Returning the Banjo to its Black Roots.

• Author: Dobbins, Geoffrey
• Position: Carolina Chocolate Drops

When most Americans think of the banjo, images from The Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance spring to mind. But the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an African American string band based in Durham, North Carolina, hopes to remind people that the banjo was originally an African instrument. The group shares its lively piece of black musical history with the world with its latest album, Genuine Negro Jig .

Audiences aren't used to seeing black musicians playing folk music, but band member Dorn Flemons is quick to point out that African American string bands were far more numerous at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Carolina Chocolate Drops's music could be called folk, but it may be more precise to call it roots music. Flemons calls the trio's style "old-time." The uninitiated often categorize it as bluegrass, though Flemons explains that bluegrass isn't really meant for dancing like their tunes are.

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T wenty-seven-year old Flemons plays a host of instruments: banjo, pan pipe, fife, bones, harmonica, snare and bass drums, kazoo, guitar, and even the jug. But he calls himself a "songster," which he defines as "a musician who plays songs that he either wrote or did not write that people enjoy." (The name of his recent solo album was American Songster .)

Flemons often talks like a much older man. He doesn't call it "World War II," he calls it "the Second World War." A song isn't a "track" or a "single," it's "a number." He even refers to musicians who play folk too fast as "these younger people," almost as if he weren't young himself.

Though a little less old-fashioned, the other two members, thirty-two-year-old Rhiannon Giddens and twenty-seven-year-old Justin Robinson, are also skilled in the styles of a bygone era. They trade roles on banjo, fiddle, and vocals.

The three artists connected at the "Black Banjo: Then and Now" gathering held in April 2005 at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. It "was a great meeting of a bunch of different minds," Flemons says.

Giddens had grown up around folk and country music. Her father had studied voice work in college, and her parents introduced her to artists like Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, as a child. Giddens went on to study classical music as a voice major at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Giddens gravitated to folk music while she was there through the contra dances held on campus. Before long, she became a folk musician...