Interview by Carson Colenbaugh

 

Through both your friendly persona and your moments of explosive musical energy, I truly believe your unique stage-presence has no equal. So it’s breathtaking whenever I stop and consider how much knowledge & research must be involved in what already strikes me as an incredible performance.

While creating music, whether that involves covering old folk songs or working on original material, do you find that Dom the Performer and Dom the Scholar work simultaneously? Or does Dom the Scholar have to lay a foundation before Dom the Performer can take the stage?

I would say that both work simultaneously, because when I am presenting my music for an audience I am trying to serve two purposes. First, it’s my desire to create music that is entertaining and pleasing to the ear and to create interest, but I am also doing what I can to make songs that will educate people to the sounds and styles of American folk music. The second purpose can be very subtle and not as didactic as it sounds. Many times, my audiences have not heard the type of music that I play on stage and that in and of itself is an education. When it comes to my original material, the stories that I tell in the songs, as well as in between the songs, help to illuminate the many layers of culture embedded in my presentation. Yet, one does dominate the other. I use my scholarship to add to the texture of the music. It is never my goal to deliver a heavy handed message to the audience because I respect them enough to let them make their decisions on the history and the music. When I begin my show, the history and the entertainment should be seamlessly intertwined.

 

What’s your lived experience of that multifaceted process of research and recital?

Music can be viewed with quite different lenses. It can be seen as a melody and other times it can be seen as culture. It’s regional but it’s also universal. When I do my research, I don’t try to find information solely for a specialized project. I am generally researching all the time and collecting the stories and songs so that they can be applied later. Taking this approach, I find that I am able to meet the projects I am involved in with the enthusiasm of having found a new piece to the puzzle. When I do a concert, the process is forming a tapestry of songs, instruments, stories, history, and commentary that can take the audience on a journey through many types of musical landscapes, so that they get the feeling that they have been transported through time, even though they have only been sitting in their chairs listening to me play.

 

Your recent concert at Vanderbilt University celebrated your donation of many personal and historical artifacts, now dubbed the Dom Flemons American Songster Collection, to the Blair School of Music’s library. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever attended, but that’s because I love both lyrics and lectures, and the evening felt like a hootenanny hybridized with Antiques Roadshow. Could you tell us a few things about the items you donated, why they were donated, and what you hope university researchers might glean from them?

When I was approached to donate materials to Vanderbilt University, I chose to pick items that would allow future generations to understand and appreciate the work I have done over 20 years in the music business. Items included a variety of instruments that I’ve collected over the years. This includes a West African akonting, the six string guitar-banjo that once belonged to my mentor Mike Seeger, several pieces of art that have been created in my likeness on a variety of materials, draft papers from my album liner notes, essays and various writings, as well as two musical jugs that I used to play on stage. Some of the items that were not on stage included a collection of vinyl records signed by musicians I respect ranging from Odetta, Taj Mahal, John Sebastian, cartoonist R. Crumb, and many others. I donated these items because, on top of much of it being my research into the history of American music, it was also important for people to get a sense of me as a record collector and a fan of music, and how that has driven me to do the work I do on stage. At the end of the day, it is so important for music researchers to be fans of the music they are studying.

 

I think I speak for the entire audience when I say that the highlight of the show was when you recorded a couple live songs on wax cylinders with the help of MTSU’s Martin Fisher. Like what happens with the antique instruments you play, you made an arguably outdated object something with immediate relevance.

How do you hope concert-goers view your work on the spectrum between the old and the new? You’re obviously a portal to the past, but you’re also living and breathing in the 21st Century.

One of the things that is extremely important for me is to break past the artifice of old and new when it comes to the presentation of American music. Even though there are songs that have very long histories, some more than 100 years old, it is still very easy to be able to create a space where the music can be just as relevant as it was in the previous century. That is not to say that I am ever trying to move things backwards, but the part of the show where we made wax cylinders was, in one way, a living embodiment of this practice. Even though the wax cylinder is connected with the earliest recording technology and the very first popular recordings of the late 1890s, it is easy to forget that it was the cutting edge technology of its time. The people who are making the recordings on these machines were living in the present moment. The technology itself actually treats the aesthetic that makes it sound old to our ears. When doing a demonstration like we did at Vanderbilt, part of what we wanted to do was to show the way that a current performance could be captured on a cylinder, and when it is played back, it sounds just as old as any other cylinder recording from the very early 20th century. When an audience makes the realization that the technology influences the way that the music sounds, it changes the listener’s whole perspective about old music, because in all essence, the music is just as immediate now as it was when it was first recorded.

