BLUEGRASS: One of life's greatest pleasures ...

... and, next to the Lord and Rita, one of my great loves is bluegrass music!

My good friend John, at Bluegrass Blog (the quintessential blue-blog), points us to a small wonder in the genre ...

Newsweek and MSNBC.com have posted an online feature on The Carolina Chocolate Drops, the black string band making waves at festivals all over the US this summer. Their sound is a mix of jug band and old time music, but all heavily influenced by the contributions that US black and African folk artists made to Appalachian musical culture.

The Bluegrass Blog also provides a paragraph from the Newsweek & MSNBC article ...

“People ask us, ‘Are y’all from the mountains?’,” says fiddler Justin Robinson [oh what energy he offers], a North Carolina native. “What they’re really asking is, ‘Why the hell are you playing this?’” His answer: “It’s a reclamation.” Robinson, fellow Carolinian Rhiannon Giddens [their female presence with an angelic tone] and Arizona-born multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons met two years ago at the annual Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C. Under the tutelage of fiddler Joe Thompson, one of the last surviving practitioners of the black fiddle style that once provided the soundtrack to North Carolina’s hilly Piedmont region, the Carolina Chocolate Drops learned their roots and honed their chops.

John points to several video links where you can have a taste of this rollicking good music.

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