Carolina Chocolate Drops, a Grammy-winning band, sits down for a Q&A with the Daily Bruin

The members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops have recorded four albums since the group’s formation in 2005. One of its albums, “Genuine Negro Jig,” won last year’s Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album. The band uses instruments such as the banjo, harmonica, jug and cello to create music with a history behind it. Dom Flemons, one of the founding members of Carolina Chocolate Drops, spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Andrea Seikaly about the group’s upcoming performance in Royce Hall.

Daily Bruin: How did you and Rhiannon Giddens, the other founding member of Carolina Chocolate Drops, decide to start a band?

Dom Flemons: We both had been interested in folk music of one form or another. I was playing a lot of singer-songwriter stuff and I really started delving into some older country, blues and jazz music. Rhiannon was doing a lot of Celtic music at that time and she also has a background in opera. We have these really varied backgrounds but we came together and started playing music. At that time, the idea of the banjo being an African-derived instrument was not as well-known. We started one group, and then I moved out from Arizona to North Carolina and Rhiannon and I started another group called the Carolina Chocolate Drops. It was one of those things where as we played, people got interested in what we were talking about and the stories that we were telling and the material that we were playing.

DB: After writing short stories and poems, you got started in music by playing a four-string banjo. What was that transition like?

DF: By that point I had been playing guitar and harmonica and then I picked up the banjo. A friend of mine gave me one that didn’t have a fifth string on it. I took all of the stuff that I knew on the guitar and played it on the banjo and so I developed a style of playing the banjo that was influenced by a lot of different recordings and different people that I met along the way. I just kind of smashed it all together and had my own sort of style of banjo. In between this transition I did slam poetry and performed at national poetry slams and did prose and wrote songs and stuff like that before I started doing traditional music pretty exclusively.

DB: The group’s previous album “Genuine Negro Jig” won a Grammy. What was that experience like?

DF: That was a pretty neat trip. We got the phone call that we had been nominated and we all went out there and it was great to actually win the Grammy.

When I went up, I jumped up and started playing the bones (instrument) as I was going up to the podium. It’s one of those things where all of sudden all of the articles or advertisements that we had came out again and said “Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops” so it gives you an extra bit of ethos when you speak about your act or your music. That has been a beautiful thing to see how it has helped elevate our group and create more awareness about what we’re going to do. This summer we’re doing five or six dates with Dave Matthews Band and the Grammy has helped us be taken a little more seriously.

DB: Given your past experiences, what is your goal as you prepare to perform at UCLA?

DF: We don’t do anything so different from other shows. We will play some songs and talk about the sources or the inspiration or sometimes who we learned it from. Some of the songs we learn from people we know, other times they’re from old recordings and other times they come from sheet music and there are a couple that we’ve written, too. If we pull out an interesting instrument we talk about that as well.

We keep it pretty casual so that it doesn’t seem too didactic or too “educational.” We also do a lot of breakdowns and dance music so we try to keep things exciting that way as well.