 

Living amid a national culture so rooted in newness, I often find solace in Old Time music. For some people, the genre can be an escape to “better days,” an idea which ignores or outright denies the lineages of violence that founded the USA and continue systemically into our present moment. But for me, Old Time is an immersion in a small part of the population that’s particularly thrifty, that gets culture secondhand and either finds something current in the old or refurbishes the old as-needed.

What has the Old Time genre meant to you recently, in the last few months?

I have always thought of the term ‘Old Time’ as being just a placeholder to describe a certain type of music that is specifically based around the fiddle and banjo string-band music of the early 20th Century. As I mentioned previously, no matter how old the songs may be, I have always viewed this music as being very current. With that being said, the music has a very deep historical root to it, so it is also a style of music that is bringing with it a deeply complex cultural story and that cannot be removed from it. I began to get into this type of music through the blues, jazz, and country music, and so for me, Old Time music is a conduit point where all these genres come together at a common source. For me, it’s always been about understanding more about the country and not about escapism.

 

You’re Dom Flemons, “The American Songster.” What does being not just any songster, but The American Songster, mean to you?

Is yours a process of mythologizing/enshrining this nation and its people, or about demystifying? Or perhaps both?

I got to a certain point in my career where I continue to have trouble being able to explain to people all of the genres I played. It was easier for people to be able to place me within one box or another. I found it to be extremely tricky to be defined by others, because once you are dubbed a single genre, you are bound to that genre for your whole career. I was reading some blues scholarship from the English writer, Paul Oliver, and in his book Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records, he talks about the role of the songster being a musician who played for a variety of people in the community and used a mixture of songs that would satisfy a varied audience. I found that even though the term ‘songster’ referred to an older type of musician, it dawned on me that most people in the 21st Century listen to music in the same way they did in the 19th Century: less inhibited by strict genre lines. It was then that I realized I could take on the name of the ‘songster’ to describe myself. As I play almost exclusively all songs of American origin, The American Songster made sense for me. It allowed me to take pride in the country where I was born, and as a man of African-American and Mexican-American descent, it also allowed me to reinforce my work acknowledging and elevating the contributions of traditionally marginalized communities by saying that this music is indeed “American.”

 

I’m thinking particularly of your original song “Nobody Wrote it Down.”

With “Nobody Wrote It Down,” I wanted to approach a different aspect of reclaiming the American story. This is the song that I co-wrote with two other songwriters for a bigger conceptual album on African-American folk traditions. I was brought onto the project to work on this song because of my research on Black Cowboys. I began to delve into the story of African-Americans in the [American] West after I found a book that describes that one and four cowboys, who helped settle the West, were African-American cowboys. From that point on, I began to search out more information on not only cowboys, but African-Americans, who helped pioneer the West through early settlements and a variety of occupations that helped build the West into cities that are now a part of the whole West Coast of the United States. “Nobody Wrote it Down” follows a man who can trace his Western lineage back several generations going back to his great-great-grandfather, who was a runaway slave. In each subsequent verse, the narrator continues to describe the hard work ethic passed-down to each successive generation, from the Buffalo Soldiers, the cowboys, and the Pullman porters. In the course of four minutes, the song covers close to 200 years of history.

 

Another incredible moment during your concert was an instrumental breakdown during which you and your plectrum banjo talked back and forth through song, but the climax of that segment was when that dialogue shifted into the high-energy chorus of Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susanna.”

As a white audience member, I often have to check-in on the nature of my engagement, since I sometimes get so caught in the sheer joy you send from your seat on the stage that I stop thinking critically about what I’m listening to.

“Oh, Susanna” was one of the first songs I tried learning on the banjo myself, but only because I knew Pete Seeger’s humorous version and for a long time was ignorant of its racist original lyrics and its ties to blackface minstrelsy.

So I’ve always been surprised that most of your songs, many of which have similarly entangled histories, don’t get more contextualization on stage.

