Conference Dinner and Concert
WWW2010 attendees are invited to the conference dinner and concert on Thursday evening at the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, which is adjacent to the Raleigh Convention Center one block south.
The dinner will be held in the Arts Center lobby and the outdoor plaza. It will feature traditional North Carolina cuisine, such as pulled pork barbecue, shrimp and grits, and black-eyed peas, as well as locally brewed beers and selected wines from the region.
The concert will begin at 7:30 PM in Meymandi Concert Hall. It will feature the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a sensational musical group that has been playing sold-out shows across the country. Quoting from the band’s site:
The Carolina Chocolate Drops are the newest and youngest players in a long lineage of Black String Bands. The tradition traces its roots to musicians from Africa who came to the Americas in the holds of slave ships. The anchor instruments were made of gourds with a neck and a variety of string combinations. The same basic gourd banjo, called the ekontone, is played today in Gambia. Alongside the banjo gourd, musicians devised a number of fiddles, American-born relatives of the African ritti or one-stringed fiddle. Eventually, perhaps under the influence or orders of masters who wanted Irish jigs played in their parlors, black fiddle-players picked up the European violin, taking that instrument back to their cabins, adding classical-style fiddle to banjo and percussion; so the blurring of boundaries began. (read more)
Carolina Chocolate Drops
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