Multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Dom Flemons joins KGNU’s Pete Miesel in the studio. Flemons discusses his KGNU Presents performance “The Bronze Buckaroo Film and Songster Show”. He also talks about the process of making his most recent album, Black Cowboys, and the deep and vast history of African American music in the early 20th century (Interview date: 11/10/2024).
Pete Miesel: Folks, it is my absolute honor and privilege to welcome to the studio Mr. Dom Flemons. How are you, sir?
Dom Flemons: Oh, I’m doing great.
Pete Miesel: I played Pokey because there’s a video of you on YouTube with you and him doing “Mama Don’t Allow No Music”.
Dom Flemons: Oh, yeah, that was back at the Bijou Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee when we were doing the Central Time Tour back in 2014.
Pete Miesel: I love that video. It’s like you have a Cajun band, a jazz band, a blues band, and I’m like, oh my god, this is Roots and Branches in a three and a half minute video. It is just a thrill. You’ve been in Boulder about a week doing some events?
Dom Flemons: Yeah, a little more than the weekend. I was over in Fort Collins on Friday, then I played at the Banjo Fest in Denver yesterday, and now I’m here in Boulder tonight for Chautauqua Community House.
Pete Miesel: As we’ve been saying, tonight, 8 o’clock at the Chautauqua Community House, Dom Flemons. The American Songster is going to be presenting the Bronze Buckaroo film and songster show. I’ve read up on this, so I know what’s going on. Tell me about the Bronze Buckaroo.
Dom Flemons: The Bronze Buckaroo is a classic film from 1939, and it starred a fellow by the name of Herb Jeffries who was a jazz singer who worked with Duke Ellington. One of the things he did at one point, at least the story goes, he was getting ready to come out of a show, and he saw a bunch of boys in Harlem playing Cowboys and Indians. There was a White boy and a Black boy. The White boys that were playing were actually making fun of the Black boy and telling him that he couldn’t be one of the cowboys because they didn’t have Black cowboys. And being hip to the history of Black cowboys in the West, Herb Jeffries wanted to correct that sort of misunderstanding of Western history. How he wanted to go about it was, he had seen how popular Gene Autry’s films had become. This is back when theaters were segregated. So he wanted to make his own Black theater version of Gene Autry singing “Cowboy Western”. The Bronze Buckaroo was the character. He did about three of those films.
Pete Miesel: And you’re gonna be presenting the film, or at least an edited version of the film?
Dom Flemons: Yeah. My wife and I got a brand new copy of the film from the National Museum of African American History and Culture over in Washington DC. We’ve edited the film so that it’s a truncated version. We’ve taken the soundtrack out, and what I’m doing is playing songs from my album Black Cowboys as the live score to the film.
Pete Miesel: Oh my gosh, that is such a good record. That came out what, 2018?
Dom Flemons: Yeah, that’s right.
Pete Miesel: What was the impetus behind that record? That seemed to swerve from what you were normally known for with the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Dom Flemons: You know, even when I was in the Chocolate Drops, I had been wanting to do a Black cowboys album. I guess it was around 2010, I found a book called “The Negro Cowboys”. It was a book that was put out in the mid 1960s, and it mentioned that one in four cowboys who helped settle the West were Black cowboys. That really opened up my eyes, being from Phoenix, Arizona.
Having not heard about it myself, I decided to start researching other books to see if anybody had written about Black cowboys at all. All of a sudden I was swimming in books on the subject. I thought to myself that there needs to be some sort of musical representation of this deep history – a history that was a broad American history. But as I went into it, I started to realize that there were connections to my own family story of migration, especially on my father’s side. His parents came out from East Texas and Arkansas over to Flagstaff, Arizona.
So there was a migration story within my family and all this history mixed and blended together with it. I decided to make Black Cowboys a part of Smithsonian Folkways. And again, I mentioned the National Museum in DC. I knew that Folkways had a partnership with them, a series called the African American Legacy Series. I made sure that Black Cowboys was a part of that, so it could be completely embedded within American culture. Because the cowboy is such a quintessential part of American life and American culture, both in the very real literal sense and also in the fantasy sense: the Hollywood cowboys. The archetype of the cowboy is just something that’s always been a part of American culture. So I wanted to try to breathe life into that somehow.
