The Carolina Chocolate Drops at the Bowery Ballroom

To describe the Carolina Chocolate Drops as a black bluegrass band is far too limiting. True, the band’s old-time fiddle and banjo-based music recalls the backwoods hillbilly sounds of generations past. Yet the young North Carolina-based band is so much more – the members have researched and reinterpreted many traditional folk musics, including jug band, string band, blues and jazz. The band’s 2010 debut album, Genuine Negro Jig, won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album.

At the Bowery Ballroom tonight, the Carolina Chocolate Drops not only explored the roots of American music, including bluegrass, country and blues, the group even performed Haitian and Scottish folk songs in their native languages. (Ironically, gospel was not in the mix.) The four musicians played a different combination of instruments for each song; most were stringed instruments (cello, guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin), but occasionally they introduced a drum, African pan-pipe or just plain handclapping. In between several songs, they taught briefly on African American history and about traditional musical instruments. This was more than a jaw-dropping concert; this was an education in the legacy of American music.