interviews & articles

Interview: Carolina Chocolate Drops, April, 2007

By newoldtymer ⋅ December 6, 2007 ⋅ Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

It’s a breezy spring night, and the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops have come to play the Atlanta History Center, nestled in the bustling, trendy neighborhood known as Buckhead. Three acts are scheduled for this night as part of its ongoing “Nothin’ but the Blues” series (tonight’s focus is “Piedmont Pickin’”), and the ‘Drops are on the middle of the bill. The auditorium is comfortable, clean and acoustically perfect, almost too perfect for the hardscrabble music being presented. The handsome, properly-dressed crowd smiles and applauds politely to all the players, but it is the ‘Drops that makes them whoop and holler, bringing them to their feet at set’s end.

Indeed, there’s plenty to get excited about. Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens, and Justin Robinson, who share the singing duties in this group, are quite the collective: Dom picks his banjo, stands to play the bones and, later, a snare drum on a strap, with grand, exaggerated motions. Dom and Justin take turns on the jug (which, by the way, you blow into, not along the top of, like the last bottle of beer you played). Justin concentrates intently on his fiddle, and wins you over with his Carolina drawl. Rhiannon pumps her head back and forth as she picks and pounds out rhythm on her banjo, then rises from her chair and delights the audience with an impromptu buck dance. The music is feverish, and bounces you like a horse at full gallop – exhilarating, yet controlled. And each of them teach, but don’t preach, between songs.

Bottom line: If you want to increase your understanding of early 20th Century music, purchasing Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music may help you develop a cold understanding of it, or you can watch the ‘Drops, none of whom have yet reached 30, and see it live and breathe, renewed. In their hands, old-time music is young again.

Thus begins the Carolina Chocolate Drops gentle reclaiming of the black musical traditions of the Carolina Piedmont. Their weapon is not advocacy, but rather the sheer beauty of what they do.

RCM caught up with Dom and Justin after their set, and they politely answered questions which were probably more political than the CCD’s have ever sought out to be.
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RCM: For starters, please rehash how the Carolina Chocolate Drops met. Was your mentor, Joe Thompson, present?

Dom Flemons: That was the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in April, 2005. Black Banjo was huge - fours days of all these people into the same stuff I was into. (I’d been) struggling in Arizona, so I just jumped on I-40 to North Carolina. I met up with (Rhiannon and Justin) there, and we started our group.

That was the first time I’d met Joe; also, Mike Seeger was there, Algia Mae Hinton, from Middlesex, North Carolina - she’s a great buck dancer and blues player - Daniel Jata from Gambia, and the Ebony Hillbillies from New York.

RCM: Has your understanding of music taken off since then, or did you come loaded?

Oh, I came loaded, but I didn’t know anything compared with how much I don’t know now (laughs).

RCM: Other than Joe Thompson, whose work have you been studying closely?

For about two years, I’ve really been into (blues guitar player) Henry Thomas, trying to figure out stuff that he does.

The history of the banjo and how it relates to blues is really interesting: Where you have one instrument, like the banjo, come in, and then you have another, the guitar in this case, swipe that traditional instrument up, and then assimilate it to fit into itself. As far as I can tell from my own research and how I play, with guitars, there’s a lot of open G tuning along with the capo. There’s a lot of different sounds you can get out of it that are very banjo-like in terms of the strum and the way the notes move around it. That’s a very important part of the history of the banjo, which is a native African instrument.

RCM: So the blues and the banjo become progressively less friendly?

It’s not so much that they became less friendly. It’s just the normal thing that happens with “black” music: (Blacks) play it, then it loses its context. So you have black people doing jazz, blues, and spirituals – those are your race records. Then there was a moment in time, I’d say about the mid- 30’s, when a new commercial market was developing, and (along with it) a new image. Ethnic music was split from hillbilly string band records and cowboy-style country music.

(Meanwhile) only very exceptional black string bands got recorded. There are a couple of Library of Congress sets that have recordings of black string bands in their traditional elements, but it just got picked up then put down, and didn’t get preserved.

RCM: So now the banjo is perceived as a hillbilly instrument, a “white” instrument? That’s an awkward way to put it. . .

