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Flemons in 2007 (Photo by Bill Steber)

I decided to try make a murder ballad in which I could get in as many murders as possible in that single ballad. I got five murders all in one.

You really outdid yourself with that.

The father kills the mother in the beginning, and the police gun him down; and then Jim Reilly kills the lover, kills Marlene (his lover), and then kills himself. The narrator, of course, is the ghost of Jim Reilly telling us this stuff.

Was there something important to going “all in” on that for you?

It was a writing exercise for me. I got a B.A. in English and Creative Writing, and Classic Literature. I was working on how to craft a story that would be emotional. I talk a lot about the emotional anguish that this character, Jim Reilly, goes through. He doesn’t understand that a prostitute has different lovers. He doesn’t understand that when he was paying to meet this woman that that was the business that she was doing. I tried to convey a lot of different emotions and a lot of different feelings within the course of that ballad. I wanted it to be really dark, and I didn’t want it to lighten up. I wanted it to start out really dark and get darker from there.

I had been listening to Johnny Cash’s American recordings, and a lot of Tom Waits, like Mule Variations, too. I was trying to get that sort of darkness and grotesque, that violence, in my writing.

I think of that as a contrast to the general tone of your work now, which is not particularly somber, brooding, or dark – at least most of it. How do you see those two things interacting?

When I wrote “The Ghost of Jim Reilly,” I had no aspirations of doing music for a living, so that was just writing for its own sake – just because I felt like doing it. When I first went out to North Carolina to the Black Banjo Gathering, and when we started the Carolina Chocolate Drops, that stuff was based on a different idea. At that time I wrote “Jim Reilly,” I didn’t know anything about black string band music or what any of that stuff meant. When the opportunity came to help create awareness about the music of North Carolina, the Piedmont string band music, through the Carolina Chocolate Drops, that became a whole different thing.

Original Carolina Chocolate Drops Rhiannon Giddens, Dom Flemons, and Justin Robinson with Joe Thompson (in ballcap). Photo by the Carolina Chocolate Drops

Instead of being just me writing songs because I felt like it, or because that was what my natural inclination happened to be, I was able to take that initial inclination and put it into a context where I could also be presenting a broader history that at that time had not been looked into. The other way to put it would be that there were all these disparate pieces of information that were out there about black string band music in one form or another. We were trying to put those together in a way that would show people that there was a very rich and vital history of that music. That changed the whole notion of it. I took myself out of the equation. I pushed my personal ambitions as a writer to the side so that I could present more traditional music and folk music in a way that, I could see at that time, in the post-digital revolution, I could see that there were a lot of people my age that didn’t know anything about this music.

You mentioned some of your early work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. That first album, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind, has two classic murder ballads, “Little Sadie” and “Tom Dula.” Tell me about their roles in that album.

[Listen to clips of the Carolina Chocolate Drops performing “Little Sadie” and “Tom Dula.” Proceeds from the sale of Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind went to benefit The Music Maker Relief Foundation.]

Oh, yeah. Those are both songs that I brought into the group. I had learned “Little Sadie” when I was still out in Phoenix. When I was first getting into music, I got into people like Bob Dylan. After I first heard Dylan, I was fortunate enough to see Dave Van Ronk play, maybe 6 months before he died. I happened to catch a show with him, and that changed my life completely. I started researching Bob Dylan. I was really interested in the early part of his career, the first and second albums he put out. I started reading about the scene in the Village, and started seeing a bunch of names that popped up; people like Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, or Patrick Sky. Then, there were people like Koerner, Ray, and Glover that came up, and Tom Rush, Brother John Sellers, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.

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