Fiddling with a vanishing tradition
String band calls on its black heritage
When the Carolina Chocolate Drops perform for schoolchildren, they always ask the kids where they think the banjo comes from, and they always get the same answer: Texas. Band member Dom Flemons guesses that's because the only place those boys and girls would have ever seen a banjo is in a bluegrass band, and the musician playing it was likely wearing cowboy boots, and cowboys - as every fifth-grader knows - are from Texas.
The kids have definitely never seen a banjo player who looks like Flemons. And unless they've been to a Carolina Chocolate Drops show, neither have their parents.
"There aren't too many of us," Flemons notes with characteristic understatement. By "us" he means three African-American musicians who play old-time string-band music from the Carolina foothills region known as the Piedmont. In fact, they are the only young, black jug band out there, according to Tim Duffy, president of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting elderly Southern musicians and preserving traditional roots music.
"Folklorists have been looking for decades," Duffy says, "and just haven't found them."
Now that they're here, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are causing quite a sensation. After the Music Maker Relief Foundation signed the trio to its small roster of young artists whose music contributes to the preservationist mission, it released "Dona Got a Ramblin' Mind" last year.
Interest in the group has grown swiftly; CCD is booked into 2009, including a sold-out date tonight at Sanders Theatre with Boston's alternative-bluegrass group Crooked Still. In December, the Carolina Chocolate Drops will make their big-screen debut in the Denzel Washington film "The Great Debaters." Duffy says the trio has already outgrown his record company and that he's negotiating with a handful of major labels on the band's behalf.
While the Carolina Chocolate Drops are successfully reclaiming the string band's African-American heritage, faces in the crowd at the band's concerts are largely white - an irony that Flemons says is entirely understandable.
"That's the audience that's been there for folk music," says Flemons, who schedules frequent appearances at inner-city schools and black community events. "There hasn't been a context for it in black society for 80 or 90 years, and it's not in the consciousness. People are just starting to catch on that there are black people playing fiddle and banjo music."
Flemons met Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson (both natives of the North Carolina Piedmont) two years ago at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C., a first-time event celebrating the banjo's African-American roots. Flemons, who grew up in Arizona, starting playing three years earlier, when he was 20, and had become a voracious student of the instrument's lineage. Giddens, a fiddler and banjo player, studied opera and then immersed herself in the contra dance community before discovering string-band music. Robinson is a classically trained violinist, but an NPR report about an elderly musician named Joe Thompson sparked his curiosity. Robinson soon traded his violin for a fiddle and sought out Thompson, a lifelong resident of Mebane, N.C., who is thought to be the last black string-band fiddler of his generation.
Thompson became the trio's mentor, and the lion's share of the Carolina Chocolate Drops's repertoire includes songs they've learned from him during their weekly visits.
"He starts playing a song, we start following him, and he lets us know if there's something to be done," is how Flemons describes the group's tutelage under Thompson, who will turn 89 next month. "It has all the basics," he says of the music's lure. "A good feel - and that can be a strong beat or a swing beat or a thumping dance beat - that gets you on your feet and enough of a tune to sing along to. This music was made for dancing."
Based in Durham, N.C., the band formed out of a shared love for the down-home songs; the imperative to raise awareness about the string band's African-American roots evolved later, a natural offshoot of the simple fact that three black musicians were taking the stage to perform this music. The band members don't consider themselves preservationists or even strict traditionalists. They write their own songs, although the band has yet to introduce originals into the live set or record them.
"We're very aware that we're not in the same social situations anymore. We're not a dance band for corn shuckings and tobacco pools. We're people right now in 2007, playing music on a casual level," Flemons says. "We're not going out there on a mission. But if anybody catches on, that would be a wonderful thing."
MMRF's Duffy begs to differ.
"They're extremely dedicated and hardworking," he says. "Dom is evangelical about it. He hangs out with young black musicians in his off time. They're in discussions to write a children's book about Joe Thompson. I think they're hoping more young, black string bands form in their wake. They're damn good entertainers, but they're also very, very clear with their message."
Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, go to boston.com/ae/music/blog. 