THE CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS

GENUINE NEGRO JIG

NONESUCH, 2010

Following on from 2008’s Heritage, the Drops’ Grammy-winning third (produced by Joe Henry) breathes fresh zest into traditional string-band folk

I don’t want to dig up band dirt, so I’m just going to say that I wasn’t encouraged when it came to songwriting in the Chocolate Drops. But I wasn’t really pushing it either, because at that point we were mostly trad. This was a difficult record to make because cracks were starting to show in the band. We’d already been doing that material for a long time, so by the time we signed to Nonesuch and got the session together we were past the material. Obviously it won a Grammy – which is fine – but it was a tough recording session, as Joe Henry will probably tell you. I came to “Reynadine” through a great compilation of Appalachian ballads, with people like AL Lloyd and Anne Briggs. It was on there and I was just obsessed with that song when we were making that record. “Why Don’t You Do Right?” was another one I loved doing. Honestly, like a lot of people,

I first heard it in the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? movie. I’d heard so many different kinds of blues singers and so much of the older stuff, through my association with Dom, that I was just starting to experiment with that kind of singing. And he had a great style of playing guitar, so it was cool to have that moment captured, that energy. The thing about the Chocolate Drops was that I always wanted it to be a string band, which meant that my voice was a tool. So there’s a balance to be struck there. Sometimes it was underused and sometimes we hit it on the head with stuff like “Hit ’Em Up Style”. The Chocolate Drops was a step, it wasn’t the terminal.