Charleston City Paper

The Carolina Chocolate Drops Leave Eden

Lost Paradise

by Chris Parker

Last February, the Carolina Chocolate Drops did something they’ve never done before. They released Leaving Eden, the first album that founding members Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons have have made without original bandmate Justin Robinson. Although the Drops have been hitting the road pretty hard since their formation in 2005, Robinson never enjoyed touring. // READ MORE →

The Bellingham Herald

Carolina Chocolate Drops Back on the Road: New Members Loosen Up Band’s Playing Style

By ALAN SCULLEY — The Atlanta Constitution Journal

You might wonder if the members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops felt more pressure recording their current album, “Leaving Eden,” than on their previous albums. // READ MORE →

Knoxville.com

Carolina Chocolate Drops Find the Sweetness From the Past

By Wayne Bledsoe

Carolina Chocolate Drops member Rhiannon Giddens says there seems to be no end to the amount of vintage music available. // READ MORE →

The Daily Tar Heel

Q&A with Dom Flemons of the Carolina Chocolate Drops

By Deborah Strange | The Daily Tar Heel

Banjo enthusiasts, historians and musicians alike are strumming their way to UNC for a banjo jamboree. // READ MORE →

PopMatters

Kickin’ Up Dust

What Nashville Might Learn from the Carolina Chocolate Drops

By Jedd Beaudoin

17 July 2012

The latest release from Carolina Chocolate Drops, Leaving Eden, isn’t just one of the best American/roots albums of 2012, it’s also one of the most important. The North Carolina outfit has proven, since its 2005 inception, that it’s not just one of the best bands working in the roots/country tradition, it’s also one of the most important. // READ MORE →

USA Today

STUDIO A PRESENTS CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

June 15, 2012

By Korina Lopez

For Grammy-winning group Carolina Chocolate Drops, playing traditional string band music is more than an odd hobby. It’s passing on an important part of African-American history. // READ MORE →

Turnstyled Junkpiled

DOM FLEMONS: AT THE CROSSROADS OF SOUND – THE TJ INTERVIEW

June 11, 2012

By Courtney Sudbrink

Dom Flemons is a character. A refreshing burst of in-your-face, Old-Time tradition, his presence in today’s music is essential. Shaped by a diverse background and never-ending, intensive journey through the landscape of American music, he is a modern-day reminder of the true artistry that can be achieved by interpretation and performance. // READ MORE →

Huffington Post

FOLK MUSIC FOR YOUNG AND OLD: NEW RELEASES FROM THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS AND THE CHIEFTAINS

June 8, 2012

By Stephen D. Winick

In the United States and around the world, roots music is thriving, bringing older and younger people alike in touch with traditions of musical, verbal, and social play that have provided pleasure and stimulated thought for centuries. You can see this close to home, by seeking out (for example) old-time jams and picking parties, grassroots rap events, Irish sessions, and drum circles. But you can also see it at the highest levels of the global music scene, in the work of Grammy-winning artists such as the Carolina Chocolate Drops and The Chieftains, both of which have new albums very much worth hearing. // READ MORE →

Boston Phoenix

THE PRESERVATION OF CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Living history

May 29, 2012

By Annie Zaleski

Seeing a Carolina Chocolate Drops concert is a transformative experience — and not just because of the old-time string band’s immense talents and diverse instrumentation. In keeping with their desire to educate audiences about how African Americans influenced popular music in the 1920s and ’30s, the band members explain the origins and lineage of nearly every tune they play. This information adds rich context and historical breadth to their music, whose banjos, fiddles, and chattering percussion are akin to a spiritual celebration. “What we do — especially seven years ago — was very new in terms of people associating it with black people,” says co-founder/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. “It was a big deal for a lot of people: ‘Why are you guys playing banjos and fiddles?’ We’re working a little more of the general history as well. And the other thing is, we’re playing stuff people haven’t heard in a long time, and it’s coming from traditions people just don’t know a lot about anymore.” // READ MORE →

LIVE: CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS AT ROYCE HALL

April 9, 2012
By Randall Roberts

About halfway through the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ gig at Royce Hall on Friday night, singer, stringed-instrument player, dancer and all-around show-stopper Rhiannon Giddens picked up a big, old banjo with a body the size of a hubcap and covered in goatskin. Called a minstrel-style banjo, it’s a replica of an instrument from the mid-1800s, and when played reproduced the same deep, echoed plonk that traveled over from Africa with the slave trade. // READ MORE →

Premier Guitar

CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS
Leaving Eden (Nonesuch)

May, 2012
By Tessa Jeffers

★★★★ (out of 5)

