Dom Flemons

Partial Transcript: Oh well, yeah, with—you know, when I first started playing the banjo, I developed the style based on a lot of different things. Well, at first, I was drawn to the banjo by the sounds of Flatt and Scruggs. And that was really the first thing that set me off of the—I probably heard it on the Beverly Hillbillies or something. Then, I finally picked up a record and heard their wonderful versions of songs like “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and stuff like that. So I had it in my head that I wanted to learn to play the banjo. And then, the next step was I came across the music of Pete Seeger, and that was through Bob Dylan’s music. I heard that Pete Seeger was a great guy. And the first time I heard this great demo version that he did—“If I Had a Hammer”—maybe about two minutes long. But it just had this very amazing sound. And the banjo I found was just such a—it was just a powerful instrument, and I couldn’t explain why. But it was the sound when I heard that really drew me in.
And at that time, I had been playing the guitar for a couple of years. And I was also a drummer starting out. So for me, when I first heard the banjo, I loved the way that I could do the drum rudiments on an instrument that I could play chords on. And so, I didn’t start out playing banjo necessarily playing banjo tunes, but I just learned songs I knew on the guitar. And having seen New Orleans jazz bands and Dixieland and stuff like that when I was fairly young, and gotten into that early jazz music. I saw one that there were banjos in that music. And then, two, that they were—the strumming was a certain thing that was interesting compared to the Scruggs style of banjo playing which was a lot more melodic and almost reminding me of electric guitar like when I heard a rock band or something like that. It’s just really like wild sounding.
And the New Orleans jazz band’s not so much. It was a lot more strumming and rhythmic stuff that led those particular banjo players to play what they played. And so I was drawn—when I started playing to the jazz band players, and then I learned the old-timey stuff as I went forward.

Partial Transcript: Okay. Well, my name is Dom Flemons. And I’m known as the American Songster. And I’m a musician who’s spent a good deal of my career advocating for traditional music in different ways. And I’ve kind of followed the path of people like Pete Seeger and trying to bring both original and traditional material together, and also tried to make it accessible to other people.

Partial Transcript: Well, traditional music’s always spoken to me. I mean—and it’s one of those things. It’s kind of like a—I don’t know. It’s like a good gumbo or something like that. It’s something that you have to feel. And when you have it, it becomes a part of you. And that’s how music is. And so for me, I was first started out with regular music that most people would listen to—a lot of rock music and punk and things like that. But that was before I really started wanting to play the guitar. And then once I had an interest in the guitar, I got into the oldies—do-up songs, the Beetles, Bob Dylan, and stuff like that. And that’s where it started. And then it expanded from there.
And I just was able to find a kind of a timeline. And, of course, this was before we had technology. I was able to find a timeline in the music I was listening to, to go backwards in time, and to be able to hear the thoughts and feelings of the past generations. And that led me back to the twenties and thirties stuff.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think old-time music is always appealing in the way that it’s deceptively simpler than other types of music. So it’s really accessible and easy. And the stories are mostly about the human condition. My first introduction was through the literature of folk tales, of people like Rip Van Winkle or John Henry. Those sort of stories drew me in—Paul Bunyan. And from there, I was able to understand the music in a different way, because I looked at it as literature. And I got a degree in English. And so I studied Chaucer and Shakespeare, and a lot of ancient literature.
So for me, folk music was kind of like the American version of all that sort of stuff. So I think that’s something that’s appealing to people all the time. And it’s just a really wonderful melodies that you can sing and that you can really just sink your teeth into. And when you get deep into the traditional field, then you find the variance of those melodies. So that’s something that’s appealing to people as well. It’s not just the musical and the literature but then there’s also the technicality of learning a certain style from a certain region or a certain version. I think that’s always universal.

Partial Transcript: Well, the cultural interchange between black and white people in the South particularly is something that’s a lot more complex than you see on TV, for example. And I had learned this myself being from the southwest originally. Then, I moved, and I currently live in North Carolina. I was able to find a lot of interesting social situations that were contradictory to what I had heard before. For example, even though we might think of certain sections of the South as being segregated where blacks and whites don’t mix together, in certain situations in the home, you had a lot more interaction happening especially when people were neighbors. And this also becomes a social thing more so than a racial sort of thing.
And so you had black people that worked with white people because they were both in the same neighborhood, the same social situations. And while they may not go out in public together in situations like music making and also with cooking and just sort of like more casual type of things that could be done in the home, there was a lot more interaction than it’s given credit for. And so with the music, there’s always been interchange because people love music. They hear something new. And they’re drawn to that, and they want to incorporate into what they’re doing.
And that works with both black and white people. You know, of course, the country is always obsessed with the white guy can sound black, but there are black guys that try to sound white too. People like Charley Pride or there were people that went even before that like DeFord Bailey who was a great harmonica player. And he was the first star of the Grand Ole Opry. And so, it’s one of those interesting things that, at first, it may seem a little strange to hear about it. But when you think of the reality of what you see when you look around you, you find that it’s really not that strange. When it comes to the Anglo-Saxon culture of the mountains, one of the things that people tend to forget is that the African slave trade was such a huge part of why America became America.
And if you think of it as an economic issue—and it being something where the only way for America to become a superpower in compared to the old world was to have African slaves because all of the other big powers had it—that changes the dynamic of why people did things. And so that doesn’t change socially what they did. So with all that being said, you had a lot of black people in every part of the United States. And because they were in a lower social standing than other people, they might not get mentioned but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. It doesn’t mean that the people that lived there, that were white didn’t know that they were there. And, of course, they knew they lived there, because that was their home.

