This special music city profile is an adapted transcript of the radio show, which streams here on demand.
The Durham NC Armory was built out of stone by the Works Progress Administration in the mid 1930s. After years serving the NC National Guard, it became an all-purpose civic venue in the heart of downtown. In the 1950s and 60s, it complied with Jim Crow laws by alternating between concerts and dance parties for White and Black audiences. White fans are said to have crowded into the mezzanine during some of those shows, when soul music was, for them, forbidden fruit.
The famous Durham artist Ernie Barnes used those rollicking nights as the model for the sinuous African American dancers in his great 1971 painting The Sugar Shack, which illustrated the closing credits of the TV show Good Times and the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You.
On a Friday evening in late April, a very different sound. The Durham Armory surged with string band music and the human swirl of something relatively rare - a racially mixed square dance. It was part of the opening night events at Biscuits & Banjos, a festival of Black roots music and culture created and curated by Rhiannon Giddens, founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and one of the most renowned public intellectuals and cultural advocates in American roots music of the past 20 years. At the square dance, Giddens sat on stage with her banjo in her lap, pulsing out clawhammer chords, while fiddlers Justin Robinson and Jake Blount drove the band - and the dancers.
This episode of The String is a field report from the city that raised me in the 1970s and 80s and gave me my foundation in music, from college rock radio, to youth orchestra at Duke University, to jazz tutelage at a Black Muslim community center. It’s an arts-forward city that in the past decade has become something of a magnet for roots music, building on a history of gospel, blues and string band music, while Biscuits & Banjos has put itself in a position to be a bridge from the past to the future and give Durham the identity it’s lacked as a national music hotspot.
Ms. Giddens proved elusive, but I was able to catch up with Justin Robinson, one of her Chocolate Drops co-founders - then and now a resident of the Durham area. He left the band in 2011 to pursue a masters degree in forestry and now he’s a state-employed botanist who also teaches cooking and African-American foodways. He still makes music though, recently in a high profile way through a duo old-time fiddle and banjo album with Giddens called What Did The Blackbird Say to The Crow? on Nonesuch Records. That led to a short tour billed as Rhiannon Giddens and the Old Time Revue, which came to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium just a week after B&B.
“I think of myself primarily as a square dance fiddler. That’s my role,” he tells me in our backstage interview. He took it up more than 20 years ago in and around Durham, playing at times weekly before he met the folk musicians with whom he’d start the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005. We talk about the band’s tutelage with Carolina elder Joe Thompson and the band’s mission to elevate and revive the Black string band legacy that Thompson embodied for the 21st century. Robinson, who left the Drops after six years (after winning a Grammy Award for the album Genuine Negro Jig), believes the band made a difference.
“Many more people now know, and it's enshrined in all these different spaces,” he says. “We're in the Ryman now. We were the first Black string band to play at the Ryman, that we know of anyway, and that was one of the nights at the Grand Ole Opry. And so, I mean, that's super special. So it's enshrined in all these different ways. You could erase the story again, because it's erasable, right? All stories are erasable, just about. But it's gonna be a lot harder.”
Unlike nearby Raleigh, whose venue-packed downtown made it a good home for the IBMA World of Bluegrass for a dozen years, Durham’s downtown has plentiful restaurants and bars but less music infrastructure. Its best-known rock and variety room is the 500-capacity Motorco Music Hall, which was quiet that weekend. Besides setting up one outdoor stage, shows during Biscuits & Banjos mostly took place at three nearby venues.
The historic Carolina Theater, a 1,000 seat concert hall with a connected cinema was built in 1926. There, I saw blues icon Taj Mahal with Leyla McCalla, as well as a moving performance by the student jazz big band from North Carolina Central, Durham’s HBCU. World famous bass player and composer Christian McBride led the ensemble in an intergenerational masterpiece of a set. A block away on West Main is Durham’s best known cozy, multi-genre venue The Pinhook. It hosted performances by blues modernist Adia Victoria, Congolese musician Niwel Tsumbu, and fingerstyle guitar virtuoso Yasmin Williams.
But the three-day event officially started at the Armory, where Rissi Palmer kicked off the music with her Color Me Country Revue. Named for her long-running radio show on Apple Music, the set started as a showcase for emerging Black NC country and roots musicians. The second half let Palmer herself soar with her specific and hard-won blend of country and soul.
The next day we met up to talk about her take on the festival from her point of view as a Durham resident. She moved with her then husband in 2016 and has embraced the city’s lore and sound.
“People need to understand the historic significance of Durham,” she says when I ask her about the logic behind launching this festival in this place. “Durham was one of the original Black Wall Streets back in the 40s. This is a historically Black town. And it had small businesses. We (had) the first insurance company that was entirely owned by Black people. (We had Black) banks. This place is steeped in so much Black history. So it only makes sense that this festival is here.”
