09/22/2026
You can see Dom Flemons in concert, live, this Saturday night at the Rise & Fall Festival in Tappahannock! Go to https://ecmhs.org/rise-and-fall-festival/ to learn more.
We’re excited to announce the release of ‘Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions,’ the new album by Dom Flemons, “The American Songster,” arriving January 22 on CD, digital formats, and as a double LP vinyl set via Smithsonian Folkways. Co-produced by Flemons and John Troutman, Curator of Music and Musical Instruments at the National Museum of American History, with Associate Producer Vania Kinard, it is the first album of roots music to be recorded using historic instruments from the museum’s collection, presenting an extraordinary history of two centuries of American music-making and music makers.
Performing solo, with his new all-star Black string band The Traveling Wildfires (Brian “B.E.” Farrow, Dante’ Pope, Tray Wellington), and alongside Smithsonian staff, Flemons breathes new life into guitars played by Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, a banjo owned by Lew Snowden, quills made by Joe Patterson, and other treasures. The album features original compositions and traditional repertoire spanning a range of American roots genres, including early jazz, country blues, 19th-century banjo breakdowns, Hawaiian steel guitar, and more.
A GRAMMY Award-winner, American Banjo Hall of Fame inductee, music scholar, songwriter, and versatile, self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Flemons has spent nearly three decades bringing significant value to America’s musical heritage through his solo career and as a co-founder of the groundbreaking Carolina Chocolate Drops. ‘Making American Music’ is the culmination of a lifetime of music-making and historical study and marks Flemons’ third album on Folkways, following his releases ‘Black Cowboys’ (2018) and ‘Traveling Wildfire’ (2023).
“Dom Flemons’s interest in the museum’s historical instruments was borne by decades of study, both as an instrumentalist and a music scholar,” Troutman writes in the liner notes. “By the time he held the museum’s banjos and guitars in his hands, he had been long familiar with playing historical instruments, and in fact had commissioned several luthiers to build instruments for him based upon the specifications of 19th-century instruments held privately or in museums. He knew how to handle them, he was familiar with their idiosyncrasies, and he could expertly play repertoire that would have been familiar to the makers and early players of those original instruments.”
Today you can hear the album’s first single “Shultz’s Dream,” Flemons’ original tribute to the Black fiddler and guitarist Arnold Shultz, a key figure in the development of bluegrass music. Stream on your preferred platform and preorder the album through the link here: orcd.co/dom-flemons-making-american-music
