Justin Robinson and Rhiannon Giddens Pay Homage to the Past on ‘What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow’

By Greg Cahill | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

I’m a botanist. I’m a culinary historian. And I’m a musician,” says fiddler and storyteller Justin Robinson, a founding member of the Grammy-winning Black string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. “And all those seem to be the same thing because they’re all about uncovering stories, not as we wish them to be, but as they are. When I think about legacy, I want people to be able to research their own stories, to understand how they have come to the place where they are right now. And where are the places they’d like to go? All these things are navigable. 

“Learning your own story shouldn’t feel like a luxury,” he adds. “It should feel like a necessity that we have to be able to tell our own stories, and to be able to tell those stories irrespective of how they might be received.”

During a cell phone call from an ancient North Carolina pine forest, Robinson pauses his search for local flora to discuss What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow (Nonesuch), a new album that finds Robinson and Carolina Chocolate Drops banjoist and vocalist Rhiannon Giddens adding to their own stories. The album marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of the recently reconvened ensemble. It also pays tribute to their mentor, the late folk fiddler Joe Thompson, a 2007 National Heritage Fellowship recipient, and fellow Piedmont-region folk legend Etta Baker, as well as other fiddle traditions from their home state. But the album is no mere collection of rustic folk tunes. Rather, it’s a reflection of the living history of a people and a region, of regional art and personal creativity, and of the role that African music and African American musicians have played in the foundational culture of a nation. 

Throughout the intimate 18-track recording, gleaned from outdoor sessions, the duo is accompanied by the sounds of nature, including two different broods of cicadas, which had not emerged simultaneously since 1803, creating a once-in-a-lifetime soundscape. “With the assaults on reality going on in the world today, we wanted to offer another kind of record, like walking back onto a gravel or dirt road while a stampede goes the other way,” notes Giddens. “With the cicada choir, this record could’ve only happened at a certain time in the last 120 years. We doubled down on place, time, realness, and old-fashioned front-porch music. It’s a reminder that another way exists, with music made for your community’s enjoyment and for dancing—not solely for commercial purposes.”  

The album was recorded over a three-day period and in three different outdoor settings: in the mountains, in the low rolling hills of the Piedmont region, and on the coastal plain, each specific to the style of music Robinson and Giddens were playing on individual tracks. “It was a lovely experience,” Robinson says. “There are lots of ways to record and produce a record, and we have done the other ways before. We were in that big cicada immersion that occurred last year, but you only hear that on some of the tracks. It only occurred in specific parts of North Carolina, and we captured part of that on the recording. But there’s also a rainstorm on some of the tracks, as well as the sound of creatures living in an old mill pond [at the Mill Prong House, a former plantation near Red Springs, North Carolina].”

The songs are grounded in North Carolina’s rich culture. “It’s a mixture of tunes, including some of Joe’s that we had recorded before and some from his repertoire that we had never recorded,” Robinson says. “There were a few from the Sandhills region of North Carolina, which is not very well known, and a few of Etta Baker’s pieces. We recorded a couple of mountain tunes, even though that’s not really our thing, but one of my favorite bands is the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers, from the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

The musical styles reflect the cultural differences found in each region. “They have different approaches and come from different traditions and different musical sensibilities,” says Robinson of the tunes. “The stuff that comes from the Sandhills and South Central North Carolina is very clean sounding, not like the rough fiddle sounds you hear in other places. Not a lot of scratchiness. I suspect that’s because of their German heritage—you want the notes to be very accurate every time. You might even hear a little vibrato in some of those tunes. And then you have Joe’s music, which is much more heavily influenced by Malian and Gambian music, which has its own musical perspective. His music sounds more robust and more full, because you are trying to play multiple notes at once. And then you have this other stuff from the mountains, which can be very sweet or can sound like a freight train bearing down on you at a hundred miles an hour. So, they all have a different feeling, for sure—a different expression.”

The album’s title comes from the song “The Rain Crow,” which is derived from the 19th-century minstrel song “Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” “Joe called that tune ‘Rain Crow,’” Robinson explains. “That comes from the yellow-billed cuckoo. When the yellow-billed cuckoo sings in the summertime, it’s an indication that rain is on the way. So, it has minstrel origins, in the song structure, but there’s ecological information in there. The yellow-billed cuckoo is pretty rare these days because they need these big, stable, unbroken forests, of which we don’t have many. The song tells us about an earlier time, and it tells us what Joe and his father and his grandfather, and the people in the region, knew about. Everybody knew what the rain crow was, so that tells us something about the environment they were living in. It tells us about the context in which they were living.”

The song also contains details about social life in the South, both before and immediately after the advent of the Civil War reconstruction period. “Black people popularly were depicted as crows or blackbirds and white people were depicted as woodpeckers in political cartoons and such,” Robinson says. “You see it in Disney’s animated movie Dumbo, in which the crows perform as the interlocutors. You see it in Michael Jackson’s film The Wiz, in which he plays a scarecrow surrounded by jive-talking figures that tell us about the association between the birds and the people.”

