The American Songster: An Interview with Dom Flemons
This blog post is generously provided in kind by Katie Karnehm-Esh. The Double Down blog is also supported by Nevada Humanities’ donors.
By Katie Karnehm-Esh
Dom Flemons. Photograph by Rory Doyle.
When I moved from northern Indiana to northern Nevada in September, I knew nothing about gold mining, ranching, living in the high desert, or cowboy poetry. But within my first week of work, I had heard the name Dom Flemons as someone I should try to interview during the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I said, “I’d love to.” Then, I continued on with trying to learn about my new job—Humanities Coordinator at Great Basin College—and my new home in Elko. I loved Nevada, but I didn’t know how to find myself in the landscape or the culture. I found myself playing Taylor Swift’s folklore on repeat and missing Lake Michigan and green spaces.
By the time of the Gathering’s keynote address in January, I knew marginally more about life in the high desert. I also knew that Dom Flemons, “the American Songster,” is a big deal. Dom is a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, an individual Grammy nominee, a scholar, a poet, and a prolific musician. He was recently inaugurated into the Banjo Hall of Fame, and also plays guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, fife, and rhythm bone. He wrote and recorded the ground-breaking album Black Cowboys, which is an artifact in the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History (whose opening ceremonies he played at). I almost hoped the interview would fall through so that I would not be exposed as a total ignoramus.
But Dom showed up just as scheduled, wearing his trademark plaid shirt, suspenders, and porkpie hat. He has been coming to the Gathering since 2015, and headlined at the Black Cowboy-themed 2020 Gathering. What struck me over the course of our conversation is what a scholar he is, in addition to an outstanding musician. While an English major at Northern Arizona University, he said he saw the power of media. “I come in extremely informed and can anticipate holes people will punch in a project,” he said when I asked if he ever got pushback. And Dom is very informed on American roots music and culture. One in four cowboys were black men, he said; the classic cowboy song “Home on the Range” was likely written by a Black cowboy. However, the books, TV shows, and ephemera of cowboy culture made it look like a monoculture. He saw a need for an album like Black Cowboys, and in his collaborations with other cowboy poets and Smithsonian Folkways, he brought an unsung part of Black Americana to life—in his own words—“activating the cultural memory of black people in the South and Southwest, who were maybe one or two generations away from living on the farm.”
“The classic cowboy song ‘Home on the Range’ was likely written by a Black cowboy.”
When I asked why Black country music was having such a moment, Dom had so much to say that he offered to give me a few extra minutes. He pointed out that country music has traditionally been about nostalgia, whereas Black music has tended to be more future leaning. “There’s a complex cultural memory in the South,” he said, “which is inherently problematic.” However, “while country music has been seen as a music for white people, it’s much more diverse. There’s [Black] musicians from the South who love country [music] and sound just like their white counterparts.”
“But,” he adds, “part of what allows segregation to continue is that we don’t participate in the art of the other.”
Dom resists being classified as any certain kind of musician, whether blues or country or folk. “I go where the music takes me,” he says, which is also true geographically. His music has taken him around the world, including the Dominican Republic (where he won a merengue competition), the rainforest of Malaysia, and the World Music Exposition, where he was the first American roots music act performed there. “I’ve been able to go to other parts of the world and show them what our country’s music has done over time,” he said, ”which I think is very powerful, especially because old styles of music are powerful in and of themselves.”
In the keynote speech at the Gathering, fellow cowboy poet Gail Steiger said that politicians struggle to get people to follow where they don’t want to go, but artists can move people in new directions. “Oh, without a doubt,” Dom said when I asked if he had found that to be true. “I try to be very pro-American,” he said, but acknowledged lately that “had gotten wild.” But he points out being an American has always been complicated; he started his career in 2005, during the George W. Bush years. “I’ve seen a lot of things happen politically,” he said, “but one constant is that music born and bred in the US is some of the most powerful in the world.” Playing traditional music has been key for him. He called it a neutral space that, “allows people to take a step back and take the music for what it is,” and think about American culture, as well as our lives, and the things we’ve seen.
This afternoon, while struggling with writer’s block, I watched the music video of “It’s Cold Inside” from Dom’s 2023 album Traveling Wildfire. To my surprise, the American Songster begins this video not with the desert Southwest, where he grew up, or the Carolinas, where he lived when he started his career, but with a sweeping view of the Chicago skyline, where he now lives. Throughout the video, the camera zooms in on Dom playing in distinctly Great Lakes landscapes: city parks, snowy prairies, and abandoned rail yards. In the most evocative scene for me, Dom, beside a lighthouse on a pier in Lake Michigan, sings, “What happened to my home?/it broke up and blowed away.”
Katie Karnehm-Esh, Ph.D., is the Humanities Coordinator at Great Basin College in Elko, Nevada. She grew up in Ohio and earned her Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She taught college English in Indiana for sixteen years before relocating to Nevada. In addition to her humanities work, she is a writer, editor, and yoga teacher.