Hubby Jenkins set for Caffe Lena show on Sunday

Hubby Jenkins might be best known as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but he’ll play solo at Caffe Lena on Sunday.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops made a giant splash as a leading roots music band that revived Black string-band traditions and famously launched Rhiannon Giddens on her superstar trajectory.

The groundbreaking, old-timey band was a key stop on the Brooklyn-born Jenkins’ pilgrimage into half-forgotten antique musical styles in projects and achievements of his own. The band’s gradual fade freed Jenkins to continue reaching back into Black American roots music.

Playing solo fits Jenkins’ solo mission: He discovered the blues in solo recordings by Mississippi blues pioneers Skip James and Bukka White.

However, as he told GR Blues magazine, he discovered the blues through Bob Dylan when his own Brooklyn band — Jenkins played sax and bass — played Dylan covers. Jenkins found that Dylan’s early albums included covers of Black blues and folk songs. Another Greenwich Village folkie, John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, encouraged Jenkins to remind his audiences that the banjo — his street-busking instrument by then — came from Africa.

As a member of the Carolina-based Drops, Jenkins helped spearhead a deep exploration of American Southern folk and blues as essentially African in origin and spirit. Otis Taylor, Bela Fleck and others also expanded public understanding of the banjo, and the music originally made on it, as imports brought by enslaved people.

Armed with banjos, fiddles, guitars, bone-percussion and blended or solo voices, the Drops pushed past prejudices against minstrelsy in fiery, fun music that connected across ethnic and age borders. Sidestepping the antique-shop dust and museum-y stiffness of some revivalists, the Drops instead played and sang with jazzy spunk and exuberant freedom. This approach earned Grammy nominations for two albums. Their “Genuine Negro Jig” (2010) won as Best Traditional Folk Album.

While the Carolina Chocolate Drops changed members at times, Jenkins and Dom Flemons were the longest-tenured members alongside Giddens, and both played for a time in the later, post-Drops band that bore her name.

Giddens moved on to ever-bigger stages as a Grammy-winning solo artist, artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble (succeeding founder Yo-Yo Ma), actor on TV’s “Nashville,” Pulitzer Prize-winning opera composer (“Omar,” with Michael Abels) and MacArthur “Genius” fellow. She also has five solo studio albums and two live albums, plus collaborations in all directions.

Meanwhile, her former bandmates also moved on along their own paths, including numerous Caffe Lena appearances.

Drops cellist Leyla McCalla played the Caffe in 2014 and with Giddens in her Our Native Daughters project in 2019 at The Egg. (Both the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Giddens’ succeeding band also played The Egg.) Guitarist, bones and banjo player Flemons played Caffe Lena in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2023.

Jenkins also played the Caffe in 2017 between his album releases – “Hubby Jenkins” (2016) and “The Fourth Day” (2020) – and he was nominated as Instrumentalist of the Year at the 2015 Americana Music Awards in Nashville.

Jenkins returns to the Caffe (47 Phila St., Saratoga Springs) Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets are $27.12 for members, $23.86 for students and $13.56 for children. Call 518-583-0022 or visit caffelena.org for information.

Jenkins will also perform Friday with John Kirk, Trish Miller, Joel Rosenberger and Brendan Taafe at the Hilton (534 Broadway) as part of the weekend-long 36th Flurry Festival (formerly the Dance Flurry) in Saratoga Springs. 8 p.m. www.flurryfestival.org.