Folk & WorldBlues
Dom Flemons releases “Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions” on 22 January 2027 through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He recorded it in the Nicholas and Eugenia Taubman Hall of Music at the National Museum of American History, and it is the first roots music album made entirely with instruments from the museum’s collection, which holds more than five thousand of them.
He plays twenty-two historic pieces on it: the guitars played by Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, Lew Snowden’s banjo, quills made by Joe Patterson and a number of nineteenth-century instruments. It is his third record for the Smithsonian’s label.
There are twenty-one songs across four sides, on CD, digitally and as a double LP. Flemons plays solo, with his new Black string band — The Traveling Wildfires — and backed by museum staff, and he moves through Black string band music, early jazz, Afro-Caribbean melodies, African American folk song, nineteenth-century banjo breakdowns, pre-blues songsters, Piedmont blues guitar, rhythm & blues, bluegrass, Hawaiian steel guitar, country blues and gospel.
There are originals and arrangements of songs associated with Bill Monroe, Hurt, Tampa Red, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jesse Fuller, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Washington Phillips. The liner notes are by Flemons and Troutman.
The first advance track is “Shultz’s Dream”, a bluegrass piece Flemons wrote in honour of Arnold Shultz, the Kentucky guitarist who was the first Black musician inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. Nothing by him was ever recorded.
Text by Alba Puiggròs