Chocolate Droppin' into the Parish June 18

Published June 9, 2010 at 6:01 p.m.

Kelly West/AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

The first time the Carolina Chocolate Drops played Austin, in March at SXSW, they didn’t see much of the town. “It seemed like we were constantly being shuttled from one place to another,” the trio’s main fiddler Justin Robinson says of the five sets and countless interviews the North Carolina old-timey music enthusiasts did. “It was a big blur.”

The group, which picked up 100 decibels of buzz at SXSW, returns to a gentler Austin June 18 at the Parish.

Asked if the press has made too much of a fact that the Chocolate Drops, who met five years ago at the Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina, are African-Americans playing a style of hillbilly music associated with whites, Robinson says, “No, that’s part of our mission. We want to let folks know that blacks have always played this kind of music” which is called Piedmont string band music after N.C.’s mid-state region.

The title of the trio’s latest album on Nonesuch, “Genuine Negro Jig” plays up the racial aspect of the music. But it’s not the band’s reels and jigs and jub band music that brings down the house every night. It’s Rhiannon Giddens’ soaring take on Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style,” with Robinson making beat box sounds with his mouth. Giddens is a classically-trained vocalist, who’s also big on folk-dancing and can stomp up a storm onstage.

The Drops are always quick to credit 91-year-old fiddler Joe Thompson with teaching them how to play the old style right. “We’re just trying to carry on the tradition,” says Robinson. But first they’re letting folks know that there is a tradition.

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