Pete Miesel: I watched a little bit of the movie when I was prepping for this and I was like, man, the music’s really good in this. The thing that struck me about your Black Cowboys album was, it wasn’t an academic exercise. It was a legitimately fun album to listen to. It sounded like you must have had a blast putting it together.
Dom Flemons: Oh gosh, it was great. That’s the thing with all of my albums. I always try to think realistically. No matter how educational anything I’m putting out might be, it has to be great to listen to, and has to be fun for the ears. It has to be an aesthetically pleasing experience, because you can’t really get this history out there to the broader public unless people can really wrap their minds around it and love what they’re hearing first. That was something I wanted to do there. I mean, I could go into the full breakdown of it. There were stories that were connected to Black cowboys directly, like Home on the Range and Goodbye Old Paint. There were African American folk songs and Black blues guitar songsters that were connected to the story, like Lead Belly and Vera Ward Hall, who did the song “Black Woman”.
Pete Miesel: I actually played Taj Mahal’s cover of “Wild Ox Moan” to start the show. And I was like, whoa, this is on Dom’s album. I never made the connection. I’ve had that album for years and it didn’t quite register with me that it was the same song.
Dom Flemons: Yeah, and as I made the album, I did the deepest dive I could to find who has done this material, who has pushed this narrative forward. So the album, Black Cowboys, spans everything that was available at that time up to that present moment. The end when I cut it off was when the remake of The Magnificent Seven when Denzel Washington had come out. So I took all the different cowboy history that was available at that time up to that point, basically. I had a nice talk with Taj Mahal about it. He told me his own interesting story about growing up and reading a comic strip in the Pittsburgh Courier as a kid about a hero known as The Chisholm Kid, who was the first Black cowboy hero to ever appear in print. That’s another story to go down.
Pete Miesel: Yeah. I’m gonna throw you a fanboy compliment. So much of your music to me, when I’m listening to records, reminds me of the classic Taj Mahal records.
Dom Flemons: Oh, I appreciate that.
Pete Miesel: It’s really quite striking, the pool both of you swim in.
Dom Flemons: He’s always been an inspiration and has always been a great supporter of my music over the years. And I just saw him recently at a 30th anniversary concert for a non profit that we both work with, Music Maker Foundation. It was great to sit down and play some bones with him. We did a banjo and bones number together, which was really fun. But yeah, recycling the blues and other related stuff. That’s my jam right there with Taj.
Pete Miesel: So one of the things you’re gonna do at the show tonight is you’re gonna show the film and you’re gonna perform some songs. Would you like to perform one of the songs you might use tonight?
Dom Flemons: Yeah, I could do that. Now, just to show how pervasive some of this Western material can be, this is a little Reverend Gary Davis song. This is a piece called “Saddle It Around”. I heard this one on a recording that came out called At Home and Church. It was put out by Stefan Grossman. When I wanted to learn this, I called Stefan up. I’ve known him for many years. Stefan sent me a second recording of this song. that had an alternate set of lyrics. So I took the lyrics I had heard and the ones that I had gotten from Stefan and made this version of the song “Saddle It Around”. It’s about a cowboy who travels down the road and gets arrested for no reason at all.
Dom Flemons plays “Saddle It Around”.
Pete Miesel: Mr. Dom Flemons. Oh my gosh, that was so good. Gary Davis is getting, not resuscitated, but there’s some new collections coming from old recordings of him. Stefan Grossman’s done such a great job with his legacy.
Dom Flemons: Absolutely. He’s just one of those guys, like some of the other greats: people like Louis Armstrong. I was just hanging out with Tony Trischka or someone like Earl Scruggs, where it’s their vocabulary of music and innovation. It’s just endless in a certain type of way. When a new recording comes out, sometimes you can even find brand new musical information that goes beyond what we know. Or we feel like we know everything they’ve ever done, then all of a sudden something new comes out.
Pete Miesel: This actually dovetails into what I was gonna ask you. A couple weeks ago, I did a program. It was one of our fundraising things, about music that knocked you flat so hard that you wanted to play the record again. It’s like that scene in Ghost World when Thora Birch keeps playing Skip James over and over, if you’ve seen that movie. All the years you’ve been doing this, do you still find records that you’re researching where you go, Oh my God, what is this?
