On this episode of our mini-series Sepia Tones, Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson welcome Dom Flemons, a renowned performer of American folk music and a founding member of The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Citing a variety of musical influences—including the legendary Howard Armstrong and the inimitable Elizabeth Cotten—Flemons shares his journey into becoming a tradition-bearer of old-time music and demonstrates the subtleties of rural black musical styles he’s learned along the way.
Dom Flemons is a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, a two-time Emmy nominee, and the creative force behind a number of solo works including, most recently, Black Cowboys and Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus. He is a multi-instrumentalist whose repertoire spans the history of American folklore, ballads, and tunes.
Dr. William Turner is a long-time African American studies scholar and retired Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies and Regional Ambassador from Berea College. He was also a research assistant to Roots author Alex Haley and co-editor of the groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia. In 2021, Turner received Western Carolina University's individual Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Southern Appalachian studies. His memoir called The Harlan Renaissance, available from West Virginia University Press, was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award at the 2022 Appalachian Studies Association Conference.
Dr. Ted Olson is a music historian and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of many books, articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories. Olson has produced and compiled a number of documentary albums of traditional Appalachian music including GSMA’s own On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing. His work has received a number of awards, including seven Grammy nominations. The East Tennessee Historical Society honored Olson with its Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021.
Music featured includes:
1. "John Henry" performed by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from GSMA’s album Big Bend Killing
2. “Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” and “Knox County Stomp,” both from Dom Flemons’ most recent album, Black Cowboys, from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
3. “Po’ Black Sheep” performed by Dom Flemons as part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
4. “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind” and "Cornbread and Butterbeans" both by The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson, from their collaborative album released by Music Maker Foundation
5. And a selection of music performed for our podcast by Dom Flemons
On this episode of our mini-series Sepia Tones, Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson welcome Dom Flemons, a renowned performer of American folk music and a founding member of The Carolina Chocolate Drops. Citing a variety of musical influences—including the legendary Howard Armstrong and the inimitable Elizabeth Cotten—Flemons shares his journey into becoming a tradition-bearer of old-time music and demonstrates the subtleties of rural black musical styles he’s learned along the way.
Dom Flemons is a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, a two-time Emmy nominee, and the creative force behind a number of solo works including, most recently, Black Cowboys and Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus. He is a multi-instrumentalist whose repertoire spans the history of American folklore, ballads, and tunes.
Dr. William Turner is a long-time African American studies scholar and retired Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies and Regional Ambassador from Berea College. He was also a research assistant to Roots author Alex Haley and co-editor of the groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia. In 2021, Turner received Western Carolina University's individual Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Southern Appalachian studies. His memoir called The Harlan Renaissance, available from West Virginia University Press, was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award at the 2022 Appalachian Studies Association Conference.
Dr. Ted Olson is a music historian and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of many books, articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories. Olson has produced and compiled a number of documentary albums of traditional Appalachian music including GSMA’s own On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing. His work has received a number of awards, including seven Grammy nominations. The East Tennessee Historical Society honored Olson with its Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021.
Music featured includes:
1. "John Henry" performed by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from GSMA’s album Big Bend Killing
2. “Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” and “Knox County Stomp,” both from Dom Flemons’ most recent album, Black Cowboys, from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
3. “Po’ Black Sheep” performed by Dom Flemons as part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
4. “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind” and "Cornbread and Butterbeans" both by The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson, from their collaborative album released by Music Maker Foundation
5. And a selection of music performed for our podcast by Dom Flemons
Sepia Tones, Episode #4
“Dom Flemons, The American Songster”
Hosts: Bill Turner, Ted Olson
Guest: Dom Flemons
[Guitar and banjo music and singing / "John Henry" by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from Big Bend Killing]
Dom Flemons
And so he stood there and he shook my hand, and he shook my hand for 10 minutes. And there was a symbolic gesture he made in shaking my hand. And he just held my hand. And it was really something to be able to see that my interest in the music could bring on a special moment even for the elders themselves.
Karen Key
Welcome to Smoky Mountain Air and our special mini-series Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music. I’m Karen Key, and in this episode, our mini-series co-hosts Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson will be speaking to Dom Flemons, a renowned performer of American folk music and a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Dom's most recent releases include his albums Black Cowboys and Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus.
This mini-series is funded through the African American Experiences in the Smokies project in collaboration with Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Dr. Olson began the interview with Dom and Dr. Turner, which took place on an online video chat.
[Guitar strumming, harmonica, fiddle, rhythm bones, vocals / "Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad" performed by Dom Flemons and others from the album Black Cowboys]
Ted Olson
Folks, welcome to Sepia Tones: Exploring Black Appalachian Music. I’m Ted Olson with my cohost Bill Turner.
