Dom Flemons
City Winery
Philadelphia
April 19, 2024
“Don’t it always seem to go?” former Carolina Chocolate Drop and Black Cowboy Dom Flemons lamented into a City Winery microphone — as he quoted famed folk singer Joni Mitchell, not as part of a song, but to make a point.
The multi-instrumentalist and musicologist, acclaimed for his long-time work reviving and reimagining poorly documented Black folk and country artists, played to a crowd of around 50 fans Thursday night inside Philly’s City Winery. The show was part of his “American Songster” tour.
Between performing renditions of African-American pioneer music and covers of mid-20th century folk tunes, Flemons cited Joni Mitchell to tell a story about the 2024 Grammy Awards and his own place in the folk tradition.
Flemons’ latest work, Traveling Wildfire, was nominated back in February for best folk album — but he lost to Joni Mitchell, who won for a recording of her live performance at the Newport Folk Festival last year. Put up against Mitchell and the likes of Paul Simon and Old Crow Medicine Show, Flemons said, “I knew that wasn’t gonna happen. When Joni’s in the category, Grammy you ain’t got.”
A Grammy is hardly the only mark of success, or even an important one. But Flemons was saying something more: He has enjoyed ongoing success as a traditionalist and revivalist but remained a considerable notch below the heights to which some other folk artists have ascended — including Rhiannon Giddens, former bandmate in The Carolina Chocolate Drops.
At Thursday night’s show, Flemons demonstrated a mastery of instruments ranging from quills (a type of pan flute invented and played by enslaved Black people) and rhythm bones to banjo and guitar. The depth and breadth of his skill were immediately apparent.
But in playing the quick excerpt from Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” Flemons further recalled passing by a “particular young lady out on the floor wearing cowboy garb” back in Los Angeles.
It was another instance of his work perhaps outshined — by Beyoncé, whose double LP Act II: Cowboy Carter, immediately broke streaming records upon its April release. It also made Beyoncé the first African-American artist to ever put out a Billboard number-one country song with “Texas Hold ‘Em” (which featured a sample of banjo playing from Rhiannon Giddens herself).
The last album Flemons put out was literally titled Black Cowboys.
“Don’t it always seem to go,” Flemons crooned again, joking about Beyoncé’s success popularizing a complex part of American history that he’s been studying and bringing to light for decades.
Flemons tipped his already fashionably slanted hat to Beyoncé. “There’s a much bigger conversation about Black country music going on out there,” he said. “And it’s amazing to see it come back up once again.”
That bigger conversation Flemons mentioned is thanks in no small part to the work the members of the Chocolate Drops did when Flemons, Giddens, and Justin Robinson formed the band in 2006 to draw attention to the history and legacy of Black country musicians while also often giving that music a modern twist. The band won a Grammy in 2010 for those efforts, manifested on the album Genuine Negro Jig. Since then, each of the members has gone on to solo work, performing, recording, and teaching.
In a recent Washington Post interview, Giddens, the most well-known of the three Chocolate Drops, said her aim is not to be a celebrity but to “bore you to tears about the banjo.” She’s made many career moves to deliver her own message her own way, from guest acting on the former CMT show Nashville with a banjo slung over her shoulder to developing the all-Black, all-female, all-banjo-playing supergroup Our Native Daughters with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla to writing an opera that had its premiere in 2022. And, of course, there’s the recent Beyoncé collab.
In that same Post interview, Giddens noted how submitting herself into the pop culture arena has also, fortunately, resulted in reaching more Black listeners. At City Winery, Flemons played to an almost entirely white audience.
Flemons has walked a different path. He left the Chocolate Drops in 2013 to start his solo career, and since then appears to have focused on upholding history over attaining commercial viability. His presentation of obscure and now-dead Black musicians, more so than his original work, is what blew my mind during his City Winery show.
Flemons told the story of how DeFord Bailey, a country star through the 1920s and 1940s, learned the harmonica as a child while recuperating from polio. Then Flemons flipped his own harmonica in circles around his lips while maintaining perfect pitch. He clawhammered and fingerpicked his way through “Po’ Black Sheep” with unbelievable physical and mental dexterity (video at the top of this article).
I had never seen animal bones, one of the oldest manmade musical instruments, used to create music — let alone to create clicks and rhythms more pristine than any castanet could capture. My mouth gaped wide enough when he used his pinky finger to slide in and out of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” that Flemons even started pointing and laughing at me from his spot on stage — all while continuing to play that guitar at a steady pace. (See that go down in the video below.)
I left the show thinking mostly about Flemons’ superhuman instrumental expertise. There are many paths to preserve and popularize the music of the past, from Flemons’s show-by-show approach to Beyoncé’s internet-breaking album drop. But musical skill lies at the heart of it. Behind the glamor, the drama, and the fluff, Beyoncé is a singer who has complete control over her voice — and has taken control over her art.
No matter how it always seems to go, no matter who ends up on top or reaches the most people, the chance to observe excellence, no matter what force pushed an artist to that point, is gonna make jaws drop.
