Founded in Durham, the Chocolate Drops link with two centuries of black string music in the NC Piedmont, but their highwire live shows are as likely to rework contemporary R&B as Appalachian folk. The foot-stomping trio appear with Joe Henry, a powerful singer-songwriter and producer of the ‘Drops’ latest album; his acoustic elegies and roadway love-songs invoke an America haunted by ghosts and thieves and shopping malls; he “seems to inhabit an older music that never actually existed, or one that keeps being forgotten and relearned, over and over” (Slant).

“Tradition is a guide, not a jailer. We play in an older tradition, but we are modern musicians.”
—Justin Robinson of the Carolina Chocolate Drops