We’ve teamed up with Come Hear NC on a podcast series that explores North Carolina music one song at a time. This time, Dom Flemons talks about a recording of the song ‘Cindy’ that Pete Seeger made with North Carolinians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
Stick around after the episode to hear Dom Flemon’s ‘Sonoran Church Two-Step.’
Read more here.
DC’s newest music festival is more than simply a music festival. The word “festival” itself may conjure images of dancing, drinking and reveling with music in the background – and that’s all well and good. But what if there was a way to do this and explore more of why music serves as the backdrop for these joyous connections?
Enter Down in the Reeds, taking place on Saturday, October 19 at The Parks at Walter Reed. You’ll surely hear great music at this inaugural event, but chances are you’ll be deeply moved to explore more of the ways music positively impacts the human condition.
“I have been a huge believer in the healing power of music from my own personal experiences, but I also felt that embracing the topic of healing through music involved too much of a focus on spirituality,” explains Chris Naoum, co-organizer of the festival and founder of DC music initiative Listen Local First. “From speaking to folks, I realized that healing through music is as much spiritual as communal and all experiences are unique to oneself. That understanding really helped push the theme of this festival out into the open.”
Read more here.
Lil Nas X’s hit single “Old Town Road” now holds the stand-alone record for the longest running No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 songs.
A cross-genre of twangy country lyrics over trap beats, Old Town Road has left many wondering if it’s a country song or a rap song.
Today on All Sides, the changing genre of country music, its origins and more.
Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” has shattered Billboard Hot 100 records after 19 chart-topping weeks.
It’s a certified hit, but there’s one chart the country-trap track isn’t on that many say it should be: Hot Country. Billboard removed “Old Town Road” from country charts in March after the song broke the Top 20, claiming it was a mistake to label it a “country” song.
The controversy has sparked a national conversation about who’s included in the genre — and whether genre is a useful mechanism at all.
Journalist Nadra Nittle weighed in on the debate in a recent piece for Vox. She attributes attitudes about country music to the whitewashed myth of the American West.
Country-pop songs have been staples on country charts for decades, but “country-trap,” “hick-hop,” and “hip-haw,” as rap-country blends have been nicknamed, have yet to become standard in the genre. Since some fans blame this on anti-blackness, Billboard’s decision to pull “Old Town Road” from the country charts has raised questions about the purpose of musical genres and the historic exclusion of African Americans from country music.
“When one understands that ‘country’ music is a marketing genre and that black country people are a culture, one begins to peel away the layers of perception and the definitions of who should be playing a certain type of music and why,” Dom Flemons, the neotraditional country musician known as the American Songster, told me.
Black musicians have been prominent contributors to country music for at least a century — from DeFord Bailey to Ray Charles to Solomon Burke to Charley Pride. So why are there still such rigid ideas about what the genre should sound like?
We talk about the long tradition that paved the way for “Old Town Road.”
Show produced by Bianca Martin, in partnership with Smithsonian Magazine. Text by Kathryn Fink.
GUESTS
Dom Flemons, Grammy-award winning music scholar, historian and multi-instrumentalist; Founding member, Carolina Chocolate Drops; @domflemons
Charles Hughes, Director, Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College; author, “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South;” @CharlesLHughes2
Rhiannon Giddens, Folk singer and songwriter; member, Our Native Daughters; Founding member, Carolina Chocolate Drops; MacArthur Fellow; @RhiannonGiddens
Read more here.
During the settlement of the West, one in four cowboys were black. But their contributions have long been overlooked by the mainstream historical record.
One need only look at the backlash over 2019’s biggest single, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” to see how overlooked black cowboys have become.
When Wrangler jeans teamed with the rapper, the company faced criticism over what some claimed was cultural appropriation—that the cowboy image was the province of white America.
“Old Town Road” became the longest-running, number-one single in the history of the Billboard charts and spawned a wider interest in the tradition of black cowboys.
Read more here.
Dom Flemons received a Best Folk Album Grammy Award nomination this past year for his album Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys. Black Cowboys sheds a light on the music, culture, and the complex history of the golden era of the Wild West by following the footsteps of the thousands of African American pioneers that helped build the United States of America. In 2010, as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dom won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk for Genuine Negro.
In a conversation with Parklife DC’s Mark Engleson, Dom discusses his path from Phoenix to DC, the reception he’s gotten for Black Cowboys and for a broader history of the American West, and his upcoming gig at the Hill Center at the former Naval Hospital on Sunday, June 30.
Read more here.
Popular depictions of the “wild, wild West” in the 19th century usually include images of tumbleweeds, horses, gun fights, and white cowboys depicted by actors like Gary Cooper or John Wayne. That picture, though, isn’t complete. Many historians believe that up to a quarter of cowboys were African-American, and many were formerly enslaved or the descendents of enslaved people.
One person pushing to re-write the historical record is Dom Flemons. He is a Grammy Award-winning music scholar, historian and multi-instrumentalist. His latest album — “Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys” — was released in 2018. He joins us to discuss that project, an upcoming concert, and the ongoing legacy of black country traditions.
Read more here.
Lesley Riddle is an important yet mostly overlooked figure in the history of American music. An African American musician and folklorist, he collaborated with and greatly influenced the Carter Family. Now in its 12th year, the annual RiddleFest celebrates the life, work and music of this 20th century musical pioneer. Headlined by multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Dom Flemons, it takes place in Burnsville on Saturday, June 22.
As Ellen Denker, vice chair of Traditional Voices Group (the organization behind RiddleFest) explains, Riddle — who was born in Burnsville in 1905 and died in Asheville in 1979 — “played a significant role in the early development of today’s country music through his relationship with A.P., Sara and Maybelle Carter.” She says that Maybelle learned her distinctive guitar picking style from Riddle and that the repertoire of the Carter Family “owes much to Riddle’s song gathering in the southern Appalachian Mountains.”
Read more here.
When folk-singer Dom Flemons began delving into the cultural history of African-Americans in the West a few years ago, he conceived the subject as a quirky passion project. “At first it was just casual research,” he says. “But when I found out one in four cowboys in the West were African-American cowboys, that sent me on a trajectory to figure something out: Why don’t I hear more about black cowboys in contemporary culture?”
The end result of Flemons’ curiosity was Black Cowboys, released last spring, a deeply historically-minded album of Western songs that traces the forgotten cultural history and musical lineages of black cowboys in the American West.
Less than a year later, Flemons has been flummoxed and delighted to find that the type of history he was mining for his project has found itself at the very center of the pop mainstream, with artists like Solange and Cardi B presenting an aestheticized version of black cowboy culture to a wide audience in recent months. More recently, Flemons has been closely following the story of Lil Nas X, whose country-trap blockbuster hit “Old Town Road,” which incorporates visual, lyrical and musical Western mythology, has stirred controversy since its release. Today, Lil Nas X released a remix of the song with country-crossover singer Billy Ray Cyrus, who says he “loved the song the first time I heard it.”
Read more here.
The number one track on the Billboard Top 100 Chart right now is called Old Town Road with Lil Nas X.
He describes his song as country-trap, but not everyone agrees it’s country enough. Billboard quietly removed the song from their “Hot Country Songs” chart, saying, it “does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” As a result the song has ended up at the center of a debate on race, the Nashville establishment and musical genres.
