Tag: black cowboys

Black Roots

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It is clear to me that 2024 will be known for being a landmark year in the evolution of Black roots music. Not only has there been tremendous growth in the number of artists that are throwing their hat in the ring for roots music – whether it be country & western, bluegrass, folk or Americana – but it is also a time where the mainstream music world is responding to this outpouring of talent in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time. In many ways, it’s not surprising that things have grown in this fashion. Since I started my professional music career back in 2005, I have seen quite a few changes in the general musical landscape that have set the stage for a Black Roots music revolution.

In the early 2000s, the musical fabric of Black Roots had already been woven into the tapestry of American culture. Hidden between the more well-known pieces of Black music, these acoustic styles that didn’t fit into the traditional mold of blues, jazz, and gospel remained unseen and unheard, relegated to the fringes. Even though it was simultaneously considered a quintessential piece of the larger puzzle of American popular culture, Black Roots music was held in greater reverence for its historical significance than for being a living musical tradition played by modern musicians of the African Diaspora.

There were great pioneers who set the stage back in the early 20th century. There were songsters, string bands, folk musicians, storytellers, songwriters, composers, and community historians who shared their stories for the early folk song collectors who were searching for the purest forms of black expression. This happened while the commercial recording companies sent their representatives out to the field looking for music that they could sell to a record buying public who wanted a sound that not only reflected the past, but the future as well.

With all that in mind, my goal in becoming a professional musician came not from a desire to be a stage performer alone, but to also expand the scholarship and visibility of Black Roots music. By becoming a touring musician I found I was filling a void that most people are not aware of today. Having the opportunity to evoke the names of people who had not gotten their due in their own time was empowering. Not only have I advocated for the music, I have played it and arranged it to reflect the rich history of American music while at same time writing my own songs that represent the modern Black experience in all of its phases.

When I first began performing in Arizona, there was no Black Roots community for me to lean on, so I had to teach myself everything. I had to learn to play the guitar, the banjo, and all of the other instruments in my repertoire on my own. Before the internet, the library was my main resource for music and I grew up in a time when a good portion of all of the world’s recorded music throughout history was not readily available on streaming platforms. Sometimes, I had to search far and wide through stacks of CDs, LPs, and 78s to gain access to the music, just so I could learn how to play it. As I began to learn more songs, I found out about the history of the performers and the legacies they left behind. Later on, I met others who held a similar passion and those individuals taught me how to play different styles and shared more parts of the history that I didn’t know about.

We are now in an era where people have access to the music that was once very hard for me to find. In many ways, I was at the forefront of these musical discoveries in the roots music community, because I took what I had learned and planted seeds all around the world with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and on my own as a solo artist over the past 25 years.

Once I left Arizona and we formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, we were able to tap into a certain energy in the crowd that changed the paradigm for Black Roots music, so that now people can see the whole picture of American music in a different way. They could see a Black person playing the banjo in the modern world and be inspired to learn more about the African and Caribbean roots of the banjo. We did that for the better part of a decade and then I decided to move on into a new territory: Black Cowboys and Black Western music. This was a new area of music that the Carolina Chocolate Drops were not a part of in any way. The Chocolate Drops had focused on the music of North Carolina and this new musical venture was an exploration into my own family roots in the Southwest.

Back in 2010, I had come across a book called The Negro Cowboys, which encouraged me to research about African American cowboys of the West. In 2018, my research came together in my solo album, Dom Flemons Presents Black Cowboys, which came out on Smithsonian Folkways as a part of the African American Legacy Series. Having grown up in Arizona, I knew that the album needed to be a part of the National Museum of African American History & Culture so that future generations could appreciate and respect the history of the Black West as well as activate the communities that had been there all along.

Back when I released Black Cowboys, I was one of the few artists talking about the contributions of African Americans out west and their varied connections to country music. Not only was I sharing this lesser known history, but I was playing the music that we now celebrate as “Black Country” long before Beyoncé, Lil Nas X, the “Yee-Haw Agenda,” or any of the newer Black artists who have risen to fame in the TikTok era. Now that the concept of Black Cowboys has gone mainstream in music, television, movies, and fashion, it’s another reminder to me that the music I created had made a major impact on American culture in both a conscious and subconscious way.