Partial Transcript: Well, I mean, when the railroads were—let’s see. When the railroads were brought into the United States, it expanded the entire country going from Louisiana Purchase on. And so, it gave people access to travel around the country that just was unprecedented before. And so this also came at the time during reconstruction as well post-Civil War where there was a lot of displacement that was going on between people that were emancipated because—when emancipation came, some black people were right with it. Some black people weren’t into it, because they had—some of them had very good homes. And to be all cast into the same place, that left a lot of different type of people with a lot of different types of situations.
And the railroad happened to be one of those conduits that led them to travel to anywhere. Some of them became Pullman porters, you know. So they were assistants on the train line. And while that might seemed like a subservient-type job, through the Pullman porters, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement came in decades later as the Pullman porters were in better social standing than other people were. And so you have a lot of stuff like this going in the background especially when it comes to the black community because the black community has been on a very progressive upward rise since the Civil War and since emancipation. There has been a lot of bumps along the way. But it’s always been thinking progressively which is one of the main reasons we don’t think about African-American people when it comes to old-time music, because old-time music and country music—a lot of it’s based on nostalgia and looking backward in time.
And when it comes to the black community looking backward in time stops after a certain point especially when you have like the Civil Rights era coming in where they had to push all that stuff away—the sharecropping and the slavery. And they had to push all that stuff back so that they could find a new type of progress. So blacks doing old-time music was something that was very much—something local communities or it would be like a special case if it was something that in the mainstream. But it was—but again, it was going on all the time, right, under the surface.

Partial Transcript: Absolutely. When people—people don’t tend to think about the way that—let me think how I want to phrase that. We don’t—let’s see. It’s hard to imagine a world before we had radios and before we had televisions and mobile devices and whatnot. And so when a new sound came into town, everybody was all over the sound for like ten, twenty, sometimes thirty to fifty years, because it was just the new sound that came in. And so you had stuff like the railroads. And before that, you also had the steamboat travel. And, you know, steamboats—they all featured a little orchestras and jazz bands. And so people like Louis Armstrong, they would go all the way from New Orleans. And they could go as far as St. Louis or they could cut over to Cincinnati and over into Iowa. And they could influence the people there by just playing their music.
There wasn’t any—they didn’t have to take any sort of direct route. It’s just when the music hit people’s ears, it changed them. You have a great story of the great white clarinet player, Bix Beiderbecke, and he heard Louis Armstrong going by on a river boat playing his trumpet. And that made him want to play trumpet. It can be as small as that. And, of course, to bring it back to the old-time music, you have people like Lesley Riddle, for example, who was a Piedmont-style guitar player from Burnsville, North Carolina. And then, he lived in Kingsport for a while where he was good friends with Brownie McGhee who would have his own blues career.
But Lesley Riddle’s most well-known for hanging with a fellow by the name of Alvin Pleasant Carter, AP Carter. And he was his running buddy. And so when AP was collecting songs for the Carter Family, AP would take the words down. And Lesley was the one who’d take the melodies down. And he’d play it on the guitar. He also taught Maybelle a couple of things on the guitar including a song called the “Cannonball” which is a Solid Gang(??) which is a song that’s still played in old-time and bluegrass circles now. But it came from this African-American influence that’s way in the back. And Lesley Riddle never recorded or anything like that. He wasn’t—I don’t think interested in being a professional musician, but through his influence, we have what’s considered white music to come out. And it’s fueled—it’s almost a super music because it has all these elements combined within it.