As a performer, how do you navigate playing songs that are central to the American songbag but are fundamentally marred by their makers and/or lyrics beyond contemporary society’s standards?

When do you feel that songs like “Oh, Susanna” need or don’t need to be contextualized in performances?

When it comes to the snippet of “Oh, Susanna” that I use in the banjo breakdown “Po’ Black Sheep,” that last half is in some ways a way for me to pull the song inside-out. It has a very racist past, which is part of the reason I don’t sing the whole song at this point in the breakdown. It is also an extremely well-known number, so being able to partially reference it allows the audience to recognize that it is familiar to them.

In full context, first I have the banjo talk, and I play a well-known tune like “Old Joe Clark,” letting the instrument musically tell its story. With “Oh, Susanna” I continue the dialogue, with the banjo hinting that the banjo is seeing a new woman in his life. I ask her name and begin to play the melody, lightly teasing that the girl is a “Southern belle.” I ask the banjo where they are going, and I sing the last line of the chorus, “I’m going to Alabama with a banjo on my knee,” which is the most familiar line of the whole song. Afterwards, I say to the banjo that if it’s going to make it to Alabama, it needs to run. In this way, I am able to subtly imply the dangerous world these early songs describe plainly and distinctly. Doing this allows me to take the stereotypes of older minstrel material, turn it inside-out, and speed-up the tempo to such a fast speed that it shocks the audience. The banjo is able to transcend it all, creating an excitement that symbolizes its transcendence over all adversity. In this way, I feel that the implication around a song like “Oh, Susanna,” which is so familiar to people, allows for the banjo piece to have an edge that is entertaining while still being subversive. Using this method allows me to tell a very important story of American history while still using entertainment to drive the message home.

 

 

Lightning Round:

 

What’s the one tune from the American Songbag (in general, not just Sandburg’s) that doesn’t get enough attention, but that everyone should listen to?

I don’t know if there’s just one song I would say needs to be heard. I think that they all need to be heard. There are recordings from the Golden Era of the industry from the 1920s and 30s that are powerful statements of American culture, and there are also many non-commercial recordings from archives like the Library of Congress that are equally important.

 

Do you own a belt? Or are you a suspenders devotee?

I do own a belt, and I wear it on many occasions when I get off-stage. As for the suspenders, they are both a statement of fashion as well as being functional. Suspenders allow me to be able to move freely, and when I’m standing up on stage, some of the details, like the buffalo nickels I have embedded in each side, can be easily seen from a distance.

 

You’ll return to Nashville in November as part of the tribute to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott at the Ryman Auditorium. Was he an important figure in your early musical development, or someone that has come to mean something to you recently?

[Due to unforseen circumstances, the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott tribute was cancelled before this interview could be published.]

It’s a real shame that the Ramblin’ Jack Elliott tribute will not be happening this time at the Ryman, but I have had the opportunity of sharing the stage with Jack several times. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott has been a huge influence on me, since I first began playing music. When I began to first pick up folk records, I thought his albums with Derroll Adams were phenomenal. They’re still phenomenal, and I listen to them quite often, and I even recently had an opportunity to appear on a recording with Jack on Andy Hedges’ recent album Roll On, Cowboys. I was looking forward to playing on that show, but I know that we’ll have another chance to get together again in the future.

 

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Dom Flemons received an Honorary Doctorate from Northern Arizona University and he’s a GRAMMY Award Winner with four GRAMMY nominations, Two-Time EMMY Nominee, International Acoustic Music Award Grand Prize Winner, and was a United States Artists Fellow. He is a musician based in the Chicago area and he is famously known as “The American Songster®” since his repertoire covers over one hundred years of American roots music; including country, folk, bluegrass, Americana, and the blues. Flemons is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music scholar, historian, actor, narrator, host, slam poet, record collector, podcaster, and the creator, host, and producer of the American Songster Radio Show on WSM in Nashville, TN. He is considered an expert player on the banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, fife and rhythm bones. He is the Co-Founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Founder of American Songster Productions.

Carson Colenbaugh is a writer from Kennesaw, Georgia. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, North American Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received support from Clemson University, Newman Wetlands Center, and the Tor House Foundation. He is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches creative writing and serves as the music editor at Nashville Review.