In the Fall of 2025, the GRAMMY Award–winning folk artist Dom Flemons was invited deep into the vault at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) to explore its landmark instrument collection, which is carefully stewarded by NMAH curator John Troutman. There in the cabinets among Ella Fitzgerald’s GRAMMY and 5,000 historic banjos, electric guitars, upright basses, fiddles, pedal steel guitars, and other instruments was the nearly 140-year-old Emory guitar played by Mississippi John Hurt at his legendary 1963 Newport Folk Festival appearance. Flemons was the museum’s first Artist in Residence in 2018, when the guitar came into the collection. It was then that the idea for this record was born.

Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions is Dom Flemons’s third album on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and marks the first-ever roots music recording of instruments stewarded by the Smithsonian, activating the collections and letting the world hear the results. In collaboration with co-producer John Troutman and associate producer Vania Kinard, Flemons carefully chose instruments that belonged to enduring Black musicians of the American folk music canon, including Elizabeth Cotten, Jesse Fuller, Irving Ashby, Mississippi John Hurt, Claude Williams, Robert “Washboard Slim” Young, Ray Brown, Lew Snowden, and Joe Patterson. Others selected from the collection belonged to American craftsmen and musicians, known and unknown, dating back decades and, in some cases, centuries. Ultimately, from the thousands of instruments in the museum’s collection, twenty-four are featured on the album.

Well before he joined Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and before his NMAH residency, Flemons had sought out Folkways records and Smithsonian Folkways albums as a college student and street musician at Northern Arizona University.

One of the nation’s most prominent folk artists, Flemons has earned the reputation of a trusted scholar and bold entertainer whose music resonates profoundly with audiences worldwide. He has performed at historic venues and major festivals throughout the United States and internationally, such as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Carnegie Hall, The Ryman Auditorium, The Newport Folk Festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, The Grand Ole Opry, and the opening ceremony for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

For nearly three decades, he has brought significant value to America’s musical heritage through both his solo career and as a co-founder of the groundbreaking Carolina Chocolate Drops. His influence was highlighted by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in a 2023 feature titled “Black Folk Musicians Are Reclaiming the Genre.” A GRAMMY Award winner and American Banjo Hall of Fame inductee, Flemons has accomplished all of this as a versatile multi-instrumentalist and self-taught musician, bringing virtuosity to the guitar, banjo, harmonica, rhythm bones, percussion, and the quills.

To Flemons, the connections he draws in Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions are not just historical, but based in real communities. “I’m not trying to only play American music’s greatest hits that are specific to those great artists,” he says. “My goal is to elevate the entire American catalog, obscure and well-known songs alike.”

Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions is both a living history and a vibrant listen. The guitars, banjos, basses, bones, and other instruments inspired Flemons to create one of the only albums where disparate and dynamic African-American musical traditions, including bluegrass, Caribbean songs, Carolina Piedmont music, Texas blues, gospel, jump blues, and rock & roll, sit side-by-side. After all, he has earned his moniker as “The American Songster,” guiding us through a hidden history of American music while giving us a tour of the instruments that live behind the curtain.

Troutman shares Flemons’s mission of bringing vernacular music to light. He co-curated an exhibit on music scholar Mack McCormick’s blues music archive, co-produced Smithsonian Folkways’ Playing For the Man at the Door box set, and wrote Kīkā Kila, a book about the Native Hawaiian steel guitar. Together, they co-produced Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions alongside Vania Kinard, who contributed to the creative direction of the album.

In the liner notes, Troutman writes, “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.”

The blend of sentient spirituality with tangible representation of the artists, via the instrument-artifacts showcased, adds a palpable sense of intrigue. Flemons is joined on the album by his new band The Traveling Wildfires (Brian Farrow, Dante’ Pope, Tray Wellington) as well as Smithsonian staffers Greg Adams on the Boucher banjo, Kenneth Slowik on cello, and Troutman himself on pedal steel.

Flemons’s prior GRAMMY-nominated albums on Smithsonian Folkways ignited a new appreciation for Black western history and Black country music. Given that his 2018 album Black Cowboys explored the pioneering footsteps of African Americans in the American West, and 2023’s Traveling Wildfire personalized his own journey, Flemons’s skill with a crafted vernacular makes Making American Music: The Smithsonian Sessions feel like walking alongside him in a continuing American musical journey.