No, that’s true, though. It’s associated with white culture. When (the Carolina Chocolate Drops) do a school show, we ask, “Where did the banjo come from?” The kids all say, “Texas”. Being from the southwest, I would try to explain (to them) why it was that banjos are associated with bluegrass. In bluegrass, you wear cowboy suits and hats, and where are cowboys from? Texas.

There’s no context of a black person playing banjo unless you look at ancient pictures from the 1800’s. There’s no context of black people with the banjo except in minstrelsy.

RCM: The thing I admire about the Chocolate Drops is how y’all are not strict preservationists - you assemble and arrange based on what works for you.

Oh, yeah. We’re not set in stone, and we never have been. We try to take from the source, try to take the essence, and go wherever we want to after that. We get a lot of, “Well, you’re really holding up the traditions of Joe Thompson”, which we are doing. We play Joe’s tunes, and we play them with the feeling that Joe has shown us, but we don’t play them exactly the same as Joe.

We’re trying not to make a big agenda, we just play the music. You can see that we’re black, we’re a string band, and that should be enough of a message. We don’t beat you over the head with what we think you should take from it.

RCM: Y’all have made a goal to educate young people by playing in the public schools. How’s the reception been? Do the kids always like you, or are they sometimes just too cool for it?

Fortunately, a lot of schools have approached us. When we started out, we got an article in a local paper called The Independent, and, from there, the schools started coming to us. We’re always up for playing in schools, and we have broken through every time. The kids catch onto the buck dancing and the clogging. They respond to the jug really well - the hambone they grab onto.

Black people in general do take pride in their struggles, but a lot of joyous things have not been celebrated. If we can just have (the students) say, “Hey, I saw black people with banjos and they made me dance. . .” That’s a real powerful thing. It keeps us grounded.

RCM: You recorded “Dixie” for your record, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind. It’s nice how the recording lifts the song out of its current context. It’s just enjoyable to listen to on its own merits.

Justin Robinson: I just like the tune, to tell you the truth. I heard Hobart Smith play it on the piano on one of his albums, Blue Ridge Legacy, and I was like, “Man, that’s a rockin’ tune!” I don’t think I’d feel comfortable playing it outside the company of this band, but I just thought it was a cool song.

A lot of those minstrel-type tunes are associated with some sort of specific connotation, in this case negative. We didn’t do it for any political reasons, (but) it is nice to return a song like that to its original context. The fact is - there’s a lot of debate over who even wrote “Dixie”. I mean, Northerners were singing it; they just put different words to it. Whether a black person wrote it, which is an assertion that some people make, is as plausible as anything else, but we don’t really know.

The most important thing is that it’s just a cool tune, even though other people shy away from it. I’m not saying make “Dixie” the theme song of the black string band movement.

RCM: Is there a black string band movement?

There is, in a very odd way. It’s been coming in waves.

Dom: Yeah, in the form of a lot of people our age and younger. I just got back from New York and met a guy who’s 19 - he’s got a real good Blind Boy Fuller going on.

Justin: There’s a kid we saw in St. Louis, who was 16, and did Muddy Waters to a T. There are kids on My Space inquiring about us or saying, “Hey, we are playing this stuff ourselves - we just picked it up.” It’s starting to trickle in, little by little.

Dom: And even white kids who might be doing punk are starting string bands instead.

RCM: Yeah, I understand - traditional has become the new rebellion. So how do y’all view the current state of country music?

Justin: Well, we’re quite removed from popular country music. Country music now is almost a misnomer.

Dom: Country’s just like every other popular music. All of the old American musics have gotten so inbred, it just gets sickening.

RCM: Got plans for future recordings? I think I read you had planned something bluesier next time around?

Justin: The first album was one pretty straight path.

Dom: Not bluesy, but it will be different. We’ll be working with different styles.

We had an earlier group called Sankofa Strings, covering blues and jazz, and then we were doing straight-up string band with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, so the first album was just straight string band, but the next album is gonna have a lot of different stuff combined, a larger repertoire.

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The Carolina Chocolate Drops will be playing throughout the United States and Canada this year. For more info, go to: http://www.sankofastrings.com/ccd/media.html
http://myspace.com/carolinachocolatedrops