That Eric Alper

The fifteenth anniversary edition of Carolina Chocolate Drops‘ 2010 Grammy Award-winning album Genuine Negro Jig is out now on Nonesuch Records. You can get the two-LP vinyl, CD, and digital editions and hear it here.The reissue, featuring founding band members Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson, includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of “City of Refuge” and a 2025 mix of “Memphis Shakedown.” This release marks the album’s first time on vinyl since its original pressing in 2010. The bonus track “Avalon,” an early example of Giddens and Robinson songwriting together, can be heard below; it features Giddens on vocals and fiddle, with Robinson on background vocals and frame drum.

Genuine Negro Jig was released on February 16, 2010, reaching the top ten on the Billboard Folk chart and the top of the Bluegrass chart. It won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. Produced by Joe Henry, it was the first of three releases on Nonesuch followed by the Carolina Chocolate Drops / Luminescent Orchestrii EP (2011) and the Grammy nominated album Leaving Eden (2012), produced by Buddy Miller. Widely acclaimed as one of 2010’s best, Genuine Negro Jig appeared in year-end lists of NPR, Paste, and more, and was featured in Rolling Stone’s 25 Best Country-Soul Albums in 2024. 

“A moment of reclamation and revelation,” says Uncut, naming the new edition of Genuine Negro Jig its Archive Album of the Month. “Marvelous … exuberant,” Rolling Stone said of the album. “This striking North Carolina trio brings a modern sizzle to the legacy of classic African American string bands,” said SPIN. The Washington Post called it “a smart and snappy collision of traditional and contemporary.” No Depression declared: “Genuine Negro Jig is easily one of the best albums I have heard in thirty some odd years … I literally cannot stop listening to this record.”

“Genuine Negro Jig remains fresh fifteen years later not only because of the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ influence on American popular culture but also because it’s an excellent record in itself,” says Dr. Dwandalyn Reece and Dr. Steven Lewis of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in the album’s liner notes. 

Carolina Chocolate Drops formed after band members Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson met at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, NC in 2005. All three trained in the Piedmont banjo and fiddle musical tradition under the tutelage of Joe Thompson, who was one of the last musicians of his era and his community to carry on the southern Black string band tradition. While old-time Southern string music is often associated with Caucasian musicians from Appalachia, Giddens pointed out in an NPR interview that “it seems that two things get left out of the history books. One, that there was string band music in the Piedmont, period. [And that] Black folk was such a huge part of string tradition.” Carolina Chocolate Drops sought to not only correct this misunderstanding but also to keep the centuries-old string music tradition alive and developing. 

The members of Carolina Chocolate Drops, who came from diverse musical backgrounds, shared singing duties and swapped instruments throughout their sets. The band recently reunited for a single show at Rhiannon Giddens’ Biscuits and Banjos festival in Durham, North Carolina in April 2025. In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Black Banjo Gathering, the documentary Don’t Get Trouble In Your Mind: The Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Story by filmmaker John Whitehead was released on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and YouTube Free4all streaming platforms.

In addition to his Grammy Award with the Chocolate Drops, Flemons has been nominated for Best Folk Album for his Smithsonian Folkways releases Black Cowboys (2018) and Traveling Wildfire (2023). Flemons was nominated for two Emmy Awards; he is an International Acoustic Music Award Grand Prize Winner, and a 2020 United States Artists Fellow. Flemons received an Honorary Doctorate from Northern Arizona University and was inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in 2025. He is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music scholar, historian, actor, narrator, host, slam poet, record collector, podcaster, and the creator, host, and producer of The American Songster Radio Show on WSM in Nashville. He has immersed himself in the music of the past, with a prodigious record collection and an immense knowledge of the different playing styles of the blues, country, old-time, bluegrass, and string band traditions that is showcased on his social media accounts @domflemons. His solo albums include Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus (2020) and Ever Popular Favourites (2016) with Martin Simpson, Buffalo Junction (2012) with Boo Hanks, and American Songster (2009). 

Giddens—a Piedmont native—is a two-time Grammy Award–winning singer and instrumentalist, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and composer of opera, ballet, and film. Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art. She is also the Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her post-Chocolate Drops solo albums with Nonesuch include Tomorrow Is my Turn (2015), Freedom Highway (2017), there is no Other (2019), They’re Calling Me Home (2021), You’re the One (2023), American Railroad (2024) with Silkroad Ensemble, and What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow (2025) with Justin Robinson. As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.” Her most recent album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, is currently nominated for a GRAMMY.

Robinson, the group’s main fiddler, also plays banjo; he grew up in a house full of musicians—his mother is a classically trained opera singer and cellist, his sister a classical pianist and his grandfather a harmonica player. He has used his wide range of interests and talents to preserve North Carolina’s African American history and culture, connecting people to the past and to the world around them. Robinson continued to write music after leaving the group in 2011, releasing the album Bones for Tinder as Justin Robinson and the Mary Annettes in 2012. In addition to preserving African American musical traditions, Robinson is known for his work as a culinary historian. He is an eighth generation Afro-Carolinian and is the descendant of sharecroppers and large landowners. He is constantly exploring the complex relationship that people have with our plant relatives, including through his social media account, @CountryGentlemanCooks, and through the formation of the Earthseed Land Cooperative. Robinson has a Master of Science degree in Forestry from North Carolina State University and carries on the ethnobotany work of his grandfather, J.G. Johnson.