Picture this: Three young black men, two on banjo and one on fiddle, are playing music at a square dance in Orange County. The music is driving and raw and at the same time melodic, joyful and fervent, inspiring the mix of dancers on the floor, black and white.
"Frolics" was the term for these gatherings, according to Odell Thompson, one of the banjo players in the above scene. The young man on fiddle is Odell's cousin, Joe Thompson. The other banjo player is Joe's brother, Nate.
Now jump ahead some 70 years to two Fridays ago. Four African-American musicians--three of them in their 20s--with banjos, fiddles and guitars coming alive in their hands, are playing string band standards for a black and white audience gathered at a Greensboro church. The players are from Sankofa Strings and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, two new bands at the vanguard of a revitalization of music styles and traditions slowly forgotten over time. Joining them for "Georgia Buck" and several other tunes is 86-year-old fiddler Joe Thompson, who rode up with the quartet from his home in Mebane. When Sankofa Strings founder Rhiannon Giddens' banjo meets Joe Thompson's fiddle and his voice wanders in, as much chanting as singing, there's the feel of something if not quite ancient, at least the product of an era long gone. You start seeing things in sepia tones and even though the music's being played right in front of you, you expect to hear crackles and hisses as if the sounds were being torn from a salvaged 78.Read the rest...
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