The three young string-band musicians in the Carolina Chocolate Drops began their show at the Ramshead Tavern Tuesday with "Peace Behind the Bridge," an instrumental by the late Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker. Giddens, her long dark hair cascading down the back of her purple quilted jacket, sat with a banjo in her lap, clawing out the prickly rhythm. Dom Flemons, wearing a gray porkpie hat and tan suspenders, sat next to her, reinforcing the groove with clicking bones in each hand. The tall Justin Robinson, a big knot of kinky hair atop his head and a pointy beard on his chin, played the bouncy, bluesy melody on his fiddle.
Robinson sang lead on the next two numbers, including "Georgia Buck," which featured Flemons blowing both staccato and sliding bass notes on a ceramic jug. The lively blues "Trouble in Mind" seemed to skip along in its hurry to get it all out. "If you see that gal of mine, make sure that you tell her," Robinson sang with the same sawing quality as his violin, "if she don't like my way of doing, she can get some other feller." Backed by Giddens' banjo and Flemons' resonator guitar, the tune tumbled along compellingly, a reminder that the African-American string-band tradition can be more than mere recovered history; it can be unalloyed delight.
After the song's second chorus promised again that the singer wouldn't allow trouble in his mind, an eerie, droning buzz entered the mix, suggesting that his resolution had been foiled. It took a minute to identify the source of the undertone, but it was Flemons doing the Tuvan throat singing of the Asian steppes. I'm pretty sure that wasn't in the standard repertoire of pre-World War II string bands.
All of this was heady stuff, but when Giddens took her first lead vocal of the evening on her original blues, "Two-Timin' Loser," the electricity in the room jumped up a notch. She's not the fiddler that Robinson is nor the banjoist that Flemons is, but she's that rarest phenomenon in pop music: a vocalist who seems to be singing from inside the listener rather than outside. It's not just that her notes are big and tender; it's the sense that no leaks or filters are removing any of the feeling between her intention and the sound she makes.
She had the same impact when she sang the sad waltz "He Likes Liquor Better Than Me," the fast, hard breakdown "Black Annie," or the R&B revenge song "Hit 'Em Up Style." A No. 2 hit single for Blu Cantrell in 2001, the latter song was recast as a rural dance number for fiddle, banjo, soprano, and human beatbox. It worked remarkably well, for such revenge songs have been around for as long as men have been cheating and women have been singing. It doesn't hurt that Giddens is an even better singer than Cantrell.
Flemons pulled out his jug again for "Cornbread and Butterbeans," which turned into a rousing audience sing-along. That song plus "Peace Behind the Bridge," "Trouble in Mind," and "Hit 'Em Up Style" are all on the Carolina Chocolate Drops' forthcoming album, the provocatively titled Genuine Negro Jig, the trio's first release for a major label and likely to be its breakthrough disc.
Opening the show was Danny Barnes, formerly of Austin's bluegrass-punk band the Bad Livers and currently a Washington state resident who frequently collaborates with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell. With his brown hair sticking out every which way above his thick-frame glasses and jutting chin, Barnes stood alone on the Ramshead stage, a banjo hanging from his neck and a laptop and mixer on the table beside him. Fingering a mouse and punching buttons, he called up a hip-hop beat from the computer, added his twangy banjo to the loop, and promptly sang the old-time country song "Misty Swan."
It worked marvelously. Barnes is a banjo virtuoso, capable of blinding 16th-note runs and percussive riffs, and the microchip groove never got in the way of that. Nor did the programmed beats ever sound like a gimmick; they sounded as if they were merely articulating the implied syncopation that had been in those Appalachian laments all along. Barnes introduced the songs from his brand new album, Pizza Box, demolishing the wall between ancient and modern as surely as the Carolina Chocolate Drops did in the second set.