We have had some incredible conversations thus far in this podcast series. And today we're in for such a treat because we have one of the great voices in American music, Dom Flemons, as our special guest.
[Music continues / "Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad" performed by Dom Flemons and others from the album Black Cowboys]
Ted Olson
Dom is a Grammy winner and a two-time Emmy nominee, and an all around talent, multi-instrumentalist, great singer, great interpreter of the American song bag. And so Dom, let's just start out by visiting that nickname that you've given yourself, the American Songster. We would love to know what that term means to you. How does it resonate for you?
Dom Flemons
The American Songster actually started out as an idea that I put together after having spent a lot of time studying early folk culture. And I found a book called Songsters and Saints, and it was written by a blues scholar named Paul Oliver many years ago. It was written in the mid-eighties. And as I was delving deeper into the history of country blues, I found this very special type of musician, the Songster, who played a variety of music that went outside of the bounds of just blues. It sometimes went into country music or ragtime, or even early jazz.
And I was drawn to these specific types of musicians. And this has included people like Papa Charlie Jackson, and Lead Belly, and Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas. And I just started to gravitate toward that music. And at first it was just an area of study, but then once I went out to the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in 2005, I found that there was a need for more African American a representation when it came to the performing arm of traditional music.
And so I was drawn to the music and I made my way out from Arizona to North Carolina to begin the Carolina Chocolate Drops. And I just found that there was such a need that first within the group, there was just a, a lot of power that we were able to harness with just the cultural message around African American string bands, as well as following, definitely in the work of Dr. Turner, the idea of African American Appalachian culture, which is something that was just underrepresented. And there were only a few books on the subject itself. For me personally, as I began to travel, I started to meet people and learn stories one-on-one. And I began to just start taking in all of these different ideas of the subtleties of American culture.
And so after about 10 years, I decided to really settle on the name, the American Songster, and really started to use it as a way to, one, allow me not to be pigeonholed as a musician, but two, to be able to reference an older part of history while still repurposing it for the 21st century.
[04:46]
[Banjo strumming, vocals / “Po’ Black Sheep” performed by Dom Flemons as part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture]
Ted Olson
Have you met Bill Turner, Dom?
Dom Flemons
Yeah…
Bill Turner
Good to see you, man!
Dom Flemons
Yeah, so good to see you as well. I’m glad we could all come together again.
Bill Turner
Thank you. I met you briefly at Berea with Loyal Jones when you were up there ten years–fifteen years ago, I’m not sure which. You were with the Chocolate Drops.
Dom Flemons
Of course!
Bill Turner
Take me back to the beginning—how you got onto this journey that brought you to be this storyteller-intellectual. I'd like to hear you tell our listeners Dom's journey.
Dom Flemons
[Laughs] Well, you know, I started out in Phoenix, Arizona. I was born there in 1982, and my musical inclination started back in grade school when I started playing drums. And that got me interested in rhythm and poly rhythm and later syncopation. You know, as I went into high school, I got into, to playing the marching bass drums, so I was in a full bass drum line for a while. So I kind of went through timpani and all sorts of, you know, the pit orchestra, and all of the different percussion instruments. And so, I guess when I was around a junior in high school, I found a documentary on the history of rock and roll that gave me something to think about.
You know, I started watching this documentary and it had Louie Jordan and Muddy Waters, and it had all of the, sort of the, the great pioneers of rock and roll. So that started me off. And then, from there, I began collecting records. This was a little bit before vinyl records had really had a resurgence, so I was going to all these old record shops just trying to piece together a story myself. And through that, I’d started playing the guitar and I started learning old folk songs. I started learning songs by people like Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix, or, you know, anything I could get my hands on in terms of records and music.
And over time I found that my love of reading turned into a full five-year journey into a BA in English. And so, my reading pursuits went from wanting to learn more about music into wanting to learn more about poetry. And that turned into literature studies that included Shakespeare and Chaucer. And also reading through all of the great poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson, E. E. Cummings, and the like, you know, that they take you through the whole curriculum. And as I moonlighted, I would go into the LP library of the University of—Northern Arizona University. And that's when I first became familiar with the Library of Congress recordings and a lot of the amazing reissues they had made in the sixties and the fifties of different folk songs.
So just on my own, I had this personal journey that was going on where I was learning songs, I was picking up gigs, and busking, and going to school. And then the Black Banjo Gathering was really the—found a pivotal event that made me decide to become a professional musician and actually really try to pursue music as something more than just a hobby I was doing.