Partial Transcript: Well, the story of the Scotch-Irish and the English settlers that were early on the influence, old time music, that’s a bit part of it because, of course, you know, the United States was built off of the old world in the UK, the British, the Scottish, and the Irish. Those are the people who settled the place. But there were two other factions that were a part of the story that it gets a little tricky. That’s why they’re not talked about, which is, of course, African Americans as slaves. And there were also the Native American and the indigenous people that were here before they even came over and settled.
So, when we think of American music, of course, there is this European influence, but what makes it American is the extra flavors that went in with all this stuff. And, of course, there were different traditions that represented both of these other tribes because if—of course, you have melodies that come from Ireland and Scotland. And there’s some really great stuff, stuff like “Soldier’s Joy” and—but you also have songs like “Shortnin’ Bread” which are songs that have a little bit more rhythmic emphasis compared to melodic emphasis. And those reach into that sort of African-American and Native-American tradition.
And when the two things combine, it’s a perfect combination. And I mean—and that’s what makes American music American is all that stuff coming together. Of course, you have—you know when you think old-time music not just fiddle and banjo, you have things like the mandolin. The mandolin is not a white instrument—only in the Italian sort of white way, you know. (laughs) And it’s—you have all these different pieces of the puzzles that come together to make this really beautiful combination of music and sounds.

Partial Transcript: One of the things that I think is really—I don’t think I want to say that. One of the things I think is the most exciting part of scholarship and documentation in the 21st century is being able to reanalyze the history books that have been the standards in which we judge all of our music. And especially in a—it’s funny with a traditional music where it’s so non-technology-based. The onset of technology has brought more scholarship and has broadened the field of traditional music in the way that over—originally, when it was documented, you know, people have their intentions and they have their certain focuses and things like that. We think of a guy like Cecil Sharp. He was focused on English music. So that’s really all he really did.
And when you hear him talk about African-American music, he didn’t really find much that he cared for with that. But he’s coming in a place where he had to write everything down. And a lot of the African-American vernacular music, that’s always been the problem—is trying to write it in European standard notation. Of course, that changes when you have John Lomax start coming around with the cylinder recorder, and also a disc recorder cutting African-American music.
Of course, he got that from him starting to work with cowboy music, and then he realized that African-American music was a strong part of the American identity. And so he helped elevate this music that, again, was treated as just arbitrary or superficial or not that important. Not what we should define ourselves as Americans by. And John Lomax, he was one of those guys that helped bring up the music but he also had his biases. He had things he was looking for. He also was looking for English ballads with African-American singers singing that.
And I think now in the 21st Century, it’s led to a really great spot where most people that are documenting, they have at least had a notion to look up more than just one school of thought, because even when I was starting out, of course, my connections came with Dixieland jazz, with jug band music and blues. And when I got into folk music—a more of the string band stuff with fiddle and banjo—it left me a little bit cold until I met Joe Thompson at the black banjo gathering in 2005. Then all of a sudden, when I heard Joe’s music and his sort of like African-American vernacular music, it connected with all of the other types of music that I have been into because there was this sort of gray area that I found that I was most interested in. And that was the songsters. And that was the songs that weren’t really blues, but they had this sort of other flavor to them—songs like “Frankie and Johnny” or like that “Railroad Bill.”
And I kept wondering, Where does this stuff come from, because there is—you know, when you think of the history of the blues, a lot of people wrote it out as spiritual music, field hollers, and also work songs, but those are all vocal styles. So where does the guitar come in? Where does the banjo come in? Where do all these other things come in? And the string band music really fills in that gap. Same thing with jazz. You just add horns onto it, and then you’re starting to get the roots of jazz. And Jelly Roll Morton talks about this in his Library of Congress recordings. And Danny Barker talks about it when he talks about Buddy Bolden and people like that.
So in the 21st century, you can take these three to four different schools of thought. You can put them next to each other, and you can find a lot broader picture. And I think that’s something that’s really exciting because when the original people who documented this stuff, they were fighting for their lives. They were fighting for these needs to be preserved. Now, we come at it as all of this stuff has been preserved, how do we look at all of it and try to make sense of any of it? And I think that that’s something that’s different than we’ve seen before.