The most important part of it all is that no one owns Black Country music and nobody owns Black Cowboys or the roots of Black music. However, nowadays I am noticing that people are trying to take credit for exposing the history when they have only scratched the surface of it.

What I have learned is that there are so many parts of the Black Country and roots music story that are still missing and are being left out of the media. There are many other artists who should be considered in the conversation and yet they aren’t getting their flowers. I have noticed the Black Country music narrative that has sprung up recently has actively disregarded the work of the many Black artists who are deeply connected to the legacy, including myself on many occasions. My hope is that people will take the time to acknowledge the ones who have paved the way for the current movement and shed light on their individual stories, too.

The main reason I have included extensive liner notes in all of my albums, including my most recent, Traveling Wildfire, is because I always make sure to give credit where it is due. The sources for my traditional songs are clearly laid out for anyone to see and my original songs are exercises in expanding the existing palette of roots music so that both can be presented to a new generation of listeners. I have seen my talking points being used to fuel many of the current conversations, but oftentimes there is no back reference to the work I have done. All of the fanfare has forgotten to give proper credit to someone who has spent the majority of their career trying to set the record straight. As a well known musician in my community, this exposes a general trend that is problematic for the current state of Black Roots music.

If it is acceptable for a mainstream pop star or the media to sidestep and steamroll the pioneers of Black Roots music, it can only lead to a narrative of uplift that will ring hollow in the long term. It will teach the future generations that sleight of hand is the only way to get ahead and that surface level fame is the goal and key to being successful. Bad ideologies take a long time to disperse once they have become a part of the general fabric of society, and if people continue to spout it the integrity of the music can be undermined without them even knowing it.

This is why I am cautiously optimistic for the current state of Black Roots music, because oftentimes it feels more like a one-sided competition than a community of Black artists coming together to be celebrated collectively.

Yet, on a positive note, I believe the current state of Black Roots music is very exciting. People are being activated by the work that has been done by the pioneers of the past one hundred years. They are reinterpreting, reinventing, and showcasing music that is becoming a viable part of the mainstream music industry. They come with a variety of sounds, instruments, and songs that will shift the template of American culture as Black Roots music always has and always will.

More voices are being added every day in places and spaces that would have been unheard of even ten years ago. It can be clearly stated that there are now plenty of young musicians in every field of Black Roots music and there is no shortage of new talent who have proven their worth on the stage, on recordings, and on social media.

The holistic landscape of the modern Black Roots music community is something that I am proud to have helped establish over the past 25 years. Major growth is upon us, but I feel like it can only happen if everyone in the community gets acknowledged, not just the “favorites” or the ones making the most money while begging for all of the attention. The connecting of dots that bind the past and future are within our reach through the technology we have at our fingertips; it is essential for us to use it with great care and responsibility.

I started my journey as the American Songster building a legacy upon a dream. I got the notion to write songs and play the old styles back when I was sixteen years old and this eventually led me to sell everything I own, jump in my car, and drive across America to find where that dream could take me. It then took me all over the world and brought me much acclaim, but I have never lost sight of what inspired me to start this journey.

For me, I’m just getting started and I’ll always be here, no matter who stays and who goes. I’ve done the work to make the music more accessible for others and I can hope that it has reflected well on my own legacy as well as the entire community I have tried to uplift.

Photo Credit: Dom Flemons by Steven Holloway.

The Show On The Road – Dom Flemons

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show,  Z’s two-part conversation with Dom Flemons, the Grammy award-winning American songster who has made it his mission to reclaim and rejuvenate the lost acoustic music of the past and bring it whistling brightly into the future.

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Born in Phoenix, Arizona to parents of African American and Mexican heritage, the ever-curious young Dominique Flemons went from playing drums in his school band and busking on the streets of Flagstaff with his fingerpicked guitar and neck rack harmonica to taking a chance that would change his life completely. He scrounged enough money to make it to the Black Banjo gathering in North Carolina, where he would meet Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson and begin a seven year run with their groundbreaking African American string band, The Carolina Chocolate Drops. They would go on win a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album, headline festivals and theaters around the world, open for Bob Dylan, play the Grand Ole Opry, and burst into the collective consciousness of young acoustic music hopefuls all around the world who were tired of the same stoic, hillbilly bluegrass and white-washed old-time songs played over and over around the festival campfire.

