Swinging it old school and keepin' it real. How real? How old? Try over one-hundred years old, back to Old Time music (once known as Old Time Familiar Music), which would eventually evolve into country (and bluegrass) music, played first by African-Americans, its progenitors. Primary? Black people played country music? There's Country Charley Pride, yeah, but...but....
Well, one of the two primary instruments of Old Time music (which is pretty-much a euphemism of Hillbilly Music) is the banjo, which is most decidedly an African-American (or African, depending on one's interpretation of when the slaves became American) creation, as slaves developed from gourds an instrument similar to the string-based instruments their ancestors/family used back in Africa. Dating back as far as the eighteenth century, slaves played banjos at religious meetings and various other events, and white musicians picked it (the instrument and the style of playing) from them. The other primary instrument of Old Time is the fiddle, which--from the colonial era to the very early twentieth century--was normally associated with black musicians, though they copped it from white musicians (who brought it to America from, mainly, Britain).
So, we have whites stealing from blacks, blacks stealing from whites, and by the time the nineteenth century rolls around, what do we get? Minstrel shows: white musicians in blackface, aping African-American musical form and style (as well as derogatory exaggerations of dialect). From there, the Civil War happens, and then Reconstruction, and then the Industrialization of the South, which turns the Piedmont area of North Carolina into the largest textile-manufacturing region in the world, and then Sears and Roebuck begin producing their catalog, which contains sheet music of the emerging styles of Ragtime and Tin Pan Alley, and they all mix and commingle with the already-established fiddle-heavy, British-ballad style of the nearby Southern Appalachian region to congeal into something known as Piedmont Stringband Music.
Piedmont Stringband Music--or Piedmont Blues, as it is sometimes called--differs from Appalachian folk music in that the banjo plays the prominent rhythmic role. In Appalachian Folk, the fiddle is the rhythmic lead, because of geography: the Appalachian people are pretty secluded by the their terrain, and thus new fads and innovations seep in slowly, if at all, and since the Appalachian people are primarily British immigrants, then their music is primarily British: ballads accompanied by fiddle (if there's any accompaniment at all). With the lower Piedmont area, though--and especially after Industrialization--different cultural, musical ideas intermingled on a much more regular basis, and thus we get the British (fiddle and the ballad lyric), the African-American (banjo and the blue notes played on it), the Deep River City South (Ragtime and its syncopation), and the Northern City Yankee (the Tin Pan Alley songwriters' structure and melody) all merging together to create a distinctive style of music that would last until shortly after WWII, when it would then die away almost completely, as the electric guitar blues of Chicago and Memphis (out of the Delta in Mississippi) drowned it out.
Flash-forward sixty years, and a new movement begins, one which is trying to re-establish Piedmont Stringband Music. The leading--and the best--band heading this movement are (taking their me from an old Tennessee stringband) the Carolina Chocolate Drops: Justin Robinson on fiddle and vocals (for this song, at least), Rhiannon Giddens on banjo, and Dom Flemons on jug (and on about any other acoustic instrument you can name on songs other than this one). "Georgie Buck" is an old song, recorded by various artists such as Taj Mahal, Earl Scruggs, and--most famously (though famously is relative, here)--by Doc Watson, himself from the Piedmont area (who became "famous" in 1960 playing guitar for Clarence Ashley, who had been performing stringband music since before WWI). The Carolina Chocolate Drops give the old nugget not only an update in sonics (meaning it don't sound old), but inject it with a great deal of wit and humor, keeping it fresh and alive, as they hope to do for the genre as well, and if they can keep making music this ancient and traditional sound this new and exciting, then maybe they and their contemporaries can convince the Coen Brothers to include them on the soundtrack to whatever period piece they direct next.
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