Partial Transcript: The Second World War was the big changing point for a lot of things in the United States. A friend of mine once put it this way. And he said, “Well, okay, we’ll take—take—let’s get out of string band music. Let’s just got straight to jazz.” So when you think of Dixieland and early New Orleans jazz, it’s communal dance music. So you have everybody coming together. Anybody can be a part of the band. And everybody gets to have a good time. So that’s one thing. But after the Second World War because of these sort of shrinking down of the family unit into a mom, dad, and one and a half kids with the dog in the stucco house, you had music that reflected that.
And so now, you only had the best people in a small group doing music that was so hard that only these experts can do it. That’s how bebop jazz evolved past the original jazz. And now, you can just switch that back over to bluegrass and to old-time music. Old-time music is a broad of communal event. A lot of times, it was around work like—you know, especially North Carolina was around tobacco pickings, like a hog killing. It was around events that—when you dry the tobacco leaves out in the tobacco barns. I mean, it was around events that took a long time. And to amuse oneself, you could play some music. And you had your friends and your family around that would also want to play music as well.
So that’s one part of it but then, of course, after the Second World War, you had smaller units and especially led—the charges led down with Bill Monroe who, of course, was influenced by a lot of Dixieland-type music and New Orleans jazz through his connection through Arnold Schultz. And it did the same thing that jazz did where everybody had to be a virtuoso, and everybody was playing music that was only could be played by those experts. And bluegrass still prides itself on that playing very fast, a lot of notes, and really interesting solos on traditional music.
And so that’s sort of the thing that’s changed with that. I mean—but with the music leaving those social situations, it just—who played it and why they played it changed. And especially when it comes to African-American music with things like The Great Migration, which is, of course, after we get past reconstruction, going into the First World War, you have people moving away from the south and moving into the cities. And the music had to reflect that. So the banjo, for example, begins to disappear as the black vernacular instrument, and it had been the instrument of African-American people from—

Partial Transcript: Well—let’s see. The role of string band music in the African-American community, and particularly the banjo for example, as the First World War and as reconstruction went by and going into the 1920s, you’d find the banjo disappearing as an African-American vernacular instrument. And it’s an instrument that’s been associated with African-American people since they were brought over in the African slave trade. And it was an instrument that was extremely popular going into the late 1700s. And it was known just as a black instrument. And then around the 1830s or so, you started having musicians called Ethiopian delineators. And they were musicians that would be later be called blackface minstrels. And they were white men most of the time. And they were trying to cash in on the power of black music essentially.
And they would black their faces up, and they would do comedy bits that would lampoon black people. And so that was very—it’s a very hard part of the history but it led to the first American popular music to be spread all over the nation. So simultaneously—so the banjo becomes a part of the minstrel show. And in the black community, they were already moving away from that old country stuff anyway. And so while there were people that were playing the banjo in the local communities as a mainstream idea, the banjo and African-American people started to fall out. And then later on, when you get into the Civil Rights era, then, of course, the association with the minstrel show was something that came up as a means to continue the progress forward in the mindset.
So in the sixties and seventies, it was really not cool to play a banjo. Even though when people left, they might not have thought about it that hard. They moved away from it just saying, We want to get rid of the country stuff. We’re done with the country stuff progress, you know. And they just—and the African-American people just—they socially just never looked back. And so you have this disconnect that comes in because the bigger family community breaks down. And so when the banjo shows up, it shows up in jazz, and it might show up just here and there as an image maybe in like the Harlem Renaissance, for example, Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson and people that referenced the banjo a lot.
But after that, it just started fading away until about the early 1970s. That was when Joe Thompson, he first recorded his music for a folklorist named Bruce Bastin at UNC Chapel Hill. And Bruce Bastin, he was actually researching Piedmont blues guitar playing. And in the course of his research, he came across this fiddling banjo tradition that was a part of North Carolina and had been for ages. And so, he started working with Joe and Joe’s cousin, Odell. And then, they were one duo in about a set of about a dozen different people who played these old time banjo styles from the rural southern community. So you have to think about it as like the mainstream idea of what this is and then also the kind of the reality of what happened with it. And so the banjo’s been out of the manifesto for just ages.

Partial Transcript: Let’s see. North Carolina is very unique with its vernacular music. Since North Carolina wasn’t necessarily a plantation state in the same way other places in the Deep South were, it didn’t take as hard of a hit when the Civil War was done. And also, with that socially, there was a lot more interaction going on just because it’s still a state that it’s influenced by the way that it had indentured servitude first before it had slavery. And so that’s reflected in the social structure of how the state’s set up. Also, tobacco was the big cash crop compared to like cotton or rice which is—those take a lot bigger workforces. And so that was something that was different in North Carolina. And so the music in itself remained mixed.
It had a very different sound from other places in the south that were—you know, that had just, you know, they were either tilted further into a bigger black community. So there was a more sort of like African-American vernacular style that had a stronger flavor compared to North Carolina and particularly in the middle of the state is where you have a stronger black population like places like Durham and whatnot where you had factory work that brought people into the middle of the state.
And in the mountains, of course, there were people that came up. And there’s a variety of situations. Sometimes, you had—people had their plantations, and they moved them up to the mountains. They brought everybody with them. That was including slaves. And also, when people are emancipated, they made their own treks to go out west. And so you find them in the mountains as well. But in the Piedmont, that’s where you start having a lot more—that's where everybody kind of met in the middle. And that really influences the style in the way particularly with the beat, you know. It’s a very dance-oriented type music. It's not quite as heavy as like, say, like Mississippi in terms of the emotionalism or also the heaviness of the downbeat. But it’s a real nice lilting style of music that has a really great dance beat

