The scene was perfectly set in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts for Dom Flemons’ live score last week, with a house lamp and comfy chair off to the side to invoke the proper intimacy. “This series came out of a house show series,” announced Andria Brown, host of Memphis’ own Folk All Y’All, which had collaborated with Crosstown Arts to bring Flemons here. “So, it operates in a lot of the same ways, including that 100 percent of what we charge you goes to the artists who perform here.” That’s only possible, she emphasized, because the community’s donations to Folk All Y’All.
With that, the show was on, and Flemons cut a striking figure in his suspenders and flat pork pie hat. Behind him hung a screen, and around him were gathered all manner of guitars, banjos, and less familiar instruments that could have been a century old. For that matter, Flemons could have been a century old, judging from his garb and his knowledge of folk and roots music from those pre-war days, except for his youthful vim and vigor, and the gleam in his eye.
Flemons first rose to prominence as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the same roots string band that spawned Rhiannon Giddens, but that outfit was already history by 2013. Since then, he’s plied his trade as a solo artist or with his own band, The Traveling Wildfires. This night, in any case, was all Dom, but didn’t lack in variety for all that. In fact, he nearly burned the place down.
The crux of the show was part cinema, part concert, and part history lesson, all presented with great relish by Flemons, who clearly loves sharing his more scholarly side. Indeed, his bio describes him as “a folk musician, Black country artist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music scholar, historian, actor, slam poet, record collector, curator, podcaster, cultural commentator, influencer, and the creator, host, and producer of the American Songster Radio Show on WSM in Nashville,” and all of that came to the fore one way or another before the evening was over.
The crux of the show was a screening of The Bronze Buckaroo, a 1939 film starring Herb Jeffries, an all-around performer who also sang with the Duke Ellington Orchestra for a time. Flemons explained Jeffries’ motivations in a sort of preamble to his performance, “As the story goes, [Jeffries] was out on a 15-minute intermission between sets [with the Ellington band] and saw a young black child crying in an alley. His friends told him that he couldn’t be one of the cowboys as they played cowboys and Indians because there were no Black cowboys. And Herb wanted to correct that because he had gotten to know a fellow advocate for Black cowboy culture, the great Langston Hughes. And one of the things that Langston Hughes always made sure to tell Black historians was, “Don’t forget the cowboys!”
While having some Sicilian heritage, Jeffries once described himself as “three-eighths Negro” to the BBC, but such matters paled in comparison to his personal commitment to Black culture and art, and his determination to launch the B-movie series about “Bob Blake, The Bronze Buckaroo” stood as proof positive of that. Flemons, for his part, noted that it was originally a sound picture, but that the National Museum of African-American History and Culture had supplied him with a high resolution version to edit, sans audio. What he presented was thus not always easy to follow, all dialogue having been removed, but that hardly mattered. The point was the classic Western imagery, probably filmed in the scrublands of California, as a counterpoint to Flemons’ mastery of traditional cowboy songcraft.
Dom Flemons (Photo: Rory Doyle)
And so, as the opening credits rolled, Flemons launched into a plaintive yodel over his guitar, followed by a melody on some rack-mounted quills, a traditional pan pipe-like instrument popularized (for a time) by Henry Thomas. And lo and behold, the tune was none other than Thomas’ first record from 1930, “Charmin’ Betsy.” Though I’d never thought of it as a cowboy song, it was the perfect accompaniment to cowpokes moseying around the tumbleweeds, somehow both familiar and strange.
Flemons continued on with more selections from his 2018 record on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Dom Flemons presents Black Cowboys, including the classic “Goodbye Old Paint,” a harmonica solo during which he pulled a set of bones from his pocket to clack along with, and the straight-up blues “He’s a Lone Ranger,” concerning Bass Reeves, “born a slave down in Arkansas” but ultimately becoming one of the first African-American Deputy U.S. Marshals.
As the action rolled on silently, full of poker games and shoot outs and a good deal of joshin’, what mattered most was this music, bubbling up like some forgotten American crude, a collective dream we all half-remembered and some could even sing along to. In that sense, it was Flemons’ gift to our collective consciousness, a reminder of a mythic past too often forgotten.
The music was so captivating, the crowd barely noticed when alarms sounded. “Interesting,” I thought, “that the one sound he would add to the film would be a fire alarm.” That was when all of us did a double take, realizing that Crosstown Concourse’s real fire alarm was indeed blaring away. Still, it took Brown stepping up to the mic and exhorting us to evacuate before we removed our asses from our seats.
As it turned out, there was not even any smoke, much less a fire —that we could see — but it made for a bracing intermission as all of us stepped out into the chill night. Once a fire truck rolled up and declared the building safe, most of us were back in our seats in no time.
While typically Flemons would have an intermission after the film, in this case he dutifully played through the last minutes of the short film, then launched into the second half immediately. This was even more of a delight. When scoring a silent film, the danger can be making the music too scintillating, distracting from whatever ghostly images parade onscreen. But once the film finished (spoiler: the good guys won), Flemons could dig into his playing with even greater ferocity.
That was especially apparent in his virtuosic banjo playing, which has earned him a place in the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame just last year. Flemons also plays a mean Piedmont-style ragtime guitar, sometimes played locally by the masterful Andy Cohen (who was in attendance this night), yet Flemons was not above some simple strumming as he presented heartfelt folk songs. There was also rock and roll and blues on hand, as in his ode to fiery poultry, “Hot Chicken,” the East Nashville variety, during which he mimicked an old school DJ ad spot, “Now you’re listening to WDOM calling from East Nashville, Tennessee!” Then, reading the room, he added “then they turned on WDIA and it sounded like this!” followed by a disarmingly accurate imitation of young Elvis Presley. Thus Memphis was treated to The King himself extolling the flavors of “hot chicken, hot hot chicken!” for just a moment, and as the night wrapped up, we knew we could die happy.