CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Last year had its ups and downs for Carolina Chocolate Drops. The North Carolina string band won a Grammy for 2010’s Genuine Negro Jig album, but experienced the loss of founding member Justin Robinson and the addition of multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins. The combination of heightened expectations and seismic changes in the band was a recipe for stress. “We had a brand-new ensemble,” says guitarist and banjo player Dom Flemons. “But we were going into new territory, and at the same time we were a lot freer to try different stuff.”

That included the selection of Americana veteran Buddy Miller to produce the group’s new album, Leaving Eden. The trio recorded in Miller’s Nashville home studio with the intent of capturing the sound of the band’s unrestrained live performances. “[Negro Jig producer] Joe Henry made a great record, but he had a very specific soundscape that he worked within,” Flemons says. “We wanted to try to bring out more of the brightness and fullness of the music.”

Miller and the band succeeded in creating a freewheeling, genre-blending collection that bursts with the Chocolate Drops’ irresistible energy, from the rap- and soul-influenced “Country Girl” to deft takes on South African guitarist Hannes Coetzee’s instrumental “Mahalla” and the traditional song “I Truly Understand That You Love Another Man.” For Flemons it’s the delicate title cut, sung by fellow founding member Rhiannon Giddens, that epitomizes the Chocolate Drops’ post-Jig journey. “That song displays a lot of the changes that the group’s gone through while making our way to a broader musical audience,” he says. “We haven’t moved away from old-time at all, but there’s a broader audience we’ve been reaching that we haven’t been able to reach before.”

The band’s “old-time” roots are in the Piedmont tradition of black string bands, a musical subgenre the Chocolate Drops are looking to not just preserve but expand upon. “We don’t try to be too didactic about it by beating people over the head with a history lesson,” says Flemons. “But we try to play good music, and when they ask, ‘Where did you get that song?’ then you can lay down some history that will hopefully put them on a journey—whether it’s to look up their own stuff or give them an interesting factoid they can share with somebody else. The musical history is important, but that doesn’t necessarily need to get in the way of entertainment.”

–Juli Thanki