Dom Flemons: Gosh, all the time. Let me think of something that I’ve been meditating on recently. I was over at Down Home Music in Berkeley recently, the home of the Strachwitz’s place. Home of Arhoolie Records for a long time. And I found two records that I’ve loved for years, but I got a new appreciation. I found a new copy of Altamont, which is an album on Black string band music. It was one of the first ones that I got a recommendation for when I wanted to research more about Black string band music.
The recordings of Nathan Fraser and Frank Patterson, which are on one side of the record, and then the recordings on the other side of the record of Gribble, Lusk, and York, which are three wonderful musicians. Now there’s a lot of information about them out there. Those two string bands are powerful. It’s just wonderful to hear them back again.
Pete Miesel: People sometimes have a tendency to confuse the string band tradition with the blues tradition. You made a comment, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth. It might have been an NPR interview a couple years ago where you said that people assume too much of blues being the cornerstone, that Black music’s a lot more diverse at the turn of the century.
Dom Flemons: Oh, absolutely. The blues is a phenomenon that grew out of the turn of the century going into the first World War, and then it really flourished into its own in the 1920s. But before that, there was a variety of African American folk song styles that were a part of the community. That included the reels or the string band music, the square dance music, that part of it. There were the work songs. There were the old time spiritual numbers, and then there were also interesting types of folk songs like Hambone, things like that where you’re slapping a rhythm on your body and you’re doing these little rhymes. They’re almost like an early version of rap in a type of way.
There’s different types of folk songs that are all a piece of this big tapestry and blues is just one part of it. But blues really became so popular after a certain point that it has overshadowed a lot of the other parts of early Black folk music. Of course, the blues was picked up by jazz and soul music and funk.
Pete Miesel: And country.
Dom Flemons: Yeah. And country music of course has a good portion of blues that’s within its big mainframe. So all of those types of music have always pointed toward the blues. Especially retrospectively, just to be able to point people to a much broader tradition, like a song like “Saddle It Around”. One of the things that’s so distinctive about it is a very different sounding picking pattern than most Gary Davis numbers.
Pete Miesel: I was about to say that. I was watching your hands and I’m like, I think I know a lot of Gary’s music, but I don’t remember this kind of touch.
Dom Flemons: Yes, exactly. That was what drew me to the song. I asked Stefan about that specifically. He told me a very interesting story. He told me about how he took Gary down to the Gaslight Cafe in New York City the very first time Mississippi John Hurt played there. Afterward, Stefan was asking Gary about what he thought of John’s playing.
It was funny, he said one of the typical answers that Gary says. “He needs to get some lessons from me”, that was the first thing he said. But he also mentioned one of the songs, “The Spike Driver Blues”. When Stefan had asked him about that song, Gary said, “Oh yeah, that’s how the old folks used to play it. I got a song that’s like that”. And he started to play “Saddle It Around”, which was a song he said he had learned back in South Carolina as a young boy.
Pete Miesel: The Piedmont style, right?
Dom Flemons: Yeah. It was an interesting moment where the influence of hearing Mississippi John Hurt opened a memory in Gary Davis for him to play this particular song. There are similarities in the picking pattern for that particular song.
Pete Miesel: I’ve heard Doc Watson do that song.
Dom Flemons: “The Spike Driver Blues”. He has a great version of it.
Pete Miesel: Doc was a phenomenal guitarist. You think you know somebody’s music, and then you listen to a different version like, whoa, I’d never heard this flourish in him. I have this Doc box sitting in my crate there, recorded in San Francisco in 1974. His playing was almost aggressive, which is not what you think about when you think about Doc Watson. Would you like to play another song?
Dom Flemons: Oh, sure. Yeah, let me see.
Pete Miesel: You guys can’t tell, I’m absolutely geeking out watching this.
Dom Flemons: I’ll do another one that I’ll do tonight. This is a little instrumental number I like to pick. I’ve messed with this one for a long time, but I ended up finally recording it on my album, Traveling Wildfire, and this is one called “The Rabbit Foot Rag”.
Dom Flemons plays “The Rabbit Foot Rag”.
