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Carolina Chocolate Drops - Cat's Cradle - Sep. 5

Durham's fantastic old-time music trio the Carolina Chocolate Drops stopped by Saturday with John Dee Holeman and Greg Humphrey in tow. Click below for a full review and more photos of the event.

It was hard to tell if Saturday at the Cradle was a trip back in time or a glimpse into the future of American roots music. It definitely started as the former, with Durham blues legend John Dee Holeman, accompanied by Music Maker Relief Foundation founder Tim Duffy, rocking harder than any octogenarian should be legally allowed to. John Dee is sprightly, a former machine operator with attitude and gravitas, and as the opening act he worked the crowd up well, getting feet stomping to his upbeat electric guitar. He even wrote a song about Chapel Hill, called “Chapel Hill Bullet,” about a rough-and-tumble juke joint that used to be in the area. The audience certainly appreciated it, and they paid their respects to the blues wisdom of the eminent musician.

Greg Humphrey, a smooth guitar picker with an amorphous, indeterminate style followed. He played sweetly enough, other than the few times when he rolled into a rhythm-heavy north Mississippi blues. It was a good set, but not much in it stood out.

Finally the night’s main attraction came to the stage. The three young black string musicians who make up the Carolina Chocolate Drops represent everywhere that traditional string music can and has yet to go. They are breathing new life into something as old as dirt (and that’s certainly no insult to folk music), but they are also transforming it in their own subtle way. They played many of their usual crowd pleasers, like “Cornbread and Butter Beans,” and “Georgia Buck,” accompanied by occasional breakouts of dancing, catcalling and friendly bickering. As the sizable audience instilled more and more of their energy into the equation, it became clear that the Chocolate Drop’s first time at the Cradle was a total success.

John Dee Holeman