We’re continuing the Homegrown Plus series with a classic from a few years ago with our good friend Dom Flemons, who performs and records as The American Songster. As usual for this series, you’ll find a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. Back in 2020, Dom performed in the Homegrown at Home concert series, the pandemic-era version of Homegrown, in which artists submitted video concerts and we premiered them online. Dom Flemons, a Grammy award winner and two-time Emmy nominee, was by no means a stranger to AFC. I first met him when he came in to do research in the Archive in 2007, which means that for almost 20 years he’s been accessing and interpreting field recordings from our archive. Because of this, his repertoire includes many songs and tunes he learned from recordings of master musicians in the American Folklife Center archives. Appropriately, he was also the first artist featured in the Center’s inaugural Archive Challenge in 2015.
Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, Dom co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005, and won the Grammy award with them in 2010. He left the group to pursue a solo career in 2014. Today his repertoire of music covers more than 100 years of American folklore, ballads and tunes. Flemons is a music scholar, historian and record collector, as well as a multi-instrumentalist who plays banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones. Dom’s 2020 concert drew on his latest album at that time, “Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys.” That album, which he released in 2018 on Smithsonian Folkways, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. It’s part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. But as you’ll see, there are a few other songs in there as well. Dom also approached the concert as an Archive Challenge opportunity, so all the songs have a connection to the AFC archive. Watch the concert in the player below!
Of course, 2020 was an unusual year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, not only did we receive concerts as pre-recorded videos, we mostly recorded the accompanying interviews online, to avoid venturing into the same room. However, Dom and I only lived a couple of miles apart at that time, and we were able to come together safely at Tonal Park Studio in Takoma Park, where both of us record our music, so we did the interview in person, sitting over 6 feet apart as pandemic recommendations dictated. It served the double purpose of Dom’s Homegrown interview, and his Phillips Barry Lecture at the American Folklore Society’s virtual meeting that year. Sadly, like the Archive Challenge videos that year, these were caught up in the confusion of the pandemic and didn’t go online until earlier this year. But now it is online, and you can watch it in the player below.
Collection Connections and Links
If you enjoyed the concert and interview, check out the Collection Connections below.
Start by visiting Dom Flemons in his online home!
Below, you’ll find links to archival collections, guides, and other materials related to African American roots music and culture. But first, we’ll highlight some of the specific songs Dom performed in his concert.
Vera Ward Hall’s “Wild Ox Moan”
Vera Ward Hall was one of the singers first recorded by John A. Lomax and later visited by his son Alan. Hall was one of Alan Lomax’s favorite singers, and he based his book “The Rainbow Sign” on her, though he changed her name to “Nora” in the book to protect her privacy. Read more about her in an essay from the Association for Cultural Equity. Hall sang “Wild Ox Moan” for Alan Lomax in 1948 and again in 1959, performing several takes each time. Find all those recordings at this link.
Nathan Frazier and Frank Patterson’s “Poor Black Sheep”
As Dom mentions, this was collected in Nashville, Tennessee by John Wesley Work III, and Work’s recording is in the AFC archive. It was released years ago on a commercial compilation called “Altamont,” but is currently available on other releases dedicated to Work’s collections. Dom wrote a whole essay on this recording for Ecotone Magazine, which you can read here.
You can hear the field recording in this licensed YouTube video.
You can find out more about Work himself through this brief biography from AFC.
“Home on the Range”
Dom tells the story of John A. Lomax’s cylinder recording of “Home on the Range,” which he made over 20 years before joining the Library of Congress staff. In that case, the singer was a Black saloon owner in Texas who had ridden the Chisholm Trail as a camp cook. Sadly, by the time Lomax did come to the Library, most of his cylinders were gone. In those early days, most collectors treated their cylinders as an intermediate step toward a final product, which was a published transcription. As such, once the song was published in Lomax’s 1910 book “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,” the cylinder was neglected, and in Lomax’s words “crumbled into dust.”
You can hear two field recordings of the song in this Library of Congress essay on the song.
