In 2011 the Carolina Chocolate Drops accepted a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album with a sound built on banjo, fiddle, a clay jug, a kazoo, and animal bones. This episode traces how Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson met at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, in April 2005, formed Sankofa Strings, narrowed their focus to the blues- and ragtime-inflected Piedmont style, and learned it knee-to-knee from octogenarian fiddler Joe Thompson.

We look at the banjo’s African roots, the band’s reworking of Blu Cantrell’s Hit ‘Em Up Style, the breakthrough album Genuine Negro Jig, and shows opening for Taj Mahal and Bob Dylan, at the Grand Ole Opry, and at Bonnaroo. After Robinson’s 2011 departure, the group added Hubby Jenkins, beatboxer Adam Matta, and cellist Leyla McCalla, recorded Leaving Eden with Buddy Miller in 2012, contributed to The Hunger Games soundtrack, the theater piece Keep a Song in Your Soul, and a Twyla Tharp dance work, then wound down as a regular unit in 2014 before reuniting in Durham in April 2025.

• Why the banjo’s history was misunderstood and what the Black Banjo Gathering set out to reclaim
• How Joe Thompson’s mentorship transmitted an oral tradition that was nearly lost
• Using a clay jug to prove the through line between old-time string music and modern R&B
• Integrating a beatboxer and a classical cellist without breaking the historical spell
• The solo careers that followed, including Rhiannon Giddens’s Pulitzer Prize and Silkroad leadership