Growing up in North Carolina, Robinson picked up the violin at age seven through the Suzuki method, but he stopped playing after middle school. “It just wasn’t cool anymore, so I took a seven-year break,” he says. “I started again at 18 or 19 and then got serious about it when I was in my 20s while attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.” 

During college, he began attending all-night blues jams. “I wanted to play the banjo, but already knew violin, so that’s when I started learning fiddle music on the same violin I had as a kid,” he says. “I was drawn by the sound and the camaraderie of playing with friends. It felt like the way I wanted to spend my musical time.” 

Blues and folk music offered Robinson something gospel and classical didn’t provide in his life. “Gospel music felt like a job, and who wants to play Vivaldi for fun? Though I’m sure somebody somewhere is doing that,” he says with a laugh. “But fun is not part of the ethos of classical music—it is the ethos of folk music. So, I decided I would do that. It was the difference between having a horse because you want to go to horse shows and having a horse because you want to ride the trails. 

“It just made sense.”

The Carolina Chocolate Drops, forged from a progressive music collective known as the Sankofa Strings, formed in 2005 at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina. “We were two of the only young people who were about the same age,” Robinson says of meeting Giddens. “A lot of much older people were at that gathering.”

The trio featured Giddens (banjo), Robinson (fiddle), and multi-instrumentalist and musicologist Dom Flemons (guitar). The octogenarian folk fiddler Thompson soon became a beloved mentor to the group, whose 2009 album, Carolina Chocolate Drops & Joe Thompson, was recorded live at the 2008 MerleFest. “I personally really love old people. I think they’re so interesting, so great,” Robinson says. “It was interesting to hear what he had done with his 87 years of life. What had he chosen to dedicate his time to over the course of his life? What did he find important as he rounded the bend at the end of his life? I’m not getting any younger, people don’t get any younger, so I found it important to ask the questions. What is it that you ought to do with your life? What’s important? What’s interesting? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to share?”

It was the group’s third album, Genuine Negro Jig, which earned a 2010 Grammy Award in the Best Traditional Folk Album category, that brought the trio widespread critical acclaim. But after two more albums and a flurry of personnel changes, the group cut back on touring and then stopped recording altogether to pursue solo work about a decade after it had first come together. Both Giddens and Robinson have released solo albums. In addition, Robinson, who holds degrees in linguistics and forestry, is a founding member of the Earthseed Land Cooperative and a member of the Conservation Trust for North Carolina Board of Directors.

This year, Giddens reconvened the group, which launched a 2025 tour with a late-April appearance at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, where the Carolina Chocolate Drops story began two decades ago. In addition to her work with the Silk Road Project, including the recent American Railroad album, Giddens—a 2017 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—earned a 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her work on Omar, an opera based on the life of Omar ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim man who lived in South Carolina in the 19th century.

For Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow is a chance not only to look back at what the Carolina Chocolate Drops accomplished as a traditional Black string band working in a predominantly white Americana music scene, but also to highlight the ongoing contributions of Black folk artists. 

 “To me, nothing has changed. It’s the same story, different day,” Robinson says of the current political climate and its impact on cultural and historical discourse. “I recorded this music because this is not the first time this has happened, or the second, or third time. This is what it means to live in the United States, this constant rewriting of history. It’s what it means to live in a nation-state in general. It’s a time when forces are trying to make the historical narrative much more narrow than it’s ever been, and that’s never a good thing. This is normal. 

“It’s why I started doing what I was doing in the first place, because we didn’t know that the banjo had any connection to West Africa, not from a popular standpoint anyway. Sure, a handful of scholars knew that and some West Africans may have had an inkling, but we didn’t know about that connection. The knowledge about it as a general concept had been erased. And that was not an accident. That didn’t just happen. It wasn’t like everybody had collectively forgotten. Absolutely not—it was a concerted effort to make people forget and to make sure that knowledge didn’t get passed along to the next generation. I don’t see this time as any different. We’re just able to see it happening, and the people who are living now haven’t seen what it means to live in a period of active erasure. It’s jarring to see that happen, and we’re living in the shadow of that already. And it’s happening in a pivotal moment in American history as people try to rewrite the story to suit their needs.

“So, I don’t think there’s anything different to do in response, because this is how I ended up here in the first place.”

What Justin Robinson Plays

“On one of the recordings, I played one of Joe Thompson’s fiddles, which was great. When he was alive, I would never touch that thing, unless I was tuning it up for him. His family was kind enough to bring it out. I also played my usual fiddle. It’s a 100-year-old instrument that was made on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic—I don’t know its exact provenance. It’s a beautiful-sounding fiddle. I tend to like violins that are from Central Europe. I agonized over the bow, and the bow is the important thing. I picked it up on tour when I had access to a lot of violin shops. I use D’Addario Helicore strings, because they take to cross-tuning very well. For the E string, I use the Pirastro Gold Label brand.”