Afro-Appalachian

Afro-Appalachian music is the Black folk tradition of southern Appalachia: the string-band music of fiddle and banjo, an instrument enslaved Africans created from West African lutes, that Black musicians made central to mountain dance, song and worship long before the recording industry wrote them out of the story. Its repertoire runs from dance tunes, ballads and hymns to the blues, and its modern form is a reclamation, led by the *Carolina Chocolate Drops* generation and carried into contemporary folk songwriting by artists such as *Amythyst Kiah*, *Jake Blount* and *Mon Rovîa*, the Liberian-born singer whose work carries the tag in Linernotd's database.