Dom Flemons: Many Pieces to the Puzzle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s fitting that Black Cowboys, the latest record from writer, storyteller, historian, and songster Dom Flemons, was released on Smithsonian Folkways, the non-profit label arm of the eponymous museum and its Center for Folklife — the album plays and reads like a museum exhibit in musical form. This collection of songs, from traditional Western folk melodies to African slaves’ field hollers to Flemons’ timeless originals, celebrates the heritage of African American cowboys in the Wild West.

The existence of black cowboys has largely been omitted from the greater historical record, relegated to forgotten dime store novels, dusty biographies, and seldom-sung songs. The commercial narratives that took the nation by storm in the last century, such as Wild West rodeo shows, singing cowboys, and myriad television shows and films, largely centered on whiteness and white heroes as the keystones of the pioneer West. Flemons understood the larger, more complicated picture — in part due to his African American and Mexican American heritage and growing up in Arizona. With this record and its exhaustive liner notes he brings these integral stories, these neatly interlocking puzzle pieces of black identities shaping the American West, out into the mainstream.

When I listen to this record and read through the liner notes it strikes me that the crux of the entire project is revisionist history and figuring out how to undo it.

One of the things I’ve found most interesting about the issue of revisionist history is that it creates even more weight to the work of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, because you start to understand why they were working for civil rights and first-class citizenship, compared to second-class citizenship. Up to that point, no matter how far you got in the status as a citizen, you could not be considered a first-class citizen if you were an African American person. This becomes extremely prevalent when speaking of early Western history. To put a black person on the same level as a white person was taboo up until even the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Nowadays it’s really hard for people to grasp that concept. When you aren’t in control of the narrative, you’ll find there are holes in it. My notion has been to add and to elevate different parts of the narrative so that when you bring all of the narratives together you get a truer picture of what the history is supposed to be. That was part of the reason I felt that this album was very important to get out there.

Being from the Southwest, I know that it’s a diverse community. The story isn’t just black and white. There are the Native American populations as well as the Mexican American populations and the different refugee groups as well. The Southwest and Western culture tends to have a very diverse population, because the open expanses of land give a lot of room for people to build a new life for themselves. Where there aren’t a lot of people, you don’t want to upset your neighbor, because they could help you in your time of need. When you read about the cowboys you start finding that the ideas of discrimination and segregation in the classic sense break down in certain situations where, because of the lack of numbers, everybody had to be working together. That called for a brotherhood and a kinship between all these different cultures, in a way that is very unique and is very reassuring, especially in modern times when it seems that the whole world is connected, but we still feel like, “Why have we never been able to get along?” But you find in different situations along the way people have figured out how to work together and get along with each other just out of necessity.

Are people surprised by the concept of the album? I can just imagine someone saying, “Black cowboys? That’s a thing?” How do you unpack for people that black folks have been everything and everywhere, just like white identities?

It’s a matter of perspective and a matter of representation in the mainstream. When it comes to cowboys, three things happened. First, you had the birth of dime store novels, sensationalized Western fiction that were written by people [back East]. They took Western stories and created a sensational picture of Western culture. It’s interesting to read about these too, because you do have several pulp novels that feature black cowboys in them, so you still have a bit of that culture in there.

The second wave was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. It was the first internationally recognized Western program. [Buffalo Bill] was definitely a Confederate-leaning individual, even though he was part of the communities in Kansas that fought against slavery. Buffalo Bill, he had black friends, he had Native American friends, he was good friends with Sitting Bull. But at the same time, ideologically, when the Wild West show went out there [on tour], it painted Buffalo Bill as a white savior, at the forefront of all of this. With it being presented at Madison Square Garden and all over the world, including Australia, Germany, England, France, and Spain it painted the picture of Western American culture being a white phenomenon and having white heroes that are in the forefront. That’s the second level.

The third thing that really cemented the image of the cowboy in place were the singing cowboys: Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, and a whole slew of other folks following behind — like Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music. That set the stage for the cowboy being a white man in a cowboy hat and chaps, saving the day. It caught on with the adults and the kids, and the kids carried on these same traditions. Once you see that sort of representation and there’s no narrative that conflicts with that, there’s no need to consider that there might be a different narrative.