Pete Miesel: Oh, that was stellar. That was really good. Dom Flemons, I’m gonna keep you a little bit longer, but I want to make sure I mention the show. It is tonight, 8 o’clock at the Chautauqua Community House. The Bronze Buckaroo Film and Songster Show. If you love this type of music, and I know listeners to Roots and Branches, you guys love this music.
So much of the kind of music you do with your solo records and the Carolina Chocolate Drop Albums inform so much of what we play on this program. We have about five different DJs who rotate and we all have slightly different tastes, but there’s just that great unabashed American sound that I hear in your records and similar artists that sort of informs what we do. This is just a thrill having you here.
When you pick a project – I know that you put a lot of work into the Black Cowboys record. Does it just occur to you or is it something you really, as you said, meditate over?
Dom Flemons: It’s a combination. I’m always searching for new things. The search for new material is always out there, and I’m always looking for new recordings and new ideas and things to write and everything like that, so that stays constant.
But when it comes to actually trying to coalesce it into a project or an album, that’s when I start to meditate on the idea of what different facets of the music am I trying to present? I play a lot of instruments, so a lot of times I have to consider what instruments I’m pulling out.
Other times when it comes to material, I have to think about what type of material should I put out there? Sad material, fast material, slow material, bluesier material, less bluesy material, and things like that. So I think of the abstracts often when it comes to, conceptually, where does the album need to go?
And then I just start to fill in the spaces with material that I’ve picked up along the way. Whether it’s a song that I’ve had in my repertoire for a while, or if it’s something that’s a little bit newer. When I did Traveling Wildfire, my most recent album, there was one song, “We Are Almost Down to the Shore”, which is a song that comes from a songster named Jimmy Strother.
I’d been playing the song for maybe 25 years or something like that, but it wasn’t until the pandemic happened. The chorus is “fight on children and don’t look back because we’re almost down to the shore”.
It dawned on me that sort of sentiment, even though it’s broad, was a sentiment that people were needing. A sense of hope just to be able to push forward. That’s a song that came up and I realized I needed to record it. “Saddle It Around” was another song like that. One of the things that I never anticipated was that there would be a huge revolution of Black cowboys as a cultural phenomenon to instantly follow the Black Cowboys album. So I set it in place because I saw this needs to happen. Let’s put it into place in the Smithsonian so no one can ever question this idea again.
But then, the movies and folks going into the club with Black cowboys. And even up to the most recent year, we’re having Beyonce coming in with her Cowboy Carter album, which again, I’m one degree removed from in my own type of way. Those types of things you can’t anticipate. “Saddle It Around” was a way for me to follow up with Black Cowboys with different types of songs connected. There’s a song I have on there that I wrote, “Nobody Wrote It Down”, which is an anthem to the idea that a lot of this history hadn’t been written down, following up with the Black cowboy story a little bit. But then also where it connects with some of the stuff that’s happening with Beyoncé, I wrote some country and western songs. Because I’ve talked about Black country music for a long time, but I wanted to write some new ones that would touch upon those themes.
Pete Miesel: The whole Beyoncé thing touched my irritation that people have with gatekeeping music. I found a lot of the discourse around that particular record to be a little skeezy to listen to. I’m like, but the Chocolate Drops have been doing this stuff for 15 years, and Dom has! It makes me sad that people want to put music in specific little solid boxes with no daylight between genres.
Dom Flemons: Absolutely, and treating it like it’s a singular phenomenon, like no one’s ever done it before. Which is wild that people are still trying to get away with that idea. That was the thing that was interesting as well media wise. Like when a song like “Old Town Road” came out and became another hit a few years back. People were calling me for context, like normal, where they would ask, what’s the history of Black cowboys, et cetera.
But when it came to this Beyoncé record, I got no calls, which I thought was very strange. I was shocked that there wasn’t the same need for historical context to be placed within this particular project. There were some things that were very concerning. And then also the fact that there’s a very strong Black country community that’s been around that I’ve been a part of. All the reports of people talking about Charlie Pryde and all these people. I’ve been performing on the Grand Ole Opry since 2008 and I’m part of the very first black string band to ever have performed on the Opry. So it was the fact that we weren’t referenced in any sort of significant way was shocking to me.
