Q&AQ&A with Rhiannon GiddensIF YOU GOWhat: Carolina Chocolate Drops.When: 6-7:15 p.m. Saturday.Where: Bud Light Stage, Riverbend.Venue website: www.riverbendfestival.comBand website: www.carolinachocolatedrops.comWHAT’S NEXTRhiannon Giddens said the Carolina Chocolate Drops will return to the studio in July to continue work on a follow-up album to their Grammy Award-winning 2010 release, “Genuine Negro Jig.” Giddens said the group is aiming for a 2012 release.
In the 1930s, Southern string bands such as the Roane County Ramblers and Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers filled audience halls with dancing crowds in the thousands.
In 2005, the Carolina Chocolate Drops proved that so-called “old-time” string-band music could still get audiences on their feet.
“It was like as soon as we got out there, we had gigs to do,” said founding member Rhiannon Giddens, in a phone interview. “It was pretty great. It was kind of immediate.”
The Drops met that year at the Black Banjo Gathering in Asheville, N.C., where they also discovered 87-year-old musician Joe Thompson, whose tunes form the backbone of their repertoire.
By January 2006, the trio, including now-departed founding member Justin Robinson, performed at an arts center in Carrboro, N.C. They soon attracted the attention of The Independent newspaper in Durham, N.C., whose story about them perked up the ears of schools, which began booking them.
Within months, the Drops were gaining national exposure and momentum, moving from gymnasiums to the stage of “A Prairie Home Companion” and onto the cover of publications such as Living Blues Magazine.
The band has since played around the country, including at Bonnaroo, and this year won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for “Genuine Negro Jig.”
For a group playing a style of music so long out of the popular mainstream, the rise was almost unbelievable, Giddens said.
“It was really kind of amazing,” she said. “We didn’t even have time to think about it too hard. It was like, ‘Hold on tight and go along for the ride.’ “
Saturday, the Drops will take the Bud Light Stage at Riverbend, their first appearance in Chattanooga since a headlining slot in the Nightfall Concert Series in 2010.
For all their popularity, Giddens said the band has never lost sight of the string-band tradition, which its members feel an obligation to uphold, even as they reinterpret the music.
Despite their age, Giddens said string-band tunes can still work their magic.
“All the mediocre folk songs from 1850 – no one does them anymore because there’s something about them that doesn’t work,” she said. “The stuff that comes to us now is the cream of the crop.
“A lot of the songs we do are just universal to the human condition. You can really put yourself in there, no matter what.”
