If you haven’t heard of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, please stop reading right now and order this album.
If you have heard of them, you will know why, when I found out they would be performing at The Strand, I went straight to the computer and ordered up four tickets.
(My darling children put up a mighty howl that their presence was mandated at a concert – a concert – on a Friday at 8 p.m. after a long week when they would just as soon be home watching “Airwolf” on demand and arguing about whose turn it is to fill the kindling bucket. I bribed them with dinner in an actual restaurant, so they came more or less willingly and had good time in spite of themselves.)
To say that the Carolina Chocolate Drops specialize in the black string- and jug-band music of the Carolina Piedmont region would be true, but a dangerous oversimplification of their niche. Yes, they play fiddles and claw hammer banjos and guitars (and bones and harmonicas and kazoos and jugs) in that distinctive style, but their repertoire ranges from the ultra-traditional to the brilliantly recast modern.
The band comprises four musicians (whose arrival in town effectively doubled the midcoast’s African-American population), two of whom are fairly new to the group, filling in for one of the three original members who is not on this tour.
The more startling of these additions was the large and rather placid-looking young man on the left who unenthusiastically tapped a tambourine for the first couple of numbers and then suddenly stood and opened his mouth to reveal, to our noisy delight, an entire percussion section, two brass instruments and a string bass.
(Apparently one can make one’s living as a human beat box. Who knew.)
The CCD’s last album, Grammy-worthy though it was, doesn’t hold a candle to experiencing this group in person. (The live version of “Hit’em Up Style” was far more vivid and terrifying than any studio recording could capture.) Theirs is community music; it’s physical and athletic, and even an audience of straight-laced, mostly retired white people finds it impossible not to whoop and stomp – and sometimes sing – right along with them.
We need more of that sort of thing here. I hope they come back soon.
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