First Album of Roots Music Ever Made Entirely Using Instruments From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Collections, Guiding Listeners Through Hidden History of Roots Music
Listen To First Single “Shultz’s Dream,” Original Bluegrass Song Written For Arnold Shultz, First Black Inductee To Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame
“Leader in 21st-century folk music”
–NPR
“Dom Flemons is one of the most accomplished American Folk Artists… few have pumped as much lifeblood into tradition as he has.”
–MOJO Magazine
“Dom Flemons [is] conducting a scholarly exploration of American roots music’s many nooks and crannies, earning himself the nickname ‘the American Songster.’”
–Rolling Stone
Dom Flemons, the GRAMMY Award-winning musician and music scholar known as “The American Songster®,” will release his epic new album Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions on January 22, 2027 via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Recorded in the Nicholas and Eugenia Taubman Hall of Music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Making American Music is the first-ever roots music album made entirely using instruments from the museum’s 5,000-plus musical instrument collection.
By researching, composing, and performing music that both preserves and reinvents Black musical tradition, Flemons has ushered a Black roots music renaissance. On Making American Music, his third album for Smithsonian Folkways, he breathes new life into twenty-two historic instruments, including guitars played by Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, Lew Snowden’s banjo, quills made by Joe Patterson, and a number of 19th-century treasures. The result is a record that brings together Flemons’ musical talent and scholarly pursuits in company with remarkable backing musicians to present a vibrant collection of musical treasures. Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions releases via CD, digital, and as a 2LP vinyl set.
Today, Smithsonian Folkways shares the high-octane bluegrass single “Shultz’s Dream,” which Flemons wrote in honor of the first Black musician inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. Though he was never recorded, Kentucky guitarist Arnold Shultz was a prime influence on bluegrass originators Bill and Charlie Monroe.
Hear/share the official video for “Shultz’s Dream” here.
Performing solo, with his new, all-star Black string band The Traveling Wildfires, and backed by Smithsonian staff, on Making American Music, Flemons leads listeners on a journey through two centuries of music. Across twenty-one songs, Flemons performs Black string band music, early jazz, Afro-Caribbean melodies, African American folk songs, 19th-century banjo breakdowns, pre-blues songsters, Piedmont blues guitar, rhythm & blues, bluegrass, Hawaiian steel guitar, country blues, gospel music, and beyond. Making American Music also features a number of originals by Dom Flemons as well as his arrangements of songs associated with Monroe, Hurt, Tampa Red, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jesse Fuller, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Washington Phillips.
As National Museum of American History curator and co-producer John Troutman writes in the liner notes: “The making of this album provided one of those instances when the stars perfectly aligned—by artist, instruments, and occasion. Dom Flemons’s interest in the museum’s historical instruments was borne by decades of study, both as an instrumentalist and a music scholar. By the time he held the museum’s banjos and guitars in his hands, he had been long familiar with playing historical instruments… 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.”
As a young musician, Flemons used Smithsonian Folkways’ catalog as an entry point into the tangled world of roots music, inaugurating what was to be a lifelong relationship with the Smithsonian Institution. He performed at the National Museum of the American Indian (with the original Carolina Chocolate Drops) and at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. When he was named as National Museum of American History’s first-ever Artist in Residence in 2018, Flemons pursued research on Black roots music history and performed pop-up concerts in the museum’s galleries. At this point, Flemons and associate producer Vania Kinard dreamt up the concept for this expansive album.
Flemons recently assembled a supergroup of Black roots musicians to form The Traveling Wildfires, who join him on a handful of tracks. Percussionist and vocalist Dante’ Pope got his start as a member of the over 150-year-old Black spirituals performance group the Fisk Jubilee Singers before performing with Flemons in 2014 and on his album Black Cowboys. He was formerly part of Old Crow Medicine Show and was the Vice President of the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Recording Academy. Two-time International Bluegrass Music Association Momentum Award-winner and 2024 Steve Martin Banjo Prize Winner Tray Wellington has become a prominent performer on the bluegrass festival circuit. Brian “B.E.” Farrow has been performing with Flemons since 2014 as his main bassist, fiddler, and backing vocalist in live performances and on the album Black Cowboys. He was formerly part of the Hackinsaw Boys and Gangstagrass.
Extensive liner notes by Flemons and Troutman with creative direction by Vania Kinard illuminate the instruments, repertoire, and creative process behind this extraordinary convergence of American songcraft, musicianship, and sound.
Flemons is a Chicago-based, Arizona-born GRAMMY Award-winner, 2025 American Banjo Hall of Fame Inductee, and two-time EMMY Award-nominee. In 2023, the New York Times featured him among other musicians under the headline: “Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre.” Known as “The American Songster®,” Flemons is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar, historian, actor, narrator, slam poet, record collector, and public speaker. He is the creator, host, and producer of the American Songster Radio Show and podcast on the legendary Nashville, Tennessee, radio station WSM. A masterful player on the banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, fife, and rhythm bones, Flemons co-founded the groundbreaking Carolina Chocolate Drops. Flemons has performed at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Carnegie Hall, The Ryman Auditorium, The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Newport Folk Fest, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the Grand Ole Opry, and more, and has appeared in such documentaries as A Man Called Hurt – The Life & Music of Mississippi John Hurt, Give Me The Banjo (PBS American Masters series); The Blues Society; and The Real Wild West (CuriosityStream).
Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions LP Track Listing
Side A (17:51)
1. Shultz’s Dream (4:57)
2. Sourwood Mountain / John Brown’s Dream (3:50)
3. Bankhead Blues (2:35)
4. Long Journey Home (3:02)
5. My Baby Said Yes (3:27)
Side B (19:15)
1. Traveling Shoes (1:41)
2. DC House Party (3:33)
3. Island (4:46)
4. Country Quills (2:20)
5. Lost River Blues (3:13)
6. Star-Spangled Banner (0:44)
7. Briggs’ Jig (2:58)
Side C (20:39)
1. Night and Day (5:16)
2. Pay Day (3:52)
3. Blues Jumped a Rabbit (3:32)
4. Bye Bye Baby Blues (4:03)
5. San Francisco Bay Blues (3:56)
Side D (19:39)
1. Desert Sunrise (5:15)
2. Mother’s Last Word to Her Son (3:49)
3. Piedmont Picker’s Choice (5:23)
4. Take Me Back to Bronzeville (5:12)
Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions Instrument Listing
–1845 and 1847 model Boucher Fretless banjos, Baltimore, MD
–1950 C.F. Martin Co. Model #000-18 guitar, serial number 114993, owned and played by Elizabeth Cotten
–Circa 1962 Silvertone 12-string archtop hollowbody electric guitar, owned and played by Jesse Fuller
–1954 Bigsby quad-neck pedal steel guitar
–Circa 1936-39 Slingerland Songster Model 401 electric guitar, serial #114
–Circa 2020s Fartime Kazoo, played by Dom Flemons on tour, 2024-2025
–Circa 2020s Hohner Marine Band Harmonica key of Eb, played by Dom Flemons on tour, 2024-2025
–Circa 1939–41 Stromberg Master 400 acoustic guitar, serial number 507, built for Irving Ashby
–Circa 1890–95 Emory guitar, played at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival by Mississippi John Hurt
–Circa 1839–41 acoustic guitar by Martin & Coupa, New York, NY
–Circa 1945–50 Roger Junior model guitar, built by Wenzel Rossmeisl (likely with Roger Rossmeisl), serial #733
–Circa 1930s Full-Dress Washboard, built and played by Robert “Washboard Slim” Young
–1936 Ernst Heinrich Roth violin, Markneukirchen, Germany, played by Claude Williams
–Circa 1969 Gibson “Johnny Smith” model, owned and played by Johnny Smith
–Circa 1937 Gibson ES-150 guitar
–Circa 1950–53 Gibson RB-100 5-String Banjo
–1688 Stradivarius Cello, the Marylebone
–Circa 1870s 5-string fretless banjo, likely made by the J.H. Buckbee Co., owned and played by Lew (a/k/a Lou) Snowden
–Circa 1964-65 Vega “Vega-Vox IV” Tenor Banjo
–1990 7/8 size double bass, Testore model, made by Dante Gabute, owned and played by Ray Brown
–Circa 1880 Set of Bones, from the musical instrument dealer J. Howard Foote
–Circa 1999 maracas made by Latin Percussion Inc.
–1968 quills, made and played by Joe Patterson
Dom Flemons Tour Dates
September 24 – Findlay, OH – Marathon Center for the Performing Arts
September 26 – Tappahannock, VA – Essex County Museum
September 27 – Williamsburg, VA – Arts Quarter Music Series
September 28 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Caffé Lena
October 2 – Frenchtown, NJ – ArtYard
October 3 – Swarthmore, PA – Lang Performing Arts Center
October 4 – York, PA – Kable House
October 8-9 – Urbana, IL – CU Folk and Roots Festival
October 10 – Pelham, TN – Cavefest
October 14 – Bentonville, AR – The Momentary
October 17-18 – Austin, TX – Austin String Band Festival
October 23 – Burlington, VT – Lane Series
November 13 – Greensboro, NC – The Pyrle
November 14 – Wytheville, VA – The Millwald
November 19 – Berwyn, IL – FitzGerald’s
November 20 – Grand Rapids, MI – Tip Top Deluxe Bar & Grill
December 22 – Tucson, AZ – 191 Toole
December 23 – Phoenix, AZ – MIM
January 25-30 – Elko, NV – National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
May 6 – Little Rock, AR – Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
About Smithsonian Folkways
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the “National Museum of Sound,” makes available close to 60,000 tracks in physical and digital format as the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian, with a reach of 80 million people per year. A division of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the non-profit label is dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among people through the documentation, preservation, production and dissemination of sound. Its mission is the legacy of Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document “people’s music” from around the world.
