Rhiannon Giddens, front woman of the Portsmouth-bound Carolina Chocolate Drops, talks about bringing roots music into the present

The title track to the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ latest album, “Leaving Eden,” is about a family that’s fallen on hard luck in an empty mill town. It was written by Laurelynn Dossett, a friend and former neighbor of Chocolate Drops vocalist, fiddler and banjoist Rhiannon Giddens, who sings the sad lyrics with aching beauty.

“It’s a gorgeous, timeless song about a timeless topic—people being displaced and an industry forming a town and then leaving it,” Giddens said in a recent phone interview with The Wire. “I just thought it was really appropriate to put on the album, because it’s just happening everywhere, you know? It really is.”

The Chocolate Drops have built their reputation primarily on new arrangements of traditional tunes from the early 20th century. But many of those 100-year-old songs carry similar themes of hardship and scarcity. You could pluck most of them out of the 1910s and they would still be relevant. 

“So many of the songs we do are still appropriate today, talking about economic disadvantage and this kind of stuff,” Giddens said. “So it was actually nice to have a modern composed song that had that timeless feel to it.”

“Leaving Eden” came out in February, about two years after its predecessor, “Genuine Negro Jig,” which took home a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album. With that award under their belt, the band has toured the world, played at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Cambridge Folk Festival, opened for Bob Dylan, and appeared on the soundtrack to Hollywood blockbuster “The Hunger Games.”

The band’s current tour will bring them to Portsmouth on Friday, Aug. 3, to headline the 15th annual Prescott Park Folk Festival. The show will also feature Aoife O’Donovan, The David Wax Museum, and The Coloradas.

The Chocolate Drops are a rarity in the modern music world: an African American string band that focuses on old-time southern black music, including Appalachian folk, jug band, fife and drum, early acoustic jazz and blues. Giddens said the Grammy last year was meaningful not only for her, but for the entire genre.

“It was great for us, but it was also great for the string band community at large, because it’s not areally particularly recognized form of music, even though it’s at the heart of so many forms of popular music,” she said. “So, that meant a lot, that we were recognized. This music has been around for a long time, you know.”

Giddens’ personal journey into the roots of American music took a roundabout path. The daughter of a classically-trained singer, she initially followed in her father’s footsteps and trained as an opera singer at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music in Ohio. She performed in five operas, investing herself completely in the art.

But the intensity of the experience eventually began to wear on Giddens. She moved back to her hometown of Greensboro, N.C., where she began attending weekly contra dances and discovered a new musical passion.

“I loved (classical music), but I just was burned out and I needed to take a break. And so I started contra dancing, and that just really opened me up to a whole other world,” she said. “This obsession with it just sort of grew and grew until I had to make a decision. So I abandoned my graduate studies and I quit taking lessons and I said, ‘OK, I’m going in with the roots show.’”

In addition to dancing, Giddens soon began calling contra dances and performing the music. She picked up fiddle and banjo and immersed herself in a dizzying number of musical projects. She played solo, in a duo with her sister, and in a Celtic band, and entered several Scottish music competitions.

She also discovered an old-time North Carolinian fiddler named Joe Thompson, who served as a musical mentor. It was through her association with Thompson that she met multi-instrumentalists Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson, with whom she formed the Sankofa Strings and, later, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.   

The Drops’ first record, “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind,” came out in 2006. They were featured prominently on the soundtrack to the 2007 film “The Great Debaters” and released another album, “Heritage,” in 2008, followed by a live recording in 2009.

The band signed with Nonesuch Records for “Genuine Negro Jig” in 2010 and released an EP with the label last year. “Leaving Eden” is their second full-length album with Nonesuch, and it sees the band growing from a trio to a quintet. In addition to Giddens and Flemons, the album’s lineup includes beat-boxer Adam Matta, cellist Leyla McCalla, and multi-instrumentalist and singer Hubby Jenkins.

Giddens said having more members enabled the band to open up and add new layers of melody to the music. The album’s 19 tracks include slow, folk ballads and fast, danceable romps, with Giddens’ luminescent vocals complementing the fiery strings.

Some of the songs, such as “No Man’s Mama,” go in a jazzier direction than the Drops’ previous work. Some are completely instrumental, while “Pretty Bird” is entirely a capella. “Country Girl” and “Ruby, Are you Mad at your Man?” draw heavily from Matta’s beat-boxing (Matta has since left the group).

“Having a couple of pieces that were really created in the studio, that’s a bit of a new thing for us,” Giddens said. “I feel like we pushed into new places, but we also kept the core the same.”

That core involves more than the sound. The Chocolate Drops have always made a point of educating their audience about the roots of American music. They usually introduce each song with a spoken explanation of where it came from.

“We are really committed to that, because we’ve learned all this stuff about the music, and it’s just stuff that’s so not known in the general public,” Giddens said. “It’s like, we can’t not at least talk about it a little bit.” 

The stories behind the songs do not always evoke pride in the nation’s musical heritage. Giddens has recently been studying minstrel music and is considering ways to tastefully incorporate it into the Chocolate Drops’ repertoire. She even has a replica minstrel banjo, as well as an antique banjo crafted in 1898.

But the band strives to strike a balance between entertainment and education. Giddens is aware that people come to their shows, first and foremost, to enjoy the music, and she tries not to bog things down with too much talking.

“I think the best reaction to hope for is the people who want to sit and listen can enjoy the intricacy of the stuff we put on, and the people who just want to dance their butts off can dance their butts off,” she said. “If we can have both of that happening at the same time, I’m always in seventh heaven.”

The Prescott Park Folk Festival takes place on Friday, Aug. 3, from 6 to 11 p.m., at the park on Marcy Street in Portsmouth. There is a suggested donation of $8 to $10. For more information, visit www.prescottpark.org.