The contemporary music scene is rich in jazz and soul, Palmer says. She praises the Pinhook for its wide-ranging programming and its support for the LGBTQ community. And she notes the deep support for the arts in general at the local and state level. “We have a really special thing,” she says. Also special is the song we spin in the show featuring Palmer with her friend Miko Marks from 2023 called “I’m Still Here.” Palmer has a new album, Survivor’s Joy, slated for this fall.
Durham isn’t a legendary music city by any means, but the bedrock of what history it has is African American, as Rissi Palmer indicated. In the 1930s and 40s, the city became a hot spot for the blues, thanks to its dominant industry - tobacco auctions and cigarettes, including the Bull Durham brand of loose tobacco that led to the city’s nickname. Factory and warehouse workers - and sharecroppers coming through town to trade - made a ready audience for the virtuoso Piedmont fingerstyle guitar of Blind Boy Fuller, Bull City Red, and Rev. Gary Davis, whose signature song “Sampson and Delilah” was covered by many including the Grateful Dead.
In the years I grew up - the 70s and 80s - Durham and the nearby cities in what’s called The Triangle - Chapel Hill and Raleigh- became ever more associated with regional folk and roots music. Barry Poss, who just passed away in May, founded Sugar Hill Records in 1978 in his adopted home city of Durham. One of the most successful independent roots music labels in history, it signed major national bluegrass artists, but also regional standouts like folk singer Mike Cross and string band the Red Clay Ramblers.
That didn’t necessarily translate into a nationally recognized scene in the 20th century, but in recent years, Durham has become something of a homing beacon for Americana musicians, including notable transplants Sam Beam, creator behind the alt-folk alter ego Iron & Wine, and MC Taylor, founder of Hiss Golden Messenger. Jake Xerxes Fussell, one of America’s most admired young balladeers and folklore based songwriters, also now calls Durham home.
At the same time, a new generation of fiddle and banjo players have moved to the city, inspired in part by Durham’s long standing grassroots old-time scene. On a sunny Sunday at Nomadas Coffee on Roxboro Street I followed a tip and found about a dozen people of all ages sitting in a circle playing tunes. After they broke up, I spoke with organizer Taylor Gin and fiddler Jon Newlin, a veteran of the old time scene, and they told me about the past and present of traditional acoustic Americana in Durham.
“Durham is definitely a center” for old-time picking, says Gin. “I don't even live in Durham. I live out a little bit outside of Durham in Cary. And I feel like if I want to play old time, I drive to Durham to do it. There are a lot of people who play. I started a Discord called Triangle Old Time, and I've just been trying to pass it around to people who seem to have any fleeting interest, because I want to try to bring people from outside of Durham to be able to come do this as well.”
Then it was on to meet a few working artists who’ve been touring and releasing music from a Durham base. First up, banjo player Joseph DeCosimo. He grew up in Chattanooga, attended UNC Chapel Hill, where he got a Master’s degree in folklore, taught for a spell at ETSU, and finally settled here with his family in 2013. He’s released several albums that reveal an artist with a profound knowledge of old-time heritage as well as a desire to make his own mark.
In a comment that didn’t make the audio feature, DeCosimo said something that felt like a strong tribute to Durham’s vibe: “I wouldn’t call myself a preservationist but I want to play in a way that you can recognize where the thing comes from – terroir or something. At the same time I’m trying to make a living doing this and living in Durham in particular has created opportunities to be around different musicians and do different things and explore different sounds that feel true to this older repertoire but feel true to the community I’m a part of which extends to indie rock space.”
We also talked about the influence of folk music icon and bluegrass ground breaker Alice Gerrard, a longtime Durham resident (until recently) who came up in just about every conversation I had. The 90-year-old matriarch has been a singer, songwriter, activist and publisher since the 1960s. Her duo albums with Hazel Dickens are classics of the 1970s. She’s still very active, including a recent album produced by MC Taylor. DeCosimo said that Gerrard’s role in the music scene helped him recruit younger old-time musicians to the city, citing multi-instrumentalist Sonya Badigian, and Tatiana Hargreaves, whom we’ll meet soon.
“One thing that makes this community special as an old time music community, is that there's an intergenerational quality,” he says. “I call Tatiana and Sonya ‘the kids’, and the kids hang out with Alice, you know? And then our friends, Dwight and Gail, who live in Chapel Hill, who are my parents' age or a little older are making music with people who are in their early 30s or 20s. And so there's this kind of cool ferment, you know?”
DeCosimo more or less recruited Tatiana Hargreves into her new Durham life after she’d finished school at Hampshire College and did some touring with bluegrass pioneer Laurie Lewis. The Oregon native (her brothers is Alex Hargreaves of the Billy Strings Band) made the move in 2017, and she’s been up to a lot since then - an award winning duo with Allison DeGroot, forming the fiery old-time band Hard Drive with Badigian, and teaching fiddle at UNC. And she tells me that being part of Alice Gerrard’s orbit was a major draw and source of satisfaction.
