29 March 2019
Dom Flemons
On Friday, March 29, we welcome two-time Grammy-award nominated artist Dom Flemons. He was the co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, winners of one of those aforementioned Grammys for Best Traditional Folk album in 2010. Dom’s latest album, Black Cowboys, was nominated in 2019. For the past couple of years Dom has been traveling the world playing his unique takes on traditional folk music.
Concert starts at 8:00 pm
Dom Flemons is known as “The American Songster” since his repertoire of music covers nearly 100 years of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. Flemons is a music scholar, historian, record collector and multi-instrumentalist. He is considered an expert player on the banjo, fife, guitar, harmonica, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones. He has performed with leading musicians such as Mike Seeger, Joe Thompson, Martin Simpson, Taj Mahal, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Guy Davis. A professional touring musician for the past ten years, Dom has traveled the nation and the world presenting folk and roots music to diverse audiences at venues like Carnegie Hall, Cecil Sharp House, the Grand Ole Opry, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, and the Newport Folk Festival. Farther afield, Dom represented the United States at the 2017 Rainforest World Music Festival in Kuching, Malaysia.
In 2018, Flemons released Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys on Smithsonian Folkways. This recording is 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. In 2017, Flemons was featured on David Holt’s State of Music on PBS and performed as bluesman Joe Hill Louis on CMT’s original hit television show “Sun Records.” In 2016, Flemons released a duo album with British musician Martin Simpson titled Ever Popular Favourites. He launched a podcast, American Songster Radio, on WUNC Public Radio and filmed two instructional DVDs through Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. In 2014, Flemons released a critically acclaimed solo album, Prospect Hill, through Music Maker Relief Foundation.
Dom visited the children of the fourth and fifth grades in Marblehead on the day of his performance. He will regale them with music as well as some history behind the music of black cowboys and other African-Americans.
Read Dom Flemon’s interview by HuffPost >
This program is supported in part by a grant from the Marblehead Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
- [Dom Flemons is] a fascinating person, after all, one part consummate performer, one part perfect gentlemen, one part scholarly archivist, and one part shrewd businessman. It’s quite the package, and the more I talk to him, the more I realize how much of the genius behind the Carolina Chocolate Drops was owed to Dom. Onstage he’s an absolute blast, charming and funny, full of energy! No Depression
- When Flemons, his round glasses sliding down his nose beneath his flat-brim hat, starts twirling his banjo between bursts of notes and sings about the “Viper Man” or that “Short Dress Gal” with a sly mischievousness, it doesn’t matter that these songs come from the long-forgotten corners of African-American music — the tunes could have been written yesterday they’re so compelling. Paste Magazine
- Most folk artists go by “singer-songwriter” or simply “musician.” But “American songster” speaks to a greater truth about the work Flemons, a multi-instrumentalist, has accomplished as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and now, since leaving that group last year, as a solo artist. Boston Globe