Partial Transcript: Oh sure. Yeah. The history of the minstrel show is a very bizarre one. So it first started out as kind of a subset of English music hall. And in the late 1700s, there were a—I can’t remember the name of the guy. There was one particular music hall musician who had a blackface character he did that sang songs that were songs trying to arouse sympathy from people about the African slave trade. So he did his act and took it over to the United States because the music halls were linked up at that time. And it just became its own thing over the United States. So first, Ethiopian delineators. Of course, Ethiopia is the one nation in Africa that was not colonized. And so that’s one thing to keep in mind as we speak of this.
So Ethiopian delineators, that was the first thing in England and America. And then they turned into blackface minstrels because they started—they worked in circuses. And so that’s where a lot of these early performers worked is just as dancers or bone players. And then a little bit later on, there was a guy, Joel Walker Sweeney, who really innovated bringing the banjo into it. So you had a whole theater style that had just orchestras doing the work.
And then, it took a vernacular turn when the banjo came into it. And then you had a fellow, Dan Decatur Emmett, who’s known for writing the song “Dixie.” And he brought together another group of guys, and they called themselves the Virginia Minstrels. And they were the first four-part group, and they featured fiddle, banjo, tambourine, and the rhythm bones. And so that was the first time you had one full night of minstrel show performances. Before then, it was like one here, one there, and just a single act. But this is the first night of it all happening.
Interviewer
And these were white people?
Dom Flemons
Yeah. They were all white people dressed up in rags and with their faces blackened, you know. And it wasn’t high-class stuff. So it was like, you know, the jokes could be classier, but many times, they weren’t classier. So like any type of humor, it always pokes away at the status quo and much of the chagrin of modern people now. And so after the Civil War, you had African-American performers coming into the minstrel show because they were seeing how much money and business was being made by these white people pretending to be black. So then, all of a sudden, you had black performers that said, We’re going to take the troupes that these white people have done, and we’re going to do it better.
And so they became—they called them Georgian Minstrels. And so they were all black troupes of minstrels. And so they traveled—these troupes traveled all over to England and to Germany and to Japan and to Australia. And they started doing the touring circuit—first the white ones and then the black ones. And then, of course, there were like the Fisk Jubilee Singers were kind of like the offset. But they were playing in the same venue. So you had like minstrel shows was one type of thing that was more secularized. And then you had the Fisk Jubilee Singers that they’re coming into it saying, These minstrels aren’t doing black music. But see, now we’re doing black music. And they had their highly arranged versions of the spiritual music.
But you had this sort of like counterbalance going back and forth. You know, people like Frederick Douglass hated minstrels with a passion. And so there was a lot of—you know, but it was cheap entertainment. So it was really hard to keep that stuff down. So one of the things that evolves out of these black minstrel shows are these tent shows. So in the south going to the secondary town, these big black circuses—because at the time, you had segregation. So if you were an acrobat that was black or an opera singer that was black, you couldn’t get into a white show. So they made these gigantic shows that were gigantic all-black circuses that they’ve set up in a town knowing that everybody in the country would come and see them.
And a lot of different entertainers came out of that. So it was a minstrel show. But they had people like Ma Rainey who was a part of it. Bessie Smith was a part of it. Blues singers like Big Joe Williams were part of it. Lonnie Johnson. They were part of this sort of bigger idea of black entertainment. And then, of course, when the recording industry really exploded in the early 1920s, we started seeing—funnel in again. But again through the biases of the people who recorded it, we see a lot of blues, a lot of spirituals, a lot of jazz. And that was considered the blackish music by the community as well as the people that were producing the record. So we get this idea of black music being this, while white music could be country music, vaudeville, sentimental songs, hillbilly slapstick, and all of the stuff we think of as white music, and, of course, popular music, opera, and stuff like that. And so from that point, we start—we find that we have all these same troupes that go all the way back to the Civil War days that are still within how we think about music now.

Partial Transcript: There’s one song called “Old Zip Coon” that people know. And it was the theme song for one of the main characters. So Zip Coon was a character that was—he was a country black guy. But he was—thought he was very refined. So he would go into town. He’d have all his fancy clothes on, but he couldn’t speak properly. So he’d say a bunch of words wrong. And he had this particular theme song which is now known as “Turkey in the Straw.” (whistles)
Well, we usually hear it all the time during Thanksgiving, but that’s the song that goes back to those minstrel days, song like “Old Joe Clark” the same way. Of course, Dixie is another song that goes back to those early days. And these are songs that are still played now. Some—you know, not everybody knows that they have these deep histories. But they kind of moved the “Blue Tail Fly” is another one. They just moved it into folk songs and, usually, have taken out the words that were the most offensive parts of them.
But many songs reached back to this very early era because it was the first time we had American vernacular music that was considered truly American compared to it being derived old-world music in some sort of way. And so it’s really a foundational part of our musical identity.

