Carolina Chocolate Drops: Leaving Eden and Moving On

Something falls with a clatter from one of Dom Flemons’s pockets. The Carolina Chocolate Drops’s banjo player, guitarist and all-round picker and plucker has a lot of pockets. Earlier, he’d produced a pipe from one, a tobacco pouch and tuning pipes from others, but what has just dropped on the table are his bones. His musical bones. The ones whose rhythms are rarely far from the heart of his band. “You never know when you’re going to need them,” he says. “Sometimes you just get bored."

This is the cue for the Chocolate Drops’s newbie Hubby Jenkins to get his bones out, and the pair begin rattling off staccato phrases. A couple of days later their bone-shaking results in them being asked – along with bandmates Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla – to leave a King’s Cross pub.

They’re supposed to be concentrating on promoting their fourth album, Leaving Eden. After winning the Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy for their 2010 record Genuine Negro Jig, you might think their edges would have become a little more polished. But no, all that counts is the music.

“There’s so much great music out there that’s fabulous, that’s under a rock,” says banjo and fiddle player Rhiannon Giddens. “We’re a group who likes traditional songs, who plays traditional music. It can be very narrow, the perception of what string band music is. Leaving Eden is a good example of what a string band can do. There’s some unexpected things. We have beatbox, bones, cello, fiddle, all these things, instead of the standard form."

“A lot of people think we're bluegrass,” notes Dom. “But on the new album we’ve got ‘Leaving Eden’, which is a great country-pop number. ‘Mahalla’ is a south African piece. We have two minstrel tunes in there, a blues, an old-time number. 'Boodle-de-Bum-Bum' is rearranged from an old song. I wouldn’t want to go too far from that [style]. If I were a listening to a traditional group and started hearing a bunch of original songs, it’s not quite the same."

Carolina Chocolate Drops draw from the string band tradition that puts the banjo to the front, trading lines with the fiddle. Home-made instruments also figure, alongside ad hoc percussion. The mix-and-match approach is in keeping with their source influcences, as is their name - a humorous yet charged nod to the 1930s black trio Tennessee Chocolate Drops. Fast-picked, the banjo became part of the (white) bluegrass menu, but the many black string bands of the era also used an instrument whose roots lie in west Africa. 

The three original members - Dom, Rhiannon and Justin Robinson - met at North Carolina’s first Black Banjo Gathering in 2005, and formed the band shortly after (pictured left, Carolina Chocolate Drops with Justin Robinson centre). There has recently been a change in personnel, with Hubby replacing Justin in 2011. “Justin went back to school,” says Rhiannon. “He’s in school full time. Forestry, that was his main interest. It’s not that compatible with being in a band on the road. He’d make a stop, pull over and collect specimens. It’s amazing he lasted on the road as long as he did."