You can read more about John Lomax’s work with the song, including the firsthand testimony of one of the music transcribers who worked with Lomax, in Michael Corcoran’s essay.
Jess Morris and Charley Willis’s “Old Paint”
As Dom recounts, this song came to John Lomax from Jess Morris, who in turn said he learned it from an African American cowboy named Charley Willis, who worked for Morris’s father as a ranchhand and horsebreaker.
You can hear Jess Morris’s version of the song in our album “Cowboy songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas.”
You can read Morris’s account of learning the song from Willis in this liner note pdf.
Bonus Video: “Charming Betsy”
At the time of his interview, Dom also recorded two individual song videos for us. We shared one in this previous blog post about Archive Challenge videos. Below find the other one, “Charming Betsy.” Dom’s primary source for “Charming Betsy” was a commercial recording by Henry Thomas, but he also listened to several versions in the American Folklife Center archive, including this one by Mr. and Mrs. Stankewitz. Find Dom’s in the player below.
More links to Explore
Homegrown Plus Videos
- American Roots Music with Rev. Robert B. Jones, Sr.
- Jake Blount’s Afro-Futurist Roots Music
- Hubby Jenkins: Blues, Spirituals, and More
- Cora Harvey Armstrong and Her Gospel Family from Virginia
- Reggie Harris: Folksongs and Spirituals
- Northern Kentucky Brotherhood Singers: A Cappella Gospel and More
- Christylez Bacon’s Progressive Hip Hop
- The Chosen Few’s a Cappella Gospel from Virginia
Other Concert Videos
- Find all but one of Dom Flemons’s previous videos for AFC here
- Find one wayward video featuring Dom here
- Phil Wiggins: Harmonica Blues from Maryland
- Dance Battle with Urban Artistry
- The Sherman Holmes Project with Brooks Long and Phil Wiggins
- Phil Wiggins and Friends: Acoustic Blues and Dance from Maryland
- Opalanga Pugh — African American storytelling from Colorado with Askia Touré on voice and drum
- James “Super Chikan” Johnson & Richard Christman — Blues Guitar from Mississippi
- The Legendary Ingramettes: African American Gospel Music from Virginia
- The Singing and Praying Band: African American A Capella Sacred Music from Delaware and Maryland
- The McIntosh County Shouters — Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout from Georgia
- The Zionaires — Gospel Music from Maryland and Delaware
- Reverb, gospel/inspirational harmony group from Washington, DC.
Folklife Today Blogs Highlighting African American Culture
Folklife Today featured a blog about the African American Spiritual “Come by Here” or “Kumbaya.”
Folklife Today featured several blogs about the spiritual singers Becky Elzy and Alberta Bradford.
Find all our blogs highlighting African American history and culture at this link.
Online Collections Guide
African-American Banjo Music: Resources in the American Folklife Center
Folklife Today Podcasts
Folklife Today featured a podcast about the African American Spiritual “Come by Here” or “Kumbaya.”
Folklife Today featured a podcast about the spiritual singers Becky Elzy and Alberta Bradford.
Lectures
John Fenn wrote this blog post gathering most of our relevant lecture videos in 2018
Since then, we have featured several more relevant lectures, such as:
- Black Lives Matter and Music Panel
- Black Lives Matter and Music Discussion
- Dick Spottswood Mini-Symposium
- Jelly Roll Morton in Washington with John Szwed
- Folklore Today/Folklore Tomorrow: Expanding the Conversation with Marilyn White
Online Collections
Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals
Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings
African American Materials in the Alan Lomax Collection of Michigan and Wisconsin Recordings
Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project
African American materials in the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection
Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection
African American materials in the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection
Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections
African American materials in the Florida WPA Folklife Collections
Civil Rights History Project
Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories
Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting
African American materials in the Working in Paterson Collection
Lomax Digital Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity
Blues in the Lomax Digital Archive
Spirituals in the Lomax Digital Archive
Many Thanks
Thanks for watching and listening!