Partial Transcript: Well, one of the things about dancing is that you know, it’s something that—let me think how I want to get that one together. When it comes to social dancing, especially in the old-time music, you have square dancing as one part of it. Then, you have a contra dancing. And contra dancing is more of like a more European style of social dance where you have certain figures that you do in repetition with your partner. And you usually have a big group of people making that happen. And square dancing is kind of like the more lowdown and funky version of dancing where there’s a lot more room to work within those patterns.
So thinking of contra dancing, so you’d have like, you know, a couple of calls like you allemande right, then you allemande left. Then you swing your partner. And you do all this stuff. And you learn this dance beforehand. And then you just do the dance when the music goes on. So square dancing is a thing where the caller will call out the figures. And based on where you are knowing what the figure might mean, you then do that figure. And so the caller has to control the dancers, and they kind of improvise different dances based on whatever it might be. You know, different callers said different things. Sometimes, they do it through songs so they’ll call it through a song. Sometimes, they just have a pattern, and they’ll just shout it out like a chant.
And that’s something that they say it reaches back to the African-American influence on social dancing in the Appalachians. And the theory behind it is that it used to have dance teachers that would teach you these dances. So, like I mentioned with the contra dances, you’d have a dance you already knew. So when you came to the dance, everybody would call, Hey, the dance number forty-two. And then you dance—you already knew dance forty-two because you’re trained in the schools. And so when you had the slaves on the plantation, the theory has been that they would see the people inside the house, and then they would take those dances and they would figure out how to do them outside of the house when the master wasn’t looking. And so they would call these figures that were something that they could understand and that they could dance to without being under the watch of the master. Then it just developed into its own thing.
And that’s something that’s a really interesting notion because it kind of shows you the sort of transmission of music that’s gone on in the United States. It really—it’s never a fully direct transition, especially in the early days when you had, you know, before emancipation. It was if you learn something, you had to kind of figure out how to learn it so that you could unlearn it in a situation you needed to, and then you could relearn it in a new situation that you needed to as well.

Partial Transcript: I only know just a little bit on it. I don’t know too much about it. Cakewalking though was built on this idea where you had very fancy dances that were going on in the house where you’d have the master and the mistress and all their guests being dressed up in nice clothes having these processions. And so, with the cakewalk, it was like—it was the black people finding a way, especially during the major holiday. So this is happening during like, you know, one thing called Junkanoo which is almost like Mardi Gras in a certain way in the Caribbean where you’d have these slaves. They have their day where they could as they please, and the roles reversed.
And the cakewalk developed out of this where they would dress up like the master and the mistress. But they would be really sleek looking, and they would then do really silly dances. No, I wouldn’t just say silly dances, but very skilled dancing that could be very comical in certain ways almost like a “Soul Train”—I'll say it like that—almost like a “Soul Train” where they could do their dances and show off their Sunday best or whatever their best clothing to everybody else in the neighborhood. And so it would just become this really elaborate event. And they’d say you’d win a cake at the end if you won, if you had the best moves, or if you have the best costumes.
Interviewer
0:47:54 Wasn’t it a parody on the white formal dancing in a sense?
Dom Flemons
Absolutely. Well, the folks on the plantation—they would see these formal dances being done. And so the cakewalk was like it would be a take on the formal dancing they’d see. So it had its own formality to it. But they would—it was definitely done in jest. It was all tongue and cheek on how to dance it, and what were the criteria if you wanted to win that big cake.
Interviewer
0:48:31 And then it was the white people who’ll then pick up on the black people parodying the white people.
Dom Flemons
That’s right. And yeah, because you had later on, in vaudeville, the cake—so the cakewalk became big as a local thing. Then, it became big in the theater and specifically to Ethiopian delineators that were—one was African-American. One was from Nassau. So one was a West Indian guy. The West Indian guy—his name’s Bert Williams. And the African-American guy—his name was George Walker. And they were known as Williams and Walker. And they were known as the Two Real Coons which was just a—because they were—they came in at a time when blackface minstrels, he was already in place. And as two urban young black people, they looked at that old stuff and they said, It’s really out of date. We just don’t relate to any of this stuff anymore, because we’re not like this.
And so, they happened to come across—they came across these African people in Dahomey. It was in San Francisco at the World’s Fair. And they decided, Why don’t we delineate our own characters off of these Africans that we just met here? And so they made their own African-American rendition of African people. So with that, in their act, they featured the cakewalk. And so it became so big that they actually took it all the way to England, and they taught Prince Edward the cakewalk. And so the cakewalk goes from this faraway tradition in the plantation where you had whites imitating blacks imitating the whites. And then all of a sudden, it gets all the way up to the world stage. And so that’s where a lot of this stuff fit is like just through what would seem like a very small segment of the population, all of a sudden, it becomes something that’s worldwide and on the big stages. Well, I guess, it’s not that crazy to think about. (laughs) We still see it now all the time.

