Acclaimed folk artist Dom Flemons has won the International Acoustic Music Awards’ (IAMA) Overall Grand Prize in their 20th awards with his song ‘Traveling Wildfire’. The song also won him the Best Folk/Americana/Roots Award. Flemons is the first African American to ever win the top award in IAMA’s 20 year history.
Chicago-based Flemons is an American old-time music, Piedmont blues, and neotraditional country multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He is a proficient player of the banjo, fife, guitar, harmonica, percussion, quills, and rhythm bones. Known as ‘The American Songster’, his repertoire of music spans nearly a century of American folklore, ballads, and tunes. He was a member of the legendary Carolina Chocolate Drops from their inception in 2005 until 2013 and has released five albums in his own name, although two of those were collaborations with other musicians.
Carolina Chocolate Drops won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards. Flemons also received a Grammy nomination in this year’s Grammy Awards for Best Folk Album for ‘Traveling Wildfire’, reviewed in May on Americana-UK.
Flemons commented: “It is a great honour to win the Overall Grand Prize as well as the Best Folk/Americana/Roots category at the International Acoustic Music Awards. Over the past 25 years, it has always been my goal to create music that entertains, educates and inspires people of all communities. Using a variety of instruments and old-time music styles it has also been my mission to make sure the music that I inherited from my friends and mentors lives on into the present. Thanks to my team and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings for all of their support in making this prize a reality.”
