Dom Flemons

Dominique Flemons was born on 30 August 1982 in Phoenix, Arizona, into a Black and Mexican family with deep roots in the state. He played percussion in his high school band and, as a teenager, guitar and harmonica in Phoenix coffee houses. From 2000 to 2005 he studied at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he took a degree in English, busked on the streets downtown and worked through old recordings in the campus library. He also became a slam poet and represented Northern Arizona at the national level in 2002 and 2003.

In April 2005 he went to the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and after graduating he moved to North Carolina to make music his career. With Rhiannon Giddens and the percussionist Súle Greg Wilson he played in Sankofa Strings, on bones, jug, guitar and four-string banjo, and in November 2005 he, Giddens and the fiddler Justin Robinson formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Over the next eight years the band played Mountain Stage, MerleFest and A Prairie Home Companion and opened for Taj Mahal and, in 2011, Bob Dylan. On Genuine Negro Jig (2010) Flemons is credited on four-string banjo, guitar, jug, bass drum, foot percussion and vocals, and he also sang and played on Leaving Eden (2012), which was nominated for a Grammy as well. The band announced on 12 November 2013 that he was leaving to concentrate on his solo career.

That solo work had begun while he was still in the band. He issued Dance Tunes, Ballads and Blues himself in 2007, and Music Maker released American Songster in 2009, a one-man record of fifteen tracks, three of them his own songs, alongside Joe Thompson’s “Old Cindy Gal” and Ma Rainey’s “Yonder Comes the Blues.” In 2012 he recorded Buffalo Junction with the Piedmont blues guitarist and singer Boo Hanks. Prospect Hill (2014), released by Music Maker and Fat Possum, brought in a band that included Guy Davis on banjo and harmonica, and in 2016 he and the English guitarist Martin Simpson made A Selection of Ever Popular Favourites for Fledg’ling. Banjo is his main instrument, and Mike Seeger shaped his playing; he also plays guitar, harmonica, jug, fife, quills and rhythm bones, and he plays a Deering four-string banjo among others.

Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys, released by Smithsonian Folkways in March 2018 as part of its African American Legacy series with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, gathered songs and poems about the Black cowboys of the American West, among them “Home on the Range” and “Goodbye Old Paint.” It was nominated for the Grammy for Best Folk Album and for a Blues Music Award. That May he made his solo debut on the Grand Ole Opry, and that summer he was the first artist-in-residence of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Making American Music internship program. He had played the bluesman Joe Hill Louis in CMT’s series Sun Records in 2017.

Traveling Wildfire, released by Smithsonian Folkways in March 2023 and produced by Ted Hutt, was built around his own songs and brought a second Best Folk Album nomination. In 2022 Northern Arizona University gave him an honorary doctorate and had him speak at its commencement, and in 2024 he won the grand prize of the International Acoustic Music Awards. He has hosted the American Songster Radio show, and by 2025 he was living in the Chicago area. That year the American Banjo Museum inducted him into its Hall of Fame in the Promotion category. His next album, Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions, was recorded on historic instruments from the collection of the National Museum of American History.