Traveling Wildfire

‘The image of the travelling wildfire reminded me of how music and stories can travel from generation to generation, bringing important lessons from the past into the present and the future.’ So says Flemons of his new album, comprising originals and new renditions of traditional songs. The former Carolina Chocolate Drop and Grammy Award-winner brