To say that contemporary country music is a primarily white musical genre is unremarkable. It’s also rather obvious to assert that country music is based in a large way on traditional African-American musical forms. Traditional mountain string bands and jug bands, which form the root of country music, emerged from the thick, verdant musical soup of European ballads, the songs and poems of African Griots, spirituals, and Native American tribal music.

With all this in mind, the Carolina Chocolate Drops latest album Genuine Negro Jig fits firmly in the tradition of American folk music.

But like contemporary string bands such as Old Crow Medicine Show or Yonder Mountain String Band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops inject this traditional music with a fresh perspective. The band trades instruments from one song to the next; Dom Flemmons may play the bones or the banjo while Justin Robinson throws down a beatbox or blows on the jug. And Rhiannon Giddens’ incredible voice is a force of God, matched only by her fierce banjo and fiddle playing. (Close your eyes and listen to Giddens intense and gorgeous unaccompanied vocal performance on the ballad Reynadine. Angelic).

For the Carolina Chocolate Drops, traditional string music is a living and breathing music—not a static museum piece.

Consider their barn-burning take on Blu Cantrell’s 2001 R&B hit Hit ‘Em Up Style. They manage to strip the song down to the bare essentials, revealing a straight –up folk song about that time old complaint: what to do with a cheating man.

And consider their haunting and beautiful rendition of Snowden’s Jig (the Genuine Negro Jig). They manage to reclaim this song, a popular minstrel song from the 19^th century, making it wholly theirs, and wholly a part of the diverse 21^st century.

The image of black musicians performing traditional string music—hillbilly music—is complicated, given the history this music has with minstrelsy.  So, when the Carolina Chocolate Drops perform songs like the swinging hoedown Trouble in Mind or Snowden’s Jig or Memphis Shakedown there is a sense of reclaiming musical history. Country music is, after all, black music too.

And when they re-imagine a contemporary song like Hit “Em Up Style as a trad string band song, they remind us that there is no such thing as “white music” or “black music”—there is only our music, a music that emanates from a common root.

It’s a part of the American musical tradition—with all the attendant ugliness and messiness, triumph and beauty that our tradition comes with. This is our music, this is our history—for all of us. The Carolina Chocolate Drops help remind us of that. They also jam like nobody’s business. Genuine Negro Jig is fun, lively, deep, and celebratory music. It is everything good and right about music.             

Genuine Negro Jig by the Carolina Chololate Drops is highly recommended.

Carolina Chocolate Drops are: Dom Flemmons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson

Carolina Chocolate Drops website 

Read:  Way Up North in Dixie: a Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem.

^{The Snowden Family taught popular minstrel performer Dan Emmitt many of the songs that would be attributed to white minstrel performers like "Dixie" and the "Genuine Negro Jig" (renamed "Snowden's Jig" on The Carolina Chocolate Drop's album)}