Foot-tapping ensues right out of the barn on the Carolina Chocolate Drops sophomore effort, as the thunder-picking melody of a 5-string banjo collides with a fiddle moan going rounds with a primitive yet wildly syncopated fife-and-drum beat in “Riro’s House.” It doesn’t take long to realize there’s something important about that galloping banjo (several models appear on the album: 5-string, 4-string, 5-string cello banjo, and a 5-string “gourd”), an instrument with roots in African-American traditional music, and more specifically, Africans in Colonial America. It’s been said the Carolina Chocolate Drops are among the only—if not the only—black traditional string band this side of, well, anywhere. It’s fair to say founding members Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons have knocked hard on the doors of their past. For Leaving Eden, the follow-up to 2010’s Grammy winning Genuine Negro Jig, the group enlisted Nashville producer Buddy Miller (Emmylou Harris, Solomon Burke, Robert Plant), beat-boxer Adam Matta, Brooklyn guitarist/ banjoist Hubby Jenkins, and cellist Leyla McCalla to expand upon these firm roots.
 // READ MORE →

Nine Pound Hammer

CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

April 1, 2012

People talk about “alternative music,” but it’s not everyday you get to see some really jumpin,’ pre-commercial, old-time music in the flesh. Don’t think this was something from a time capsule, a musicologists dry presentation, or some wax cylinder from a vault in the Smithsonian–this was a kick-ass live show with the sass of an after hours tent-show, and it brought the house down. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old time string band, led by talented Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons, that plays Southern black music from the 1920s and ’30s—”string-band music, jug-band music, fife and drum, early jazz”–mostly, they went back to the 1850s on one number–and a few original numbers as well. Last night, in Seattle, they transported the crowd with a combination of talent and sass and musical chops. Am I raving? Well, I should be. This is what music can do.
 // READ MORE →

CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

Keeping string-band music history alive while pushing it into the future

By Juli Thanki

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.” // READ MORE →

March 13, 2012
By BARRY MAZOR

‘Leaving Eden” (Nonesuch) features winning, rhythmically decisive renditions of both “West End Blues,” best known from the 1928 version by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five (and sung early on by Ethel Waters), and “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” introduced on Kentucky radio by hillbilly vaudevillian Cousin Emmy with her band the Kinfolk in 1940, then made a bluegrass standard by the Osborne Brothers in the mid-1950s. Such an unusual musical combination is well within the inclusive, always-evolving musical range of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who since 2005 have emerged as an American roots-music phenomenon. // READ MORE →

Click here to listen to the whole story – NPR Weekend Edition

NPR Weekend Edition

CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS: HOOKED ON OLD-TIME SOUNDS

March 10, 2012

Carolina Chocolate Drops breathed new life into old-time music with the 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig, which put a contemporary spin on Southern string tools from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That collection went on to win a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. // READ MORE →

NPR Here & Now

THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS ARE ‘LEAVING EDEN’

March 9, 2012

The Grammy Award winning string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops are out with a new album. It’s called ‘Leaving Eden,’ a collection of 15 original and cover songs that continues this group’s mission of not just playing old-time music, but playing with it. // READ MORE →

WAYNE BLEDSOE: CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS EDUCATES AND ENTERTAINS

March 9, 2012
By Wayne Bledsoe

“Leaving Eden,” Carolina Chocolate Drops (Nonesuch)

Since 2005 or so the Carolina Chocolate Drops have been reclaiming the long-abandoned heritage of African-American string band music. It wasn’t called “country” then, but the music that blacks and whites in the country were playing in the 1920s and ’30s wasn’t very far apart, if at all. An Appalachian fiddle didn’t know or care what color the fingers were playing it and neither did audiences. As the years went by, though, the term “country” became an insult in the black community, and black string band players were marginalized as “country” became commercial. // READ MORE →

It was hard times for black musicians in the decades following the Civil War, but that didn’t stop them from shouting out some soulful and joyous music.

Today, the young musicians of the Carolina Chocolate Drops are reviving interest in these old tunes — not by re-creating them as precious museum pieces, but by celebrating them — getting smartphone-toting audiences clapping, singing and dancing to gut strings and clacking bones. Through their buoyant charisma, the Drops manage to effortlessly pluck out the brightness from an era that is stained by bigotry. // READ MORE →

Carolina Chocolate Drops, “Leaving Eden”: The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a young trio of singing string players who play the old-fashioned way — but with new energy. Learned, in part, from the ancient fiddler Joe Thompson, they began with the banjo and fiddle music one might have heard in a 1940s North Carolina dance hall and have since developed a repertoire of originals and traditionals with a wider scope. One year ago, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were presented with golden gramophones in the category of Best Traditional Folk Album for their 2010 release, “Genuine Negro Jig.” “Leaving Eden” is even better. // READ MORE →