{"id":141176,"date":"2023-09-03T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-03T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/?p=141176"},"modified":"2023-09-03T14:51:11","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T21:51:11","slug":"dom-flemons-the-american-songster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acousticguitar.com\/dom-flemons-the-american-songster\/","title":{"rendered":"Dom Flemons Brings a Deep Knowledge of Roots Music to His Work as the American Songster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometime in late 19th century, a colorful type of musician emerged in the southern United States\u2014a songster who would wander around singing a broad range of repertoire, from ballads to folk songs to dance numbers. At first joined by separate musicians playing banjo and fiddle, and later using guitar to provide self-accompaniment, the songster was a precursor to the prototypical blues musician and by extension so much of American popular music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than a hundred years later, Dom Flemons, aka the American Songster, recasts the tradition by putting his mark on tunes collected from a century of roots music\u2014from field hollers to folk and country songs\u2014playing not just the customary guitar, banjo, and harmonica but other more traditional instruments like fife, quills, and rhythm bones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last couple of decades, Flemons has assembled his repertoire through scouring record bins for historic and rare finds, learning from old recordings, and connecting the dots. He has become a music scholar and historian in large part through poring over the liner notes in his music collection, currently around 5,000 records broken down into scores of categories, and he now shares selections on his monthly show The American Songster Radio<\/em>. At the same time, Flemons has built on the fingerstyle guitar approaches that he learned firsthand from blues masters like Algia Mae Hinton<\/a> in the mid-2000s, when he was in his 20s and beginning his music career in earnest in North Carolina. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While in that state, Flemons co-created the Carolina Chocolate Drops with fellow multi-instrumentalists Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson, doing much to hip new mainstream audiences to old-time string band music. In 2010, the group won a Grammy award for Best Traditional Folk Album for its album Genuine Negro Jig<\/a>. <\/em>Flemons has experienced similar success with his unique surveys of old-time music as a solo artist, beginning with his 2007 debut, Dance Tunes, Ballads and Blues<\/a><\/em>. More recently, his 2018 album, Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys<\/a><\/em>, explored the role of African-American musicians in the development of country music and earned him a Grammy nomination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On his latest album, Traveling Wildfire<\/a> <\/em>(Smithsonian Folkways), Flemons, now 40 and based in Chicago, examines the Black experience in country music on his own song \u201cSlow Dance With You.\u201d He also explores a wide range of other territory, from a cover of the unreleased Bob Dylan song \u201cGuess I\u2019m Doing Fine\u201d to the original instrumental \u201cRabbit Foot Rag,\u201d a spirited number based in the ragtime tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I talked to Flemons about his journey to becoming the American Songster, how he found his voice in assembling his expansive repertoire of old and new songs, and what makes the ideal acoustic guitar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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