Carolina Chocolate Drops Genuine Negro Jig (15th Anniversary Edition) 2LP

TAS Super LP List! Special Merit: Informal

The 15th anniversary edition of Carolina Chocolate Drops' 2010 Grammy-winning album Genuine Negro Jig, featuring founding band members Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson, includes the original Joe Henry-produced album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of "City of Refuge" and a 2025 mix of "Memphis Shakedown."

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.

"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.