Because before I was just passionate. But then when I found that I could help expand African American musical history, that was when I started to see that there was a purpose that was much broader that I could begin to pursue. And the Carolina Chocolate Drops happened to be the very first group I was able to put together where I could take that full energy and, and I was able to put it together in a collaborative way with everybody else.
Bill Turner
Oh, well we can tell why you're The American Songster, then.
[09:50]
[Fiddle playing, banjo, jug, percussion, vocals / “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind” performed by The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson]
Ted Olson
Well, I was going to pick up then from the banjo gathering in Boone and the creation of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Would you mind talking a little bit about the formation of that band and a little bit of the trajectory of the band, including where the name came from. Cause this, I think, might loop around important understanding about African American music in Appalachia.
Dom Flemons
Oh, absolutely. Well, when I went to the gathering, I actually wasn't a full performer there. I was actually someone that was, as a young performer and a young banjo player, I was brought to sort of take it in and kind of see, you know, what I could take away personally from having an experience with all of the different scholars as well as the African American players that were there.
I also met Rhiannon Giddens over there. Justin Robinson had made an appearance over there, but I didn't meet him at that particular time. Also, there was Joe Thompson—was there performing with Bob Carlin. Bela Fleck also made an appearance at the event as well. And this was maybe several months after he had come back from Africa. But it was just sort of a wellspring of new ideas around the banjo, because each person and each sort of click of banjo history, they all were coming together at this one event.
It was interesting to see all the different ways that people were approaching the banjo and that the idea of African American banjo playing was still such a new idea. The banjo history as a musical form had just—it just hadn't been addressed in any sort of substantial way.
And so, in the course of going to the gathering, everyone began to tell me about a movie called Louie Bluie. And I was hearing all about Howard Armstrong and how I had to catch this movie. And at that point I had started talking with Rhiannon Giddens about getting together to play some music.
And as I began to watch the movie Louie Bluie, the scene in the middle of the movie where he's playing the “Cacklin' Hen” with Billy Shivers from the Tennessee Ramblers—that particular scene. It moved me so much that I picked up the phone. I called Rhiannon at that moment. And I told her she had to watch this movie.
And so keeping that in mind, fast forward into the fall of 2005, I'm out in North Carolina. And to get out there, I just sold everything I owned because I had graduated from college a few months beforehand. And I just decided to move across the country, having never done so for the first time. And so I'm there in the fall.
I began to start playing with Joe Thompson, along with Rhiannon and Justin, and we start to begin to learn his repertoire. And we were trying to figure out what to name our group. And I showed the other two Louie Bluie. And when we got to that scene, it was almost like hands down everybody said that that was the greatest fiddling we'd ever seen.
And then we decided that we should probably call our group something in tribute to Howard Armstrong. And Carolina Chocolate Drops ended up being a perfect way to have the alliteration and the easy way for people to understand where we were coming from. Even though, of course, the term itself is a little bit iffy when you get into the deep history. At that time, we innocently said Carolina Chocolate Drops since it was North Carolina-based music, instead of Tennessee Chocolate Drops. And that led to the group being as it was.
[15:09]
[Banjo strumming, fiddle, rhythm bones, jug, vocals / "Cornbread and Butterbeans" performed by The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson]
Ted Olson
And just for anyone who's maybe needs the connection made explicit. The Tennessee Chocolate Drops was the name that Howard Armstrong and his brother and Carl Martin gave to their trio at 1929/1930 sessions that were made in Knoxville, Tennessee, by the Brunswick Vocallion labels. And those were historical Appalachian recording sessions. And we've talked about them during some of our Sepia Tones sessions and conversations with Sparky Rucker, and maybe perhaps in another occasion or two. Very important recordings of African American music in Appalachia. Of course, the star during the Knoxville sessions was Howard Armstrong along with arguably Leola Manning, the great blues singer. Not to leave anybody out, Carl Martin certainly was a well-respected musician, and there were others, of course, African American musicians who added their repertoire and their style and their sensibility to the recorded soundscape of what was being documented in Appalachia at that time and in that place.
And then, Dom, you did mention Carolina as being kind of a place in which some of your, music was situated and located. And, we had been talking before about the North Carolina Piedmont, and I know that's a part of the musical landscape that is very significant to you. And I would just very much enjoy hearing your take on the Piedmont tradition.
Dom Flemons
Well, my first experience with North Carolina music, it really started when I got deep into the recordings of the folk revival. I got into the recordings that had been made on Smithsonian Folkways. And I found a wonderful album called Freight Train and Other North Carolina Songs by Elizabeth Cotten.