Pete Miesel: Something that jumped up at me when I listened to Leaving Eden, which I think was the last Chocolate Drop. The way you and your bandmates bounced around from different influences without drawing attention to it, if that makes any sense.
Like on the previous record you did “Renardine” which was a Fairport Convention song. And you could do hit em up style, and then you could do some ragtime instrumentals. I was always amazed how seamless the records sounded, and how they didn’t sound academic. It lived up to something Tom Waits once said about folk music. He said, “Folk music is a newspaper. It’s a conversation society has with itself.”
Dom Flemons: That’s right.
Pete Miesel: I’ve always been impressed with musicians in your community, the old timey string musicians, who can bring that tradition and make it sound so alive.
Dom Flemons: Yeah, without a doubt. It’s funny you mentioned Genuine Negro Jig. Working with Joe Henry, one of the things that he mentioned to me in passing, when it came to the sequencing of a record, the way that the tracks go from one chapter to the next is like the chapters in a book.
If you think of a record as chapters in a book, you can figure out the way to tell your story, even if the material is scattered in a variety of directions. It’s all about figuring out how you want to tell the story, whether it’s a story of keys and tones. Records that have always influenced me are records like The Red Headed Stranger by Willie Nelson.
One of the things that you find key wise is everything is either one fourth up or one fourth to the other. So if a song’s in A, the next one’s in D, and then the next one’s in E, and then the next one’s in D. Which is like the chords on a guitar. So if you think of an album as a song and chords being strummed on a guitar, that’s a sort of way that you can tell a story.
Sometimes the lyrics tell you a story, and you want your narrator for your songs to take you one direction or another. That was how we sequenced a lot of those records. Joe Henry was the one who really drove A Genuine Negro Jig. But when it came to Leaving Eden, I was very active in how we decided to put the tracks together on that record.
And then even calling it Leaving Eden was symbolic. At that time our original fiddler had left, and Leaving Eden was the first record where he wasn’t on it. So in a certain way, it symbolically was the first statement of our group, where we were outside of the harmonious bubble of where we had started as a group. That was something that was very important, that the three of us had come together and the three of us had created a sound that created a buzz and a wave. So the newer group and the newer set of songs for Leaving Eden, symbolically, we were like, okay, now we’re leaving the Garden of Eden.
There’s also a “Leaving Eden” song, of course, that has its own story. But it was also symbolically about leaving that perfect place that we once had been, or at least a seemingly perfect place. And then even with my own solo records, I always try to think about the story that’s being told. So whenever you’re hearing the sequence, everything is very purposeful in the way that it starts from one section to the next. But I also try to hyper focus, to make sure that each song told its own story. So you wouldn’t have to be bound to the sequence, but when you put it all together.
Pete Miesel: You can definitely hear that on the Prospect Hill record. You leaned into a lot of old jazz on that, I noticed.
Dom Flemons: Cause I hadn’t had a chance to do that really in my records up to that point. And Carolina Chocolate Drops, there was never a place where I could do any of those things. I’ve always been a big fan of early rock and roll, which is also great regional music that’s like old timey music from the ‘20s in a way. Because it is so wide open at certain points, especially when you delve into the deep cuts of some of that early rock and roll. But also getting into that early jazz and where string band and jazz can meet up as well.
I wanted to showcase a little bit of all of those things in there. So that’s why I wanted to bring a horn in. Brian Horton, God rest his soul now. He did some amazing stuff on all those tracks. That was something that I wanted to do for Prospect Hill. And even when I reissued Prospect Hill as the Prospect Hill Omnibus, I wanted to bring in some of those extra cuts, which were interesting rhythmic beats. That’s another aspect of my music, where I go from the songs I perform live, where I’m singing them. It’s always been a part of what I’m presenting, but I also wanted to show people an aspect of my music where I started out as a drummer. The marching bass drum is one of my main instruments. The only one that I’ve had actual classical training in a sense, because I was in the marching band. And show the ways that polyrhythm can ebb and flow within music, and so that’s something that kind of goes outside of performing it live. But it allows the listener to hear different aspects of my music. I think about that all the time.
Pete Miesel: How many instruments do you play?
Dom Flemons: About twelve all together.
Pete Miesel: In one of your promo photos you have this ginormous banjo. What is that?
