A former Phoenix Union graduate from Central High is now a Grammy award winner.Dom Flemons, who graduated from Central in 2000, is a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, which won a Grammy last night for Best American Folk Album for their 2010 album, Genuine Negro Jig.
Flemons, who plays a four-string banjo, guitar, jug, harmonica, kazoo, snare drum, and bones, is one of three band members. Much of the band’s repertoire is based on the traditional Black string music of the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina.
“I left Arizona because I knew the music would take me somewhere-but I had no idea,” Flemons said in his biography on the band’s website.
You don’t have to be born in the Piedmont to feel the music in your blood. “
Flemons’ brother Estaban Flemons is a chemistry and biology teacher at North High School and coaches basketball and swimming at the school. He says his brother began learning the guitar and began to embrace his love of music and performing while he was at Central . He later picked up the banjo, and went to Encanto Park for Wednesday night music jams.
Flemons learned about a Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina in 2005, and when he made the trip, it changed his life. He met players he had only heard on recordings. He moved to North Carolina, and met up with Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson, his future band mates, who were learning traditional songs at the home of the legendary African American fiddler Joe Thompson.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops have released five albums, and Flemons has two solo albums. They opened for Taj Mahal, and have performed on PBS’ Fresh Air and BBC Radio, as well as several folk and fiddler festivals.
Below is a link to their Grammy-winning photo, and to the band’s website.
From Website:
The Black string band tradition traces its roots to musicians from Africa who came to the Americas in the holds of slave ships. The anchor instruments were made of gourds with a neck and a variety of string combinations. The same basic gourd banjo, called the ekontone, is played today in Gambia. Alongside the banjo gourd, musicians devised a number of fiddles, American-born relatives of the African ritti or one-stringed fiddle. Eventually, perhaps under the influence or orders of masters who wanted Irish jigs played in their parlors, black fiddle-players picked up the European violin, taking that instrument back to their cabins, adding classical-style fiddle to banjo and percussion; so the blurring of boundaries began.
Source: Phoenix Union High School District
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