Carolina Chocolate Drops

The band traces its start to the Black Banjo Gathering, held in Boone, North Carolina, in April 2005. Flemons, a singer and multi-instrumentalist from Phoenix, Arizona, went at the suggestion of one of its organizers, the percussionist Súle Greg Wilson, and there met Joe Thompson, Mike Seeger and Giddens, a Greensboro native who had trained as a singer at Oberlin. With Wilson, Flemons and Giddens played as Sankofa Strings, whose CD Colored Aristocracy had Robinson, a fiddler from Gastonia, guesting on “Black-Eyed Daisy,” a piece from Thompson’s repertoire. Flemons moved to the Triangle late in 2005, and the trio began driving every Thursday night to Thompson’s home in Mebane. Thompson, born in 1918, was then in his eighties, a fiddler with a short bowing style handed down through generations of his family, and the band began largely as a way of bringing his music back out into dance halls and public places. All three sang and traded instruments, among them banjo, fiddle, guitar, harmonica, snare drum, bones, jug and kazoo.

Their first album, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind, recorded mostly in April 2006 and released that September by the Music Maker label, was sixteen traditional songs; the band were the first members of the Music Maker Relief Foundation’s “Next Generation Artists” program. They recorded music for the film The Great Debaters (Atlantic, 2007), released Heritage on the French Dixiefrog label in February 2008, and in April 2008 recorded a live set with Thompson at MerleFest, issued by Music Maker in May 2009.

Genuine Negro Jig, produced by Joe Henry and recorded in January 2009, was the band’s first album for Nonesuch, released on 16 February 2010. It drew on the Piedmont repertoire, with “Snowden’s Jig,” “Cornbread and Butterbeans” and Etta Baker’s “Peace Behind the Bridge,” alongside Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan’s “Trampled Rose” and a string-band arrangement of Blu Cantrell’s R&B hit “Hit ’Em Up Style,” and it was the last of their records to include Wilson. It reached number one on Billboard’s bluegrass albums chart and won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album at the 53rd awards in 2011. In these years the band opened for Taj Mahal and, in 2011, Bob Dylan, and played Mountain Stage, MerleFest, Bonnaroo, A Prairie Home Companion, Later... with Jools Holland and the Grand Ole Opry.

In February 2011 Robinson left, and the beatboxer Adam Matta and the Brooklyn guitarist, banjo player and singer Hubby Jenkins joined; a live EP with the New York band Luminescent Orchestrii had come out on Nonesuch that January. Leaving Eden (Nonesuch, February 2012) was produced by Buddy Miller and recorded live in one room at his home studio in Nashville over two weeks of sessions, with the New Orleans cellist Leyla McCalla. It mixed Thompson’s “Riro’s House,” Cousin Emmy’s “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” and J. E. Mainer’s “Run Mountain” with Laurelyn Dossett’s title song, Giddens’s “Country Girl” and Hazel Dickens’s “Pretty Bird,” which Giddens sang unaccompanied. It also topped the bluegrass albums chart and was nominated for the Grammy for Best Folk Album. Joe Thompson died in February 2012, aged 93. That year the band contributed “Daughter’s Lament” to the soundtrack of The Hunger Games and “Political World” to the Bob Dylan tribute Chimes of Freedom.

Flemons left in November 2013 for a solo career, and the cellist Malcolm Parson and the multi-instrumentalist Rowan Corbett joined Giddens and Jenkins. In 2014 the band worked with the choreographer Twyla Tharp on Cornbread Duet, and that year it stopped performing regularly. Giddens went on to solo records and in 2020 was named artistic director of Silkroad; Flemons, Jenkins and McCalla also pursued their own careers. The band was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2016. The original members reunited on 26 April 2025 at the Durham Performing Arts Center, during the first Biscuits & Banjos festival, which Giddens created to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering; it was the band’s first show together in a decade. Nonesuch issued a fifteenth-anniversary edition of Genuine Negro Jig with seven previously unreleased tracks in January 2026.