Dom Flemons: Oh, that’s Big Head Joe, the giant six string banjo. That’s a guitar banjo that comes from around 1919, and it was made by an African American luthier named Robert McGinnes. The fellow worked out of Harlem in the years before the Harlem Renaissance, and he worked for James Reese Europe, the famous ragtime composer. McGinnis created a series of instruments that were called the Clef Club Deluxe instruments, and they were for James Reese Europe’s all black string band orchestra, The Clef Club. They’re very famous for two things.
One, they broke the color barrier at Carnegie Hall back in the turn of the 20th century. And then also, they went overseas during the First World War and they were The 369th Hellfighters Brigade. So this instrument has a significance connected to that history there.
I got the instrument myself because it was so reminiscent of the Gibson six string banjo that Papa Charlie Jackson played. For me, it references back to this very early part of blues history. And this thing’s great to play. I can’t take it with me anymore unless I drive.
Pete Miesel: It’s a pretty fearsome looking instrument in those photos. I was like, oh my God, how does that sound?
Dom Flemons: And when you play it, it’s a beautiful one. On The Prospect Hill Omnibus, there’s a tune I actually wrote to Big Head Joe dedicated, the Big Head Joe’s March, and that one features the instrument there. There’s another one called “The Grand Manifesto”, where I juxtaposed it next to me playing electric guitar. You get six string banjo and electric guitar happening at the same time. Yeah, I have a few different recordings that I’ve done with Big Head Joe.
Pete Miesel: Yeah, this is great. I feel like I’ve gone past the time we agreed to, but may I ask you to do another song? How about on the harmonica? Give us a harmonica tune.
Dom Flemons: Yeah, I’ll do my little specialty on the harmonica here. This is an old Eck Robertson number called “Brown Skin Girl”. I never learned to play the fiddle, but I decided to start putting fiddle tunes on the harmonica. I was inspired by listening to the recordings of DeFord Bailey. And actually in December, out at Berkeley, it’s part of the reason I was there. Recently, I curated a festival at the Freight & Salvage dedicated to DeFord Bailey, and so we’re going to have a three night festival dedicated to DeFord. Also in the most recent reprinting of DeFord Bailey’s biography by David Morton, I wrote the foreword for it. That’s something I’d recommend for folks as well, if you want to know more about DeFord. He was a great harmonica player, the very first star of the Grand Ole Opry, very first Black star of country music. In the book it talks about how he grew up in a string band family. It talks about all the different aspects of that, and then also his trials and tribulations as an early Black star, in a very contentious situation in the country music community.
But nevertheless, one of the things that was beautiful was that DeFord was able to play harmonica instrumentals starting out the Grand Ole Opry show and it sent a message that changed the world. It actually set the precedent for harmonica players playing on the radio, which is a big part of the blues tradition as well. I’ll just show you how beautiful this solo harmonica sound can be over the radio waves now.
Dom Flemons plays “Brown Skin Girl”.
Pete Miesel: Again Dom Flemons, thank you so much for coming in a week that’s been difficult, obviously, for a lot of us. This has been absolutely invigorating to talk to you and to dive into what we do in our little part of the sandbox.
Dom Flemons: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Pete Miesel: Okay, once again, I beg you, if you don’t have anything to do tonight, and who would? It’s a long weekend. It’s a holiday weekend. Go to Chautauqua Community House tonight to see Mr. Dom Flemons, the American Songster, presenting the Bronze Buckaroo and Songster Show. I can’t do justice to how cool it’s been to see you play these tunes. This has been an absolute kick. Are you going to be doing any more shows on this tour?
Dom Flemons: This is the last one here tonight. Then I’ll be heading back to Chicago where I’m living now. In about a week I’ll be out in Los Angeles playing a special show for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra over at the Gene Autry Museum. That’ll be really fun.
Pete Miesel: Something I like to say on every one of these shows is, find a record that you’ve never heard before. Find a musician you’ve never heard before. Put it on your record player, put it on your CD, pull up a video, and just let it absorb into you. And it’ll be the most rewarding thing you can do. God knows we need things that are rewarding right now.
Once again, this has been a real thrill. I’m going to let you go. Mr. Dom Flemons, thank you so much.
Dom Flemons: Thank you so much for having me.
