For the past 13 years, as Dom Flemons delved into the history of folk music, black string bands, old-time country and earlyrock ‘n’ roll, he kept his musical obsessions away from his parents and grandparents. “I’m a very shy person, so it’s kind of hard for me to be like, ‘Let me ask you about the history of stuff,’ and put the folklore hat on in my own family,” says Flemons, 29, who plays banjo and sings in acoustic trio Carolina Chocolate Drops. “It’s one of those things that’s a little odd for me to do when I’m just visiting.”
Yet Flemons wound up asking his family questions and learned from listening to East Texas folk greats such as Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb that one of his grandfathers came from the same region and speaks in the same accent.
And one of his grandmothers recalled hearing fiddle and banjo music along with the church hymns she absorbed every Sunday in Helena, Ark. “As you go along, you tend to find interesting cultural aspects with yourself,” Flemons says from New Orleans, where his 7-year-old band recently performed at the Jazz and Heritage Festival. “Sometimes it’s subconscious, but when they come to the foreground, it can lead to interesting epiphanies.”
A zillion folk musicians, from Bob Dylan to the Grateful Dead to Nickel Creek, have drawn inspiration from country, bluegrass blues and jazz from the early 20th century — naturally adding their own modern identity.
The Chocolate Drops are unique in a few ways. Most obviously, the band is African-American, unlike most folk-revival stars, so it has access to mentors and forebears via groups such as the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, N.C.
Also, fiddle and banjo player Rhiannon Giddens is classically trained at Oberlin Conservatory of Music and an experienced opera singer, providing a certain all-star confidence.
The Chocolate Drops are steeped in enough jazz history to know that a banjo can be just as potent a rhythmic instrument as a drum machine. The band also has enough contemporary spirit to buttress Giddens’ rickety original “Country Girl” with hip-hop beat boxing.
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Although the group has put out four albums, including this year’s superb “Leaving Eden,” its best-known song may be a 3-year-old cover of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 smash “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops),” which has a violin, banjo and almost 800,000 views on YouTube. (Other folk-y musicians have covered contemporary urban songs, of course, but they tend to be of the “goofy white guys tackleSir Mix-a-Lot” persuasion.)
“It feels very genuine. It’s not like a gimmick,” says Chris Mateer, an Americana-music blogger at uprootedmusicrevue.com and a contributor to country-rock website No Depression. “Folk music disappeared for a while outside of our parents and a couple of Neil Young records. There’s this resurgence, and people are reaching back to Mike Seeger and New City Ramblers. It’s nice that that lineage is still available if you’re pursuing it. It’s kind of like pursuing Led Zeppelin, and realizing those early Led Zeppelin records have old blues covers on them, and reaching back.”
Flemons, who is from Arizona, met Giddens and Justin Robinson in 2005 at the first Black Banjo Gathering, a conference at Appalachian State University in Boone.
Their epiphany was a collaboration on “Old Joe Clark,” an 1880s mountain ballad they’d all coincidentally arranged before the event. (Robinson has since left the band because he didn’t like life on the road; five-string banjoist Hubby Jenkins recently replaced him.) Giddens has described the moment she met the other Chocolate Drops as “magic.”
“Even though she has an opera background, she started with not opera music — her dad was a trained vocalist, but he played a lot of ’70s folk music and stuff like that,” Flemons says of Giddens. “She grew up with a nonclassical background in music, then she did opera later. So she’s very good about not being overtly classical or super-rigid about things. One thing she’s very good about is being in tune, with keys and keeping the quality of music. … And I bring, like, making sure that the stuff is bad-ass.
“We have artistic disagreements,” he adds, “but for the most part, we have a very natural chemistry.”
After the Black Banjo Gathering, Flemons was so inspired that he moved from his Arizona home to Chapel Hill, N.C. The Chocolate Drops then hooked up with Joe Thompson, a fiddler who lived in nearby Mebane and taught them why fiddle-and-banjo tunes were so important to black communities in the Piedmont section of North Carolina. (Thompson, a National Endowment of the Arts Folk Heritage Fellow and an important figure in preserving the history and culture of black string bands, died in March at 93.)
“We’re a black string band, and that’s one thing that’s been very poignant with us. Joe Thompson and our connection with him and having played with him for several years before the group started growing — that’s something that’s been interesting to watch,” Fleming says. “People say, ‘You guys have done a lot forold-time music,’ and it’s great to be a part of it. And it’s great to be one of many people who’ve been doing it for years.”
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When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Where: Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave.
Tickets: $20; 773-525-2501, lincolnhallchicago.com