And without any knowledge of a tradition or anything, I was so drawn to the sound of Elizabeth Cotten's music. I just fell in love with that record. And I wanted to figure out a way to learn how to play in that style. And so I first started trying to figure out a way to mimic it. Of course, this is a time before the internet was available for you to search anything out.
So I had to go to any song book that was available or find people in my local folk community at the coffee house who might be able to teach me something about “Freight Train” or one of those songs. And so that's where I started with. And I had heard that North Carolina was a great music hub. And as I began to study more old-timey music, I found that there were a lot of musicians that had come from North Carolina. And so I was naturally drawn to the state in general.
So once the gathering had happened, I just figured, it's all over—North Carolina for me. And so, from Flagstaff, I rode all the way from I-40, all the way down to Chapel Hill in just one swoop. And I started to search it out. I wanted to do my own sort of folkloric exploration.
I wanted to find out what the new folk revival was gonna look like. Who are the new people that were playing it. And then also I wanted to fill in some of the gaps on some of the musicians I had heard about, and I wanted to find out if there was information that had not been discovered before.
And so, when it came to North Carolina in specific, shortly after I moved out, I met a fellow by the name of Timothy Duffy, who I had heard about actually just a little bit before leaving Arizona. I had heard about his nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation. They had had a couple of copies of his CDs in the public library. And actually one of the musicians who inspired me to go to the gathering was one of the first CDs I heard from Music Maker Relief Foundation, and she had just a beautiful finger picking style that I also just fell in love with as well. So the chance to get to meet Algia Mae Hinton in person and hear her music, again, North Carolina was looking very, very attractive to me after going to that gathering.
And so, I started talking with Tim Duffy a little bit, and I began to tell him how I had loved his records. And I think I surprised more than he had surprised me when I told him that.
And, just as a side note, that's something I've always tried to do as well. If I know someone's work, I've always tried to make a point to let them know that they're appreciated, You know in folklore, it's few and far between sometimes.
And when I got to talking to Tim Duffy about it, I mentioned that I had heard the recordings of John Dee Holeman on the album Bull Durham Blues. And Tim, knowing that John Dee at that time had a little bit of extra free time on his hands, he called John Dee up, and John Dee just 20 minutes later drove down to Tim's house, and he wanted to come and meet me, just because he heard there was a young African American man who wanted to learn this old-time blues.
And so he stood there and he shook my hand, and he shook my hand for 10 minutes. And there was a symbolic gesture he made in shaking my hand and he just held my hand. And it was really something to be able to see that my interest in the music could bring on a special moment even for the elders themselves.
And so I then began to see that there was a conversation that could be had with new people coming in and being able to interplay within those stories. And so that was something that happened early on.
Cecilia Conway—the work that she and Bruce Bastian and Kip Lornell had done for the archives at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—I became aware that the Southern Folklife Collection housed a lot of their recordings. So then I began to study Carolina Piedmont music on a forensic level.
So there was first just listening to Elizabeth Cotten, Doc Watson, and some of the more popular pickers. But then I started learning about people like John Snipes. I also heard Sparky Rucker the very first time through the archives and then getting to meet him later was wonderful. But it came on just like a wave. And again, the more I began to delve into Piedmont music, I found, an intriguing and engaging story began to evolve as well, that included banjo music, as well as the evolution of banjo music into guitar music, and its own type of way. So I started to learn a little of all three of those styles.
[23:03]
Ted Olson
Just one quick follow-up question, then I'll turn it over to Bill, Dom. Did you ever consciously try to incorporate Black Appalachian tunes, songs, repertoire, styles into your repertoire? I mean, was there ever a conscious thought in your mind that we need to represent that region in addition to, say, the Piedmont tradition.
Dom Flemons
Oh, without a doubt. You know, it's interesting that starting out in English, in a literature setting that really set my barometer toward North Carolina, because of the literature, the ballad tradition, whether it be Anglo or African American. I found that the ballad tradition, and being able to composite songs and lyrics, was something of interest to me.
And so, I was already instantly drawn to those archives in the first place. And then of course hearing the songs like "Georgie Buck" or "Old Corn Liquor" or "Freight Train," I'd I always wanted to incorporate those, especially once I was in North Carolina, I found that I wanted to incorporate that type of music just altogether in my repertoire, because I just, I love the style.
And then as I begin to sit with more players, I started to feel more confident in being a tradition bearer for the style, because there was a little something extra I picked up along the way.
And I guess it was about, I don’t know, six or seven years down, down the line with it that I really felt like I was able to get that special flavor that especially a lot of the blues of the upper South has this special flavor. It's a little different than a lot of the blues from the Deep South, which tends to be very emotional. And it tends to be very raw in its own type of way. And I found that, especially in the Piedmont, there's a light sort of a rhythm and a dance sort of aesthetic that's connected with a lot of the Piedmont style of music. And I was always drawn to that. I also found the lyrics to be a lot catchier and actually very funny many times too, when you get the right songs being sung. And so, I was also drawn to that as well.
