Music Monday: Birmingham Jail by Chatham County Line

On September 15, 1963, four Ku Klux Klan members planted dynamite under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Martin Luther King, Jr. called it “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”  The first prosecution didn’t occur until the next decade.  The next two until the next century.  One of the men was never prosecuted.  None received the punishment they deserved, but a more fitting punishment, perhaps, is that their diabolical act helped galvanize the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Music Monday: Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show

With the news that Old Crow Medicine Show is on permanent hiatus (I always view these things as permanent, whatever the language of the announcement), it is time that I feature one of the great acts of the Old Time resurgence.  With Old Crow Medicine Show and the Carolina Chocolate Drops gone, who else other than Chatham County Line and Railroad Earth will carry that torch?

Music Monday: The Carolina Chocolate Drops

Last week I featured some traditional Scottish music.  Old-time music or old-time string band music is a form of roots music.  In contrast with its cousin bluegrass, old-time is deeply concerned with preserving, reviving, and building on the traditional music brought to America from Scotland, England, and Africa.

I’ve always strongly preferred old-time string bands over a bluegrass act.  I say always, but I’ve only known the term “old-time” for about a decade.  Before that, I just knew it as the music I grew up hearing at events around my small, southern Appalachian town, played by an old man with a fiddle or a mandolin.  That, though, was music that was literally dying with the old men who played it.  Early in the group’s history, the Carolina Chocolate Drops spent much of their time to Mebane, North Carolina to learn from a 90-year-old African-American fiddler named Joe Thompson.  They weren’t just learning to make music, they were engaging in cultural anthropology and historical preservation.