The Lone Ranger was very likely inspired by Bass Reeves, a Black deputy U.S. marshal, and the defining version of Home on the Range was collected by John Lomax from a Black cook in San Antonio. This episode follows Dom Flemons, the American Songster, born August 30, 1982 in Phoenix, Arizona, of African American and Mexican heritage, as he digs those buried stories back out of the music. From high school percussion, coffeehouse guitar and harmonica, an English degree at Northern Arizona University, and national poetry slams in 2002 and 2003, he traced Bob Dylan and the Beatles backward to Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Mentored by Flagstaff folklorist Sule Greg Wilson, Flemons attended the first Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina in April 2005, met Rhiannon Giddens, formed Sankofa Strings, and by November 2005 co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The band played the Grand Ole Opry, Bonnaroo, and BBC TV, opened for Taj Mahal and Bob Dylan, and won the Grammy for Genuine Negro Jig in 2010. The hosts explain why he left in November 2013 to pursue the broader songster tradition, leading to Prospect Hill, the Smithsonian-affiliated Black Cowboys in 2018, Traveling Wildfire in 2023, and a 2025 induction into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in the promotion category.

• How minstrel shows and 1920s race records versus hillbilly records rewrote the banjo as a white instrument
• What Piedmont blues sounds like and how the bones, jug, and four-string banjo drive it
• Charlie Willis, Nat Love, and Bill Pickett, the Black cowboys behind Goodbye Old Paint and early rodeo
• Why Black cowboys became Pullman porters and how that network fed the civil rights movement
• Playing the quills on a neck rack while picking banjo, recreating the sound of 1920s bluesmen