Carolina Chocolate Drops have no trouble finding their own style

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Carolina Chocolate Drops performing "Hit' Em Up Style" at WDVX

Carolina Chocolate Drops

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are carrying on tradition by not being traditional.

When the Chocolate Drops perform the song "Hit 'Em Up Style," a song originally performed by modern R&B artist Blu Cantrell, it sounds as if it could have originated in the 1920s - well, aside from the reference to Neiman-Marcus.

"People talk about 'Hit 'Em Up Style,' but we're just doing what everybody else has done," says Chocolate Drops co-founder Rhiannon Giddens.

In a call from France, where the group is touring, Giddens says one of the biggest surprises she found in researching music is, "how fluid the borders are between composed songs and folk songs." The sort of academic idea of what is a folk song and what isn't was far more blurred in the past. Popular songs were copied by regional musicians and became better known as folk songs and folk songs were adapted into popular songs.

That knowledge helps explain the attitudes of artists who influenced Giddens and her fellow Chocolate Drops Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson. The late Howard Armstrong, who co-founded the Knoxville-based Tennessee Chocolate Drops in the 1930s, often talked about adapting his music to whatever the job called for. The group also learned from North Carolina fiddler Joe Thompson and, in fact, solidified as a group while visiting Thompson to learn his music and play with him.

"We're technically carrying on his music," says Giddens of Thompson. "We always play two or three of his songs at every show. That's a real direct carry-on and the whole idea of a black string band."

Then with Armstrong, the influence is his flexibility.

"We admire that model. We don't sit down and say, 'How can we be like them?' It just naturally how it turned out to be."

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are part of an ongoing musical discovery. The Drops, the Avett Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show and other lesser-known acts are diving into the pre-bluegrass era of rural folk, country and blues music and adapting to their own uses. Sometimes it sounds like straight old-time music. Other times it doesn't. Sometimes the groups play vintage songs. At other times, it's original material.

And the Chocolate Drops, with the recent hit album "Genuine Negro Jig" and sell-out shows across the United States and Europe, have found themselves at the forefront. Since forming in 2005, the group has enlightened audiences to some forgotten styles, but the emphasis is always on fun.

"Dom had done a lot of street performing and the idea that you've got to grab onto somebody who is passing if you want them to stop," says Giddens.

And Giddens, who is classically trained, performed in operas. "The visual part of music has always been utmost in my mind. It just makes sense to make a show out of it. ... It sort of developed organically and the audience liked it."

She says both Thompson and Armstrong understood that element in music.

"It's music to entertain people, to make people dance. ... They'd be playing for a party. You play what's going to make people happy and to get a paycheck and for yourself as well. Some of that's been lacking in music these days. (Artists say), 'We're going to play this just the way we want to play it and we don't care what the audience thinks.' I'm not a big fan of that. They come to see us for a particular reason and they want to be entertained."

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