Carolina Chocolate Drops Concert in Raleigh on Sept. 21

Sept. 5, 2012 - PRLog -- North Carolina’s own Grammy winning Carolina Chocolate Drops kick off this season’s Down Home Concerts at the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. Their latest release, Leaving Eden, has received widespread critical acclaim, and they’ve also penned a tune titled “Daughter’s Lament” for The Hunger Games soundtrack.

Leaving Eden is a record of original compositions, covers, and traditional songs produced by Buddy Miller. The current band line-up features founding members Dom Flemons and Rhiannon Giddens with Brooklyn-based guitarist, banjo player and singer Hubby Jenkins, and New Orleans-based cellist Leyla McCalla also joins them on their latest tour.

The Drops formed after the band’s founding members met Piedmont fiddler Joe Thompson at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, NC in 2005. They traveled to his home once a week to learn from him and jam with him, and they started performing as a tribute to Thompson, a chance to bring his music back out of the house again and into dance halls and public places. Today, their music carries on Thompson’s old-time Piedmont music legacy and proves that the music of the past is as alive and vibrant today as it ever was. Join PineCone for a night celebrating North Carolina Piedmont music!

Appalachian State University’s first Black Banjo Gathering was designed to recognize the important African American musical contributions to traditional string band music. When founding Drops members Flemons, Giddens, and Justin Robinson initially connected, they knew that their combination was powerful. They named themselves the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a tip of the hat to popular 1930s black string band the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. They began learning from Thompson, spending their Thursday nights jamming at his home in Mebane.

Thompson was an influential African American fiddler who played traditional music in the Piedmont for nearly eight decades. He and his cousin Odell were the recipients of the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award in 1991. In 2007, Thompson received national recognition in the form of the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He passed away in February of this year.

After their performance at the 2006 Shakori Hills Festival, the CCDs worked with the Music Maker Relief Foundation, which released their albums Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind and Carolina Chocolate Drops & Joe Thompson, a collaboration with their mentor.

They were the first black string band to grace the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, in a performance that Opry host Marty Stuart called “a healing moment” for the venerable institution.

February of 2011 found the Chocolate Drops accepting the Best Traditional Album Grammy Award for Genuine Negro Jig, which blends traditional African American string band music with contemporary rhythms and influences.

On Leaving Eden, CCD’s original lineup expanded from three to five players, and their new repertoire incorporates more blues, jazz, and folk balladry alongside brilliantly rendered string-band tunes. Giddens and Flemons, both singers and multi-instrumentalists, were used to working together, but they needed back-up for their second full-length Nonesuch disc. Help came in the form of three new players: beat-boxer Adam Matta, introduced to the band by their friends in Luminescent Orchestrii (with whom they’d released a live EP on Nonesuch in 2011), Jenkins and McCalla, both of whom the band had befriended via Music Maker Relief Foundation, which helps support elder roots artists and encourage young talent.

“Leaving Eden,” a song written by Giddens’ friend and fellow Greensboro resident Laurelynn Dossett, had long been on Giddens’ to-do list, but until now it hadn’t found a place in CCD’s set. With the new lineup, its time had come, and the song became the centerpiece of the album. McCalla’s cello lends gravity to this elegiac number about the falling fortunes of a mill town, sung with plainspoken eloquence by Giddens, who is an Oberlin Conservatory-trained singer.

Though often striking out in new directions, CCD return to familiar turf with tracks like “Riro’s House,” a traditional piece they’d learned from Thompson, and “West End Blues,” paying tribute to the venerable Piedmont guitarist and banjo player Etta Baker. They continue employing such unique instrumentation as jugs and bones; Giddens records for the first time with a 5-string cello (or bass) banjo, and Flemons employs his quills, a pan-pipe instrument of African origin with a distinctive Irish pennywhistle lilt to it.

“We want to remain true to the roots of how we started,” Giddens explains. “We’re always going to have a string band on our records. But we don’t want to just do Piedmont style fiddle-banjo-guitar tunes; there’s more to our musical life than that. We grow in a healthy, slow way that reflects our true development as musicians and as a band.”

Tickets are still available! Tickets range from $39-$49 for the general public ($34-$44 for PineCone members) and can be ordered by calling PineCone's box office at 919-664-8302, in person at the Progress Energy Center (the box office is located on the Wilmington Street side of the Center), or online at Ticketmaster.com.

Learn more about the Carolina Chocolate Drops Sept. 21 concert in Raleigh and other upcoming concerts at http://www.pinecone.org.