Partial Transcript: Well, the recording industry is a very interesting sort of beast where just like now in the music business, it’s never built on artistic integrity. It’s just built on what’s going to sell for—to people. And so when the recording industry first started, it was—ethnic music was the stuff that was selling the best. And what they ended up doing was they were selling ethnic records to the ethnic communities in which would enjoy the music. So we’re thinking like right around the end of the First World War, for example. There’s a big influx of different immigrants coming into the United States. And so the record companies realized—because they were all based on New Jersey and New York—they realized that, Oh we can sell records to the Italians and the Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, or we can sell Ukrainian music to the Ukrainian people over in like, you know, the Lower East Side. And they just started working on that angle.
Of course, there was—by 1920, you had a situation where there was a songwriter—a black songwriter by the name of Perry Bradford who had connections with WC Handy. He started pitching his songs to the record company to be recorded by a black woman by the name of Mamie Smith. And so, through that recording, it was race records, because at that time that they were still going off of the teachings of Booker T. Washington—very strongly at that time. And so Booker T. Washington was about uplifting the race. And so black people become known as the race. And so, they treated the race as a demographic to sell records to. So then when Mamie Smith became big as a colored woman singing in front of a colored jazz band, it became a huge hit—it was called the “Crazy Blues.” And it led to the formation of race records which meant southern black people. And that was kind of the idea around race records.
So then right after that, they did the same thing with poor white people. And they used the term that was not—it was one that’s you go back and forth based on who you hear but hillbilly. And hillbilly became the other type, and that was for poor white people. And so once they set this kind of rules for the ethnic communities that were demanding a certain type of material, it led to the segregation of the music which I don’t think they originally had intended for necessarily. But thinking of stuff as business, it makes sense why they set it up that particular way. If they’re thinking of we’ve covered Greeks, Italians, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Indian, and then African. Also, West Indies stuff because Calypso was big. What is the next demographic? Okay. Southern blacks, and then Southern whites. All of a sudden, it starts making a little more logical sense more so than social sense. And so—but at the same time, it doesn’t take long for mass media to change people’s minds about what they think about things.
And so, that was in 1920 was when they made the first major race records. And from that point on, it was, I think, 1922 or ’23 was on the first hillbilly record started coming out. And that just changed the way we think about music all the time. So with the blacks in Appalachia though, see, that’s the thing. And so while black people were still playing music in the south and in the Appalachian regions—because it wasn’t reflected on the record—we have for the first time this sort of disappearing of the tradition just because nobody knew that that was something that was supposed to be a part of their culture. And again, the African-American culture’s always been progressive moving.
So thinking back to the beginning of the recording industry and what came before that, that’s not necessarily been on anybody’s mind for several decades even though there are familial ties to this music. Of course, there’s like, Oh well, I didn’t know that black people played the banjo, but great grandpa over here, he played the harmonica. He played really good too. But, you know, we don’t know why he was doing that, and there wasn’t a reason for people to necessarily search into that nor document it in a way that would, you know, that would help us a folklore documentarians to show that demographic.

Partial Transcript: Oh I mean when the colonial powers came in, they told the story. I mean that’s the thing—is when someone wins the culture wars, that’s who tells the story. And that’s reflected from the very first moment that we think about American culture. So who’s writing it down? These people that settled in America even though we know that there were people that were there beforehand. What is their story? It’s hard to say, because they didn’t win, you know. And that’s kind of the stuff you get into when you get into the deep part of the history.

