It is Oct. 20, 2010, and, courtesy of the Billiken Club, you are sitting comfortably inside the nearly 100-year-old Sheldon Concert Hall. The lights are dimmed. Three musicians sit on stage surrounded by instruments. Roughly 500 people fill the seats around you.

The lead singer of the group – who you know to be the Carolina Chocolate Drops – speaks for a moment about the history  of the song they are about to play. Written down, but not composed, by a white man named Dan Emmett, the tune from a black family of string band musicians – the Snowdens – who lived nearby. A song with a history. Titled by Emmett “Genuine Negro Jig,” the band – while using the former as the title for their latest CD – has re-titled the song in honor of the original songwriters: Snowden’s Jig. The band begins to play.

I’ll leave the actual sound of the song for you to go forth and discover on your own – right now, even, before you finish this article! – but know this: There is nothing in any other form of entertainment, as far as I am aware, quite like the experience of being taken on the musical trip of Snowden’s Jig with 500 other people, all clapping along or stamping the ground to the beat. This is encouraged by the band, and with good reason: These are not songs for sitting idly by and appreciating.

These are songs for dancing to, for getting up and grooving to the beat. Were we not in a tightly packed concert hall, it would have been sacrilege for the concertgoers to stay seated. Still, had they not clapped or stamped along, it would have been blasphemy.

As I’ve admitted in previous reviews, I am somewhat prone to hyperbole. The thing is, these guys and gal are really just that good. Really freaking good.

We are lucky to live in a world in which these musicians exist. They may not be playing much or even any of their own original compositions, but they are dredging up from the past and bringing into the future the kind of music that, at least for me (and I think also for you) points toward a sort of “ur-music,” a feeling of what it is to experience “good music.” When you listen to the Chocolate Drops or other musicians of similar caliber (no matter the genre), you are taking a glance into what Plato would call the Form of music, that thing outside of time and space by which all music can be judged. In the case of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, that judgment is guilty- guilty of being too good for this world.

But while they’re still here, we need to enjoy them while we may.