“It's been one of the most beautiful parts of my life over the last six or seven years,” Hargreaves says in an interview on her front porch. “(Alice) actually just moved from Durham to the DC area on Saturday, so it's kind of wild that she's not living here anymore. But, I mean, she's just an incredible person, an incredible friend. There's so much that you learn from being around her. You don't have to be asking her targeted questions about Bill Monroe or Luther Davis or whoever. It just comes up.”
Gerrard made the move, to the sadness of many, to be near her children.
Then I met up with Durham’s new folkie on the block, singer, songwriter and fiddle player Isa Burke. She arrived in February, from her home state of Maine by way of years in Boston where she was a standout fiddle student at the Berklee college of Music and then part of the trio Lula Wiles, a band so innovative and informed that they wound up on Smithsonian Folkways Records.
“I wasn't really sure where I wanted to go,” Burke tells me at a coffee shop on HIllsborough Rd. near my longtime favorite BBQ place. “And then over that time, I kept making more friends that lived around here and developing more and more connections to this music scene, and hearing about cool bands, and it kind of kept calling to me more and more.” More of her musical friends moved to the city, and she played a couple of tours with area indie band The Mountain Goats. “And it just felt like, okay, I get the message! I will go, and now I'm here, and I'm really, really loving it so far. And it feels like the music scene here is a really good fit for what I do.”
By that Burke means this unique amalgam of traditional acoustic folk and old-time with an indie rock flair for the experimental. One can hear it in Durham’s Magic Tuber String Band, led by Courtney Werner and Evan Morgan. Their music, they say, is “contemporary in nature with a throughline in history.” We play the title track of their new album Needlefall. And there’s more. The city is home to banjo player and border-crossing bluegrass artist Joe Troop, who formed the bilingual duo Larry & Joe with master Venezuelan folk musician Larry Bellorín. Vivian Leva and Riley Calcagno record and tour as Viv and Riley, a neo folk duo inspired by old time but moving forward with undeniable freedom. This spirit has helped Durham’s most important contemporary label - Merge Records - thrive since its founding in 1989 to support Triangle indie rock band Superchunk. The label has been home to the Mountain Goats and to Hiss Golden Messenger, besides national acts that live elsewhere like Waxahatchee. They're part of a robust triangle label scene that includes Sleepy Cat Records in Carrboro, Yep Roc in Hillsboro, and Ramseur, home of the Avett Brothers in Concord.
I spoke with MC Taylor for this show a few years ago, and he told me that he moved to the Triangle in 2007 to study folklore at UNC. In that talk he confirmed that Durham’s Black music history and its dynamic indie scene encouraged him to put down roots. There was another member of Hiss Golden Messenger I really wanted to meet with before my research was done, because I’ve heard him described as a local MVP. He is multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Phil Cook, and he’ll get the last word on Durham. Phil moved from Wisconsin with his brother Brad in 2005 after forming the popular indie folk band Megafaun. They made four albums before breaking up, and since then, Phil has pursued a range of outlets, including producing a recent album by Tatiana Hargreaves. In sizing up the potential for Biscuits & Banjos, he praises Dr. Cicely Mitchell, a champion of jazz and the arts in Durham.
“To me, this is where opportunity really meets the moment and personnel,” Cook says. “I was on tour in the Midwest for this festival. As much as I hated being away, I have the most faith in the cultural dignitaries and cultural ambassadors and curators. So combining Rhiannon’s much lauded and beautifully deserved, building notoriety and and her fellowship like you know, or her way to unite people the way she does with the way Cicely does, is that's the combination, to me, that is going to bring not only tradition but visionary new voices, and have all of them be able to converse on a stage in a city like Durham.”
Biscuits & Banjos came to a climax on Saturday night with the first reunion concert by the Carolina Chocolate Drops in a decade. Their set reflected how the famous string band evolved - from the original three with Giddens, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson - through subsequent members including Hubby Jenkins and cellist Leyla McCalla.
Robinson told me the show felt like a form of closure for him, like the end of a book that got put up on a shelf. Yet he has been touring with Rhiannon’s old time revue, promoting the new fiddle and banjo album, and the festival plans to return. The object, Giddens told the New York Times, was to be a link in a chain, not the end of a chain.
The CCD may or may not get together again, but their influence and legacy could hardly be stronger. Jake Blount said on stage at DPAC that the band are heroes to him and his band New Dangerfield, and that he was elated that his dream of opening for the Chocolate Drops had come true. For us, an 80-minute documentary by filmmaker John Whitehead called Don’t Get Trouble In Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story has just been released for download or streaming. Learn more at chocolatedropsmovie.com.
Durham’s one of a kind with a culture that’s subtle but grounded. Riley Calcagno told me he said it felt “people powered,” which I took to mean bottom up enthusiasm, collaboration, and organizing. What I came away feeling after five days on the ground and hearing the wide ranging festival is that Black country music and its old-time string-band roots have never been stronger. And now all of that music has a new home in the Bull City.