[25:18]
Bill Turner
Let me ask this, Dom—I've been making little marks here the way you do when you, oh, manage to stick your knife in a tree. And you’ve said the words 'learning,' ' studying' 15 times since we started. And, I saw a wonderful piece not long ago, maybe a year or so ago in The Tennesseean in Nashville. And you came in and you talked about the influence of African Americans on people like the Carter family. And that was around the time of the opening of the National African American Music Museum in Nashville.
So what is your take on, putting this all together, why is there still this kind of racial cut on Black Appalachian music? And you did a piece on the racialization of the banjo. Recently we saw at the Country Music Awards, five Black people were nominated; a Black woman was the host. Put all that together in terms of where you see this genre of music merging into the whole picture.
Dom Flemons
I think for the first time we're seeing a full merge into the more mainstream aspect of country music when it comes to—again, you know, when we think of Black music and we think of country music, we have African American performers, then we have rural Black folk tradition. And then we have country music as a commercial art form. So we're seeing all of these things sort of blend together in one type of way.
When I did the playlist for the National Museum over in Nashville, I wanted to approach it in a way that focused on three umbrellas. The first umbrella was taking rural Black musical forms that have informed country music and making that its own island. Because I found, especially in my research of early 1920s and thirties music, there's a lot music that I think now in the 21st century, we would consider Black country music, but it was never marketed nor was it ever advertised as Black country music in its day. And I think that there's just a wealth of music that’s just has never been categorized as Black country that I think could you know, perfectly suffice as Black country by our definitions now.
So there's that part of it. And, that includes non-commercial recordings and commercial recordings. Cause that starts breaking down into its own—you know, Ted could talk a lot about how, with the Knoxville sessions and all of those different recording for the major labels they, based on strict segregation, which was a part of the United States at that time. They segregated the marketing and the musicianship out in a way that may not display the cultural ties that people have one-to-one. So that's one big part of, of the story that I wanted to tell.
The second part was African American performers doing country music, whether it be interpretations within their own style. And I kind of brought a song like “Nightlife” by B B. King, which ended up becoming a very signature song for him. It was written by Willie Nelson, and it's a cover. But at the same time, B. B. King's version is so different from Willie Nelson's version that it is almost its own creative endeavor—just to be able to show that that's a part of it.
I also as a more modern cover, as well as thinking of someone like Whitney Houston doing “I Will Always Love You,” which is a cover of a Dolly Parton number. Now, taking that as an idea of broadly as Black country, they're just—that's a whole umbrella in of itself for African American performers doing country-type material, whether written as country music or they're, you know, they're doing more like something like Ray Charles or Solomon Burke, where they're adding a flavor of a non-country genre into their—into the country material, which makes its own, again, it makes its own sort of a new type of country song.
And then of course there's the third type, which, you know, we think about people like Charlie Pride, who we just lost recently, or Linda Martell, where they're singing more of a conventional Country and Western style, but they happen to be African American at the same time.
And I think that we're now in the fourth umbrella where, many of these performers, they aren’t facing exactly the same situations that people like Charlie Pride or Linda Martell faced, where there was straight racial prejudice against their performing Country and Western music. But at the same time, there are still plenty of biases that are within the entire spectrum to where I still think, you know, even to this day, I think we're also having a computer problem. I think even computers can't compute Black and country and they just—it can't compute like it's supposed to. Cause even the computer is so set in a certain way that country music should sound or be that it can't compute. And I think we're having our own sort of communication breakdown in the modern era with this specifically.
And I think that that's why people are making such a big, large emphasis on African American participation, you know. For me personally, since I've always played the old-time music, I found that that was an entry point that allowed me to be able to perform on the Grand Ole Opry and to be involved with country music with little to no backlash in a certain type of way. But it's because it's playing to the historical aspect of country music, and then having the stories I've picked up over time, I'm always more than happy to tell that there's a more diverse background to the music than people may have given a credit in the first place.
[31:18]
[Fiddle and guitar music / "Knox County Stomp" performed by Dom Flemons and others from the album Black Cowboys]
Bill Turner
Hey, Dom, let me ask you something, man, and I hope you don't mind me asking you this. You’re called, in various ways, this multi-instrumentalist, but I'm sure people listening also hear the voice of an intellectual, an academic, a scholar of this music. Which do you do when you play?
