Dom Flemons & The Traveling Wildfires

folk · americana · roots

Dom Flemons & The Traveling Wildfires is a Black string band ensemble launched in 2025 and led by multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons, who performs as The American Songster. Born in Phoenix in 1982 and now based in the Chicago area, Flemons co-founded the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005 and stayed with the group until 2013, winning a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album for its 2010 record Genuine Negro Jig. His solo catalog includes Prospect Hill (2014) and the Smithsonian Folkways albums Black Cowboys (2018) and Traveling Wildfire (2023), both nominated for Best Folk Album at the Grammy Awards, and he was inducted into the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame in 2025. He plays banjo, guitar, harmonica, quills, fife, jug, bones and percussion, and has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The band's rotating structure is modelled on Bill Monroe's practice of cycling players through his group, and the project was conceived around the 2025 induction of Arnold Shultz, the Black Kentucky guitarist who influenced Monroe, into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Its roster has drawn on bassist and fiddler Brian Farrow of Gangstagrass, banjo and guitar player Tray Wellington of New Dangerfield, vocalist and percussionist Dante Pope, who has worked with Old Crow Medicine Show, and Sule Greg Wilson, a fellow founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The repertoire moves across bluegrass, country, folk, gospel, blues and old-time string band music, mixing Flemons's own catalog with traditional material and tracing the Black roots common to those forms rather than treating them as separate genres. The group's first full touring year runs from spring to autumn 2026 across roughly eighteen dates, including MerleFest, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Grey Fox and Blue Ox, alongside theater and performing arts center bookings.

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Upcoming shows in Virginia

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