Back in late April, the Carolina Chocolate Drops played a reunion show at the Biscuits & Banjos festival in Durham, North Carolina. It was the first time that the festival had been organized by Chocolate Drops co-founder, Rhiannon Giddens, and it doubled as a big anniversary.
Giddens, Justin Robinson and Dom Flemons were marking the 20th anniversary of their band, the event that first catalyzed their musical mission (the Black Banjo Gathering), and the movement to reclaim the Black roots of folk and country music they helped propelled forward.
All these years later, it’s easy to recognize the significance of three young pickers starting the group that would do much to revive the forgotten Black string band tradition and bring it to new audiences. But at least one of the Chocolate Drops, Flemons, envisioned the contributions they’d make to history from the very start.
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“In some ways, this 20th anniversary has fulfilled a dream that I had 20 years ago when I came to North Carolina from Arizona to document what would become the emergence of Black Americana,” he told me in Durham. “So I documented all along the way from 2005 to now.”
‘This was gonna mean something to people in the future’
In college, Flemons spent his downtime in the library poring over Smithsonian Folkways, Arhoolie Records and the Library of Congress’s vast archives of recorded music, reading folklorists’ taxonomies of musical traditions, and, often, finding holes in the scholarship. He’d recently graduated and was barely into his twenties when he began acting as the Chocolate Drops’ archivist, collecting all their show flyers and plenty else, “Knowing that this was gonna be something that was gonna mean something to people in the future,” he recalled. “How far we would go, we had no clue. But each place we went [to perform], it kept growing and growing.”
Soon, Flemons told me, he would continue the commemoration of Chocolate Drops’ history by displaying some of his artifacts in downtown Nashville’s Westin Hotel. When I met him in the hotel lobby the first day of June, I found I wasn’t the only one zeroing in on the dapper musician’s presence. A fan who’d seen him on the Grand Ole Opry a few nights before approached to say, “We love your music and we love everything that you said at your set. And here you are. I mean, wow.”
“I’m so glad that you’re able to stop by for a little bit,” Flemons grinned. “We were just talking about everything on display.”
‘They need to see the artifacts’
One of the items behind the glass is a resophonic guitar he played during the Chocolate Drops very first appearance on the Opry in 2008. Flemons is still a tremendously active musician, but he was willing to part with some of his instruments so that people can get a good look at them.
“Because of the way that the Black roots music community has grown, I really wanted to have those type of artifacts here in Nashville,” he explained. “They need to see the artifacts of the originators and the pioneers that have helped create the modern sense of Black roots music.
When Flemons agreed to partner with Vanderbilt University and the National Museum of African American Music on this exhibit, he was told it could only hold so much.
His reaction? “Six items! I don’t know if I can do it.”
We summoned his business manager and close collaborator, Vania Kinard, who’d been snapping photos of the proceedings, to join the conversation. Since she and Flemons are married, she knows his collection intimately, but could also offer big-picture perspective.
“He wasn’t comfortable picking the items himself,” said Kinard, “because he felt like, ‘I don’t know which ones have more value. They all have value in the same way to me.’ So I was like, ‘If this is going to be a representation of Dom, it’s got to have a little bit of boots and instruments and music to hint at the different parts of Dom’s musical career.’”
‘A hundred years from now… it will be accessible to other people”
The Deering banjo displayed before us was one that Flemons took all over the world with the Chocolate Drops, and had to get repaired when it was damaged on an overseas flight. Next to it, the headstock of a tiny clay banjo is missing. A sculptor was moved to make whimsically rustic renderings of the Chocolate Drops as musical frogs after seeing them play a North Carolina festival. “Me with my big apple hat,” Flemons described, “and Rhiannon with her little flower dress and Justin with a little hat playing the fiddle.”
Flemons delights in stylized depictions like this, viewing them as signs of cultural impact.
“I was always a big fan of early silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” he said, “And they created such a beautiful, iconic, timeless image with the characters they made that you could depict these characters in any form or fashion.”
That’s not the only eye-catching art on the shelf, Flemons noted, pointing out a pair of “ugly face jugs.”
“Now this is a folkloric practice that goes back to the early 1700s, and there are links back to Africa and enslaved people making clay jugs that in some ways symbolize a spiritual practice of evil spirits being put into a jug and put away.”
For Flemons, the jug is an old-time instrument too, one whose flatulent bass notes added jaunty humor to certain Chocolate Drops numbers.
And rounding out the exhibit are tokens from the solo career he began when he left the band in 2013: a pair of golden, ostrich-toe cowboy boots, much like the ones his dad wore, and a vinyl copy of his album Black Cowboys that symbolizes how he’s carried on with the work of excavating Black roots culture. Its 18 songs and poems are accompanied by thoroughly researched liner notes, he said, “so that there would be a very clear, tangible, historical precedent that said that Black cowboys is a thing and it’s important. But to see it sort of evolve outward into popular culture has been really amazing, and I’m glad it’s had that role.”
As the fan who briefly interrupted us can attest, Flemons is every bit a showman, unparalleled in his faithful and theatrical animations of a myriad folk, country, blues and old-time vernaculars. And for him, that goes hand in hand with putting hidden histories on painstaking and — ideally permanent — display. “A hundred years from now, when I’m not here, if those items are in Vanderbilt University, they’re going to the preserving it and it will be accessible to other people.”
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