Are you playing both your knowledge of all this music as well as your skill to perform this music, if that makes sense as a question?
Dom Flemons
Oh, yeah. So when it comes to the performances and the concerts, I tend to leave a lot of the academics to the side. I'll tell a story to frame a song, but I tend to like to arrange my songs to tell a lot of the stories I've picked up over time, because I can't assume that people are going to want to hear everything I picked up in my travels and the books that I've read.
But when people listen to my music, I try to put small subtleties for the people who know the sounds that connect all of this music. And then the people who may not be familiar at the same time, because I found that just, right from the beginning, I found that there had to be a balance. It had to be a balance between too much academic and not enough academic and making sure that the stories land in the right way, and trying to figure out the ways to keep the audience engaged. Because also the audience, they—if it was made too easy for the audience, then they wouldn't dig deeper.
So I also try to make sure that they dig a little bit, you know. I at least try to give them the means to dig a little deeper because, of course, as we've seen over time, these are stories that still need to be told and they still need to be reassessed. I find that even with all the study that I've been able to do and reading up, I find that there's still more tales to tell, you know.
Bill Turner
So I can imagine you're quite a teacher for people when you are “The American Songster,” but you're in Toronto, you're in Cuba, or wherever, where people don't know that much about the specificity of the African American experience in Appalachia. I can imagine you make them know it very well. and I'm just amazed with the way you can do that.
[34:47]
Dom Flemons
Oh, thank you so much. It took a while to be able to get the actual show to coalesce into something that was comprehensive and a nice overview. That's always been the goal for me.
Ted Olson
Dom, we don't mean to put you on the spot, but, we are truly all ears if you feel comfortable playing anything that you would care to share with us related to what we've talked about or some other reportorial piece that you'd like to share with our audience in our celebration of Black Appalachian music.
Dom Flemons
Oh, sure thing. Well, I brought a few different instruments here, and I can give you a small breakdown of a few different styles. I'll play you a little bit of this [strums guitar]. This is a version of “John Henry.” Now I have the guitar in an open tuning, and one of the things that C. C. Conway and Bruce Bastin, they began to meet people like Joe Thompson, because they were starting to delve into Carolina Piedmont guitar playing.
And so they started to try to find the roots of people like Blind Boy Fuller. And I'll speak about Fuller just a little bit later. But they found that many of the guitar players, they had forebears that played fiddle and banjo music. And a lot of them played in an open tuning called “K. C. tuning,” which is known as Vestapol tuning, open D tuning to the modern guitar players. And they started with a version of “John Henry” that sounded like this.
[Dom playing “John Henry” in open D tuning on guitar]
Bill Turner
That's it. Yeah.
Dom Flemons
And so that's a little bit of the K. C. tuning. And so there are a lot of different songs that sort of fit within that idea. But I'll pull out the gourd banjo too, just to kind of give you a little bit of the comparison. [strums banjo]. So this is how it sounds on the banjo played almost the exact same way, but played in the claw hammer style.
[Dom playing “John Henry” on gourd banjo]
[Bill Turner laughs.]
And so a lot of the guitar players started “John Henry” like that, where they just translated the banjo right over to the guitar as guitars became more available. And later on, they began to develop guitar numbers that were in standard tuning. So I mentioned a fellow by the name of John Dee Holeman, and John Dee was really interesting in a way that, his style of music—he first started playing the style of Blind Boy Fuller. And so he played songs like this here. This is one, “Rag Mama.”
[Dom playing “Rag Mama” on guitar]
And over time, John Dee started to get into more of the popular blues music that was coming up during his time. So, for the people that were listening to Blind Boy Fuller—he learned from some of the folks that had heard Blind Boy early on. And then he started to apply some of the,
I guess more of the R&B styles and the boogie woogie. And so this is another one I learned from him, the "Chapel Hill Boogie." And so he took the Piedmont style and did this with it.
[Dom playing and singing “Chapel Hill Boogie” on guitar]
[Bill Turner laughs.]
[40:47]
Bill Turner
All right, my brother, all right.
Ted Olson
Nice.
Bill Turner
That's fantastic.
Dom Flemons
And one other style, just to show one other bit that I picked up, I met another fellow by the name of Boo Hanks through the Music Maker Relief Foundation. And so, Boo, he had never recorded commercially until 2007 when I first met him. And when he picked up Blind Boy Fuller, he did sort of a different type of bass run, which I felt was a little more syncopated, but it sounded something like this here.
[Dom playing and singing “Truckin’ My Blues Away” on guitar]
Bill Turner
[laughs] Fantastic.
