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Duke Arts Presents

Carolina Chocolate Drops + Joe Henry

Saturday, September 25, 2010 | 8:00 pm

Reynolds Industries Theater


Founded in Durham, the Chocolate Drops link with two centuries of black string music in the NC Piedmont, but their highwire live shows are as likely to rework contemporary R&B as Appalachian folk. The foot-stomping trio appear with Joe Henry, a powerful singer-songwriter and producer of the ‘Drops’ latest album; his acoustic elegies and roadway love-songs invoke an America haunted by ghosts and thieves and shopping malls; he “seems to inhabit an older music that never actually existed, or one that keeps being forgotten and relearned, over and over” (Slant).

 

“Tradition is a guide, not a jailer. We play in an older tradition, but we are modern musicians.”
—Justin Robinson of the Carolina Chocolate Drops