In April, when I covered the reunion concert of the Carolina Chocolate Drops - the climactic performance of Durham, NC’s new Biscuits And Banjos festival - most of the 2,500 people in attendance knew at some level that there was complicated interpersonal history coloring the joy of the first show in a decade by the pioneering Black string band.
Fans have certainly wondered about how and why such a game-changing unicorn of a band dissipated in the 2010s, when they had such a wind at their back. At last, there’s a definitive account - one that tells the remarkable, enriching story we did know - and a more complex story we didn’t, about love, disenchantment, and the tricky business of taking music born of the porch and the dance hall into the modern roots music business.
Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story by independent filmmaker John Whitehead has had two lives. A 102-minute version was well-received on the film festival circuit in 2019. Then it sat, waiting for a platform. Clearing it for digital distribution took time and required trimming 20 minutes. This spring, a concise and fast-moving version became available for streaming on Amazon, Apple TV, and YouTube. Whitehead, a wide-ranging and award-winning filmmaker with the remarkable foresight and access to follow the band from its inception to its denouement, calls the doc “a labor of love without a real budget, backers, or a marketing team.” In that sense, it’s as much a work of folk art and heart as the CCD’s music.
Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson met in 2005, at or in the immediate wake of an event in Boone, NC called the Black Banjo Gathering. I’d heard about that for years, but it is revelatory to virtually be there, seeing how this racially integrated, quasi-academic confab could become a vessel for community and connection-making. We see Dom (a wild-haired, 22-year-old folk fan from Phoenix) jam with Rhiannon for the first time. All three are drawn to the gathering by the mystique and music of elder fiddler Joe Thompson, regarded as the last link to Black string band music in the Carolinas. The young acolytes are changed people. They move to Durham and start exploring the music together, including regular visits to Thompson’s country home in Mebane to play and learn tunes. Out of this, the band is born.
Whitehead’s edits carry us along with excitement as the Drops develop their sound and find their audience at ever-larger shows and festivals. Audiences hear and see something magic in the trio, something novel, joyful and vibrant. They go crazy and line up to buy every home-printed CD the early band can make. It’s nice, incidentally, to have evidence that disproves the assertions, made fervently by many during and after this mid 2000s time period, that roots and country music methodically shut out Black art and artists. That’s been true historically of course, but here we see young, 21st century Black musicians bringing their truth and their sound and in short order finding themselves playing the Grand Ole Opry, i.e. inspired and talented “outsiders” who find they’re pushing on an open door.
Things do get tough however. A little-known inter-band romance ends when Rhiannon leaves Dom for another man, who becomes her husband, father of her first child, and then touring companion and on-the-road caregiver. It feels as awkward as it sounds. Robinson has to endure that interpersonal chemistry, while also growing tired of the grind and routine, having never aspired to be a full-time touring musician. He’s a country guy and a square dance fiddler who had other things going on in North Carolina. After a gruelling experience recording their mainstream breakout album, Genuine Negro Jig for the prestigious Nonesuch Records label, he finds himself a winner at the Grammy Awards, smiling for the cameras, yet nobody’s very happy. He departs in 2011, followed by Flemons in 2013. Interesting new members join and the group evolves, but the project can’t sustain past 2016.
The original three had one big thing in common - love of traditional Black American music - and not much else. Giddens is a formally trained opera singer with a penchant for knowing what the plan is, like the set lists that Flemons doesn’t want to write up before shows. She’s a social change agent, destined to become a cultural activist and intellectual, an eclectic songwriter, and a MacArthur fellow. Dom is a free spirit from the West who goes down the rabbit hole of pre-War Black American music, all the way back to minstrelsy. He is a freelance scholar - destined to produce historic packages for Smithsonian Folkways - and a free-wheeling, uninhibited performer whose roots are in Vaudeville and old radio barn dances and frolicks. You can tell that each needs to be a solo artist. They were an unstable molecule from the get-go.
Robinson turns out to be every bit as interesting, but for different reasons. He just wasn't born to the stage or the tour or the business of playing the same popular songs year in year out. “Old time music for me is very much a social music,” he says in the movie. “For me, turning that music I played with Joe and with my friends into a stage music, there wasn’t enough depth there…That in addition to a connection to place. Those songs for me were place-based. Who cares if I’m playing a song from North Carolina in Minneapolis?”
During and after the Biscuits and Banjos CCD reunion weekend, I sought an interview with Robinson, and it wasn’t easy. He’d moved on from the music PR game, earning a master’s degree in forestry, becoming a state-employed botanist and a Black foodways expert. He’s playing back where it feels right to him - at the community square dance. He made an important exception though, recording an album for Nonesuch with Giddens - just fiddle and banjo - recorded outdoors in rural North Carolina. To support that superb old-time album What Did The Blackbird Say To The Crow?, Robinson signed on for several dates on a tour billed as Rhiannon Giddens and the Old-Time Revue. I was able to catch up with him then, in a backstage interview at the Ryman Auditorium. There, he told me the Chocolate Drops are, for him, a closed book on a shelf.
Provenance truly matters in roots music. It is place-based, and it’s one of the few forces in American culture pushing back against our national plague of brand-based homogenization. At the same time, art wants to travel. Folk artists tour for a living, and most relish playing for audiences from coast to coast and overseas. Bluegrass was born in the American south, but its global journey has been beautiful. By performing 200-plus dates a year at times, the Drops lit fires in other young Black musicians, inspiring them to reclaim the banjo and to pick up endangered folk and blues traditions. They did a world of good by putting up with the rigors and displacement of the road.
Whitehead’s film shows us the Drops spreading that gift, while reminding us that some of the finest musicians - the Joe Thompsons, the Justin Robinsons - are out there picking and thinking locally. Sometimes it’s on us to go to them.