Dom Flemons
And when I started to play all these different styles slowly and steadily, there started to be subtleties that grew with it, you know. And just after having played all those, now I'll pull it back to the beginning for a little bit and play a little bit of Elizabeth Cotten, just singing here a little bit of the difference there. Because her style, as well as Etta Baker—these two women had styles that were a parlor style of Piedmont blues. And so they tended to have a little bit more of a relaxed feel to them. And so, it's almost in its own way like its own type of chamber music, like folk chamber music.
[Dom playing "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotten on guitar]
And as I began to travel, it began to be clear to me that each individual region of the state had its own particular style of picking. And then over time, you know, I started to find just little subtleties and being able to play them. And so, in a way, I was able to follow in another one of my mentors, Mike Seeger, who focused on styles and the old-time styles, as well as the history to present all of the different aspects of folk music.
Ted Olson
Bill, you have anything you want to add?
Bill Turner
Yes, I guess it's a big jump, but I must do it, because my grandson asked me to present this question to you. And that is: Billy Ray Cyrus and Lil Nas, "Old Town Road." He's 14—he's going, "Papa, what's the connection here, man, between this country music and hip hop?" What do you think, Dom?
[44:33]
Dom Flemons
Well, in the liner notes to Black Cowboys, I alluded to it on a couple of the acapella numbers, particularly a version of the song "The Old Chisholm Trail" that I picked up from the Library of Congress. And, you know, when you hear the song, "The Old Chisholm Trail" sung usually, you know, it's kind of sung like…
[Dom playing and singing "Old Chisholm Trail"]
And when I heard the field recording of a penitentiary inmate by the name of Moses Clear Rock Platt, who recorded for the Lomax in the thirties, he's sang…
[Dom singing "Old Chisholm Trail" in a different style]
And when I heard that, there was a difference, and it told me why Black Cowboys is an idea audio-wise. But then also I began to see that there was a connection between hip hop, in a certain way, with the older music that proceeded the blues. Over the years, I've found quite a few songs that sort of, again, they touch, they tiptoe right next to each other. They run right parallel with each other. And that's been a part of my studying as well as has been to bring together old-time recordings that have this particular flavor to be able to present it.
So I've done a little bit of it on my album Prospect Hill I had several songs that were built on beats.
And so I wanted to take that idea of what I call organic beats. Cause one of the things that drives me crazy about a lot of hip hop is that everything is computerized beats. And as a drummer, I just—organic beets are the only things that make me tap my toe, you know. Someone actually hitting a rhythm makes me tap my toe.
And so I made several tracks in Prospect Hill to sort of delve into this idea for the very first time. And so also having started out on the bass drum, the Mississippi fife and drum tradition has always been of interest to me just to hear drums and to hear fifes working together. That reaches back into my own marching band days when I was doing that.
And with “Old Town Road,” it was sort of the most interesting story. I released Black Cowboys, and then I got the nomination for the Grammy. And basically the week after the Grammys had happened in 2019, that's when I started to see some stuff come up about the song “Old Town Road,” and of course I kept an eye on it. And then it started to grow. And as it grew, I began to start getting calls for people, asking for me to provide context for the song itself. And so I began to tell them a little more about the history of Black country music. Cause it, of course I found it was a groundbreaking event that would finally present a benchmark for people to see what has come before, to see what is going to come next.
And so I, I took that opportunity to start interviewing and start telling people about the benchmark up to this particular song. And that was sort of how I took it. You didn't know what, it's a nice little country-novelty number, you know, that got the kids going. But it was very different from what I wanted to do with Black Cowboys. I wanted to keep it straight to the folk cowboy, the historical Black history around Western people, because it was—I knew it would be really easy to just put a cowboy hat on and Black Cowboys can be sold that way, very easily. And so I saw that “Old Town Road”—that's sold like hotcakes appear apparently, to be able to present, you know, just Black Cowboys, you know, as people might want to see them.
You know, my father was my first introduction to loving country music. He was always listening to Country and Western. Having grown up in Flagstaff, he loved Buck Owens and Hank Williams and was a big listener of country music at that time. And my grandmother loved Minnie Pearl and stuff.
So they were a part of that, the generation that had country music as a part of their life. And that ended up for me being a part of the story too, was just, you know, continuing to tell people, you know, Black people like country music too. It's at the store. [laughs]
Bill Turner
Yeah. You know, my father and my grandparents all grew up, one born in 1894 in far Southwest Virginia, down in Lee County, Virginia—Pennington Gap. And I don't know why people get all cooked up about this historical overlap, you know, in music, in terms of sound, the way it sounds—country music.
