Unwicked

From their website:

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a group of young African-American stringband musicians that have come to together to play the rich tradition of fiddle and banjo music in Carolinas’ piedmont. Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson both hail from the green hills of the North Carolina Piedmont while Dom Flemons is native to sunny Arizona.

They were in NYC on 25 July as part of the River to River festival. They opened for Riders in the Sky at Rockefeller Park along the banks of the Hudson River. The sun was setting but the stage had them staring directly into it when they started their set. I have had a lot of fun this past week seeing some great live music, and that fun continued with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. It was Wednesday night and I started that day feeling less than wonderful. By the time they left the stage, by the time the last string had been plucked and the last foot stomped, I was feeling fine.

The Drops play authentic music from a grand tradition. They also bring a passion to educate. Before every tune they tell a little about the origins—of the song, the writer, or the instruments and the traditions. They were gracious and generous performers and they treated their historical predecessors and the audience with equal respect. With the might of Lower Manhattan behind them, and the power of the mighty Hudson River behind the audience, it was a perfect setting for listening to the sweet and disarming sounds of the Carolina piedmont.

While Riders in the Sky entertained the crowd, I said hello to the members of the Chocolate Drops and was touched by their humility and generosity. In addition to the three members listed above, they were joined on stage by Sule Greg Wilson. It’s refreshing to have the music and people of the hills come to the canyons of Manhattan. The contrast between the two bands that performed that evening demonstrate the spectrum of what many people refer loosely to as country or folk music. I can imagine many people think that the Riders and the Drops come from the same rack in the record store. (In some bad stores, they might.)

For me, the difference is as much geographic as it is cultural and chronological. There is so much about country and western music that I just simply do not like. Much of this is directly related to the what I call the Pat Boone Effect. It’s not so much the theft of black music by white producers, or the unacknowledged influence of roots music by rock bands like Led Zeppelin. My main complaint is when you borrow or steal roots music and suck at it.

Elvis Presley didn’t suck in his early days when he acted as a cauldron for bringing together the raucous and soulful music of his youth. Pat Boone did suck when he recorded hack jobs like his covers of famous black tunes. (I won’t waste any time writing about when and how much Elvis did suck out loud, how much he sucked with the force of a galaxy-eating black hole when he made movies and shit records, but I will defend to the end the music he made at the start of his career.)

Today on Governor’s Island Trinity Church is presenting “Ribbon of Highway/Endless Skyway: Music in the Spirit of Woody Guthrie” as part of River to River. This will be my first trip to Governor’s Island. I need to shower and shave. It was a choice between this and Rock the Bells, the hip-hop show over at Randall’s Island, but since Rock the Bells continues Sunday, I’m off to Governor’s Island.