Partial Transcript: In the post-digital revolution, it’s been interesting to see how two things has been happening at the same time. There’s been a rebirth in the interest in old-time music in a certain way just because people have access to it. I mean like for me, I caught the very tail end of the pre-digital world like if I had to find a song or if I was obsessing over a particular musician, I had to find it somewhere. I have to call every record store across the country until I found it and could mail order it or I could go down to the store and buy it.
And so each time I did that, I had to sit and listen to the record, immerse myself and then learn it. And that was a personal connection I made and an emotional connection I made from my journey. And so now, you don’t have to necessarily do that. You have things like YouTube now where there are lessons to learn anything essentially. And in a certain way, it kind of takes people away from the personal journey, because, of course, I had a second version of that journey when I first came up to North Carolina, and I started meeting musicians who played this stuff. So compared to me listening to a record, that is one step removed. I then was sitting next to someone who grew up with this story of music-making. And that was a different interaction. It was more emotional and the—me knowing that person.
And then, I learned the music. And that was a different type of thing. And I think with the technology, it’s very tricky because it makes it too easy to be disconnected from the person next door. Of course, the great connection is that you can become connected to someone across the world with that same technology. So it’s really interesting back and forth. I was thinking about actually Alan Lomax, the great folklorist where later in years, you know, a lot of people don’t know that he really delved into the academic and the statistical world of computers after he did his really famous field recordings. After he traveled the entire world, he decided to use keycard computers and create a style of computing to really categorize different types of music.
And it’s essentially what—when you go onto Pandora or Spotify or something and then there’s an algorithm that recommends a bunch of stuff to you. Alan Lomax—he created that. It was called the global jukebox. And it was based on an idea that he called cultural equity. And cultural equity was the idea that when mass media was created, it was meant to be a two-way stream all the time. But when it actually was implemented, it was three people had access to the big TV while, everybody else had access to the small transmitter which just costs a couple of bucks.
And so now, with the technology, it’s starting to go the other way where everyone has access to the big TV. And then, it’s a matter of everybody struggling to find out which one are the right transmitters to get your hands on. And so with traditional music, it’s—again, traditional music works in any situation. So it’s not like the music is going to go away per se. It’s been documented and re-documented, and people are still finding it just as endearing as they did back then.
But the one thing is just—that it’s not quite as close to the heart in terms of what most people see. There’s something that’s really nice about being able to sit around the circle with just a three or four others and being able to play tunes all night, and not worrying about what, you know, why you’re playing the tunes or what’s the reason for playing the tunes. It’s playing the music and the interaction between people and the community. That’s one of the things that makes it so special. And, yeah. Well, you know, I'd only hope that people would use the technology to try to cross those barriers and do something like similar to what I did. I was into the music. And then I made my journey out, so I could be near to the music. And so that’s something that I’d hope people would do.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think that the history is always so important, you then, you don’t repeat the past. When you know the history of where a song comes from or why it comes from a certain place, it only creates a deeper understanding, especially for me as a performer, it gives me a deeper understanding when I start—when I play it out on stage because I don’t have to explain all this stuff to people. But I can play the music to show, hey, this is music that’s several hundred years old. And I’ve got some history behind me that’s driving me to go forward. And I think that that’s reflected when people hear my music. And having lived in the South and being able to spend actually about a decade down in the South studying and also just spending time with people, I feel that there’s a certain way that I play the music that wasn’t there before I lived out in the South. And that’s something that’s really important because it’s hard to describe the North Carolina Mountains if you’ve never seen them before.
And once you’ve seen them, they become a part of you, because you can’t unlearn that. And that’s something that’s really important, I think, in general. It’s just knowing the history and knowing the places that you might be talking about to be able to really just taking just something a little extra. It's really hard to put it into words because it’s not tangible. It’s something that just becomes a part of your experience.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think when young people don’t know the history or they’re not being shown or presented the entire picture or the entire spectrum, it gives them a skewed view of life. And it leads them to get impressions of certain things that might not be fully correct. And so, you know, they can try to get passionate and get up on a soapbox about something. But if they’re not fully aware of all the ideas that they’re looking at, they’re just going to—you know, people would just shake their heads and say, Okay. And then they’ll just walk away knowing that they weren’t correct. At least now, because it used to be people would get really upset, and they would yell at you. But now with all this technology to soothe us, people don’t yell at you necessarily anymore. They just pick up their phone, and they walk away.
And when you're speaking with truth and you're speaking with the facts, those things are undeniable. And those are the things that will—even if people get mad and walk away if they can look back later and see that you were speaking the truth, they can’t deny what you’ve put out there. And I think that that’s something very important for young people to make that connection, see that the history means something, see that when they go to school and they learn something, it really means something, because if they don’t have it, then they’re in a deficiency especially in this world now where it’s just there’s so many false truths that are put out. Because there are so many outlets, it gives people a skewed idea of what’s real, what’s not real, what’s important, and also what are the best ways that they can be the best self they can be. And history can do that.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think that definitely speaking about where the songs come from, being able to play in the styles, and also just having more people who are advocates that if they know the information, they can spread the knowledge. That’s one of the reasons several years back, I decided to lean more into the educational—in the academic aspects of my music. Instead of just trying to go closer to popular music, I found that especially after Pete Seeger passed away in 2014, I thought it was—somebody needed to take up that story. I mean—because without it, I mean it could die. It doesn't necessarily have to die. But it only takes one generation for people to forget everything. And so it always has to be retold again and again and again. And so that’s the thing that I think has been an important part of my journey.