Now we’re over a hundred years down the road from all three of those things. The idea that black cowboys are representative of cowboy culture is something that’s been chipped away for many years. When it comes to representation and African American culture in the West you’ll find that there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

How do you take an album that might come across as a “time capsule” or historic novelty music and show it’s more than just a bridge to yesteryear? How do you view this music today, in a modern context?

There was one thing that really set this off. At first I faced that problem. Of course, I had my interest in cowboy music in general; I love Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, Riders in the Sky, etc. That interested me in general, but I came into this particular issue as I started trying to make this into a compelling narrative so that people won’t just pass it off as nostalgic music.

I was talking with my father about one of the cowboys I was reading about, a fellow by the name of Nat Love, who was one of very few black cowboys to write an autobiography. He worked out of this town called Holbrook, Arizona. Then he became a Pullman porter working on the railroad lines. The history of Pullman porters was what we would call a catalyst for the early civil rights movement. One of the main Pullman porters, a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph, started the very first all-black union called the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Black people who were Pullman porters were able to elevate themselves socially, because they began to know the most prominent white patrons from traveling with them. At first they just worked for tips, but then they wanted to work for a salary, so A. Philip Randolph helped the porters raise their wages.

The porters were also the connecting point between every black section of town in the United States. When it came to delivering the all-black newspapers and when it came to 78 RPM records, the porters had supplies that they would sell to people. They connected the North, South, East, and West of the United States. Later on, in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, Randolph was one of the people who helped Martin Luther King Jr. organize the bus boycott. My father told me that; he was a porter for a chair car, the local/regional train car.

Seeing that someone like Nat Love was a cowboy and later a Pullman porter connected this ancient story of dusty old cowboys on the range into a very modern African American context. That was how I connected the narrative so it would be modern. This gave me a strong sense of why we don’t think about black cowboys. White cowboys continued to ranch and become proprietors on their ranches. But of course in the African American community nostalgia, looking backwards, thinking about the old home place is a whole different story. Cowboy music is connected to country music and one of the biggest parts of country music is nostalgia. In the African American community, nostalgia has always been a double-edged sword.

When I hear you talk about your connection to your music, the dots seem to connect pretty directly, but you’ve put in time, done the research, given it care, and given yourself an in-depth education. How do we make it as easy as possible for people to also trace those threads without all of the rigorous work you put in? Or do you think that work is necessary and maybe something everyone should experience?

Well, I think technically everyone should work through all of that. That’s something that I would like to have happen.

Especially since there are so many of us who haven’t had a choice but to put in that work.

Absolutely. [It all started for me by] being a big fan of Texas country blues music, which is part of my grandfather’s culture. It was very natural to listen to people like Lead Belly, Henry Thomas, and Lightnin’ Hopkins even. All of that stuff is black Western culture from the descendants of these cowboys. I wanted to bring that stuff into a single room. I also went to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, and I met several of the cowboys. Don Edwards, a legendary cowboy singer who has spent a lot of time talking about the influence of black cowboys, told me about how all the black cowboys were called black vaqueros. He told me about Mexican vaqueros and how they were the original cowboys. It opens up Spanish and Mexican culture being part of Western culture starting three hundred years before the time period we cover on the album. That’s a piece of the puzzle.

It’s obviously a very complicated and complex puzzle, but it’s not necessarily more complicated than just the narrative of America we’re already familiar with — the melting pot of cultures and backgrounds. It’s a matter of putting those pieces together. You’re adding more colorful pieces to the puzzle they already have half-built in their heads.

Overall, I really wanted to be able to give Black Cowboy 101. Like the quote from Mike Searles that I used in the introduction. When people think of the birth of the West they think of it as the birthplace of America. If you think of it as only white America, you would get the impression that only white people are true Americans and everyone else is an interloper. If you start adding these other people — Mexican vaqueros, African American cowboys, and even Native American cowboys — you get a better sense that it’s not only the birthplace of America, but it’s always been multicultural, from the beginning.

Photo by Timothy Duffy