My father loved Tennessee Ernie Ford. He loved country music. I told somebody that recently, my father grew up in Southwest Virginia, had a dialect that was our Appalachian equivalent of the Gullah language. My father had his own way of talking, which was—you know, he would say “nite” and “rite” and “fite,” and that's the way he grew up listening to…
And so this overlap between sound and culture and politics—I'm just so honored to be able to spend this much time talking to you about this, because you know it rhyme and rhythm, as well as the people and the places and the events and the milestones. And I honor you for that, sir.
[50:37]
Dom Flemons
Oh, well, thank you so much—and, Dr. Turner, your works… you know, I had some notion beforehand. But when I finally started to travel around, I found that I was, just, I was just illuminated by being able to be able to present music—and also to be able to present some of the scholarship that, I think, it's become more and more relevant now. I've also tried to make it clear to a lot of people that so much information is available that, you know, a lot of my work is trying to just bring it together—take those disparate pieces and put it into one place. You know how that can go, you know. Just bringing all the—bringing all the different breadcrumbs that have been left behind and really pulling together in a tangible form for people, you know?
It's just been a great pleasure and honor to be able to do that. And again, like I tell people, to feed the music that's fed me for so long. I find joy and pleasure in what the music's brought me culturally, as well as musically. And, to be able to do anything I can to advocate is a great thing.
And that’s ultimately why I ended up started taking on the name of “The American Songster,” just to let people know that there was—I was going for a higher purpose than just my own personal music, but something that could work for others in the end.
Bill Turner
Right.
Ted Olson
Dom, with respect for our time commitment, perhaps we should wind down and offer you the opportunity to close with some thoughts and/or a tune or a song, maybe something to kind of say goodbye to the audience, you know, through.
Dom Flemons
Oh, okay. Well, I'll pull it back to our North Carolina Piedmont style, and I'll do a little bit of one of the great pieces from the Piedmont repertoire, "Railroad Bill," as it was performed by one of its great arbiters Etta Baker. And working with Music Maker Relief Foundation I never got to meet Etta Baker. I actually missed her by just a couple of weeks. I was planning to go visit her before she passed away, but she always left an impression on my music, and I've always tried to get the subtleties of her playing. So here's a little bit of "Railroad Bill."
[Dom playing "Railroad Bill" on guitar]
[54:41]
[Guitar and banjo music and singing / "John Henry" by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from Big Bend Killing.]
Karen Key
Thank you to our guest hosts Dr. William Turner and Dr. Ted Olson.
Dr. William Turner is a long-time African American studies scholar and retired Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies and Regional Ambassador from Berea College. He was also a research assistant to Roots author Alex Haley and co-editor of the groundbreaking Blacks in Appalachia. In 2021, Turner received Western Carolina University's individual Mountain Heritage Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to Southern Appalachian studies. His memoir called The Harlan Renaissance, available from West Virginia University Press, was awarded the prestigious Weatherford Award at the 2022 Appalachian Studies Association Conference.
Dr. Ted Olson is a music historian and professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of many books, articles, reviews, encyclopedia entries, and oral histories. Olson has produced and compiled a number of documentary albums of traditional Appalachian music including GSMA’s own On Top of Old Smoky and Big Bend Killing. His work has received a number of awards, including seven Grammy nominations. The East Tennessee Historical Society honored Olson with its Ramsey Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2021.
[Guitar strumming, harmonica, fiddle, rhythm bones, vocals / "Going Down the Road Feelin' Bad" performed by Dom Flemons and others from the album Black Cowboys]
Valerie Polk
Special thanks also to guest Dom Flemons. Flemons is a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops and the creative force behind a number of solo works including, most recently, Black Cowboys and Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus.
Music featured in this episode includes: "John Henry" performed by Amythyst Kiah and Roy Andrade from GSMA’s album Big Bend Killing;
“Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” and “Knox County Stomp,” both from Dom Flemons’ most recent album, Black Cowboys, from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings;
“Po’ Black Sheep” performed by Dom Flemons as part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Courtesy of the Library of Congress;
And also “Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind” and "Cornbread and Butterbeans" by The Carolina Chocolate Drops and Joe Thompson, from their collaborative album released by Music Maker Foundation;
And special thanks to Dom Flemons for performing some of the musical styles that have influenced his music and career
[Old-time guitar music from Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music and bird song]
Karen Key
Our theme music is from Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music, GSMA’s Grammy-nominated music collection. Bird recordings by Mark Dunaway.
Thanks for listening!
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Great Smoky Mountains Association is an educational, non-profit partner of the National Park Service. We support the perpetual preservation of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by promoting greater public interest and appreciation through education, interpretation, and research. Learn more about our work and the benefits of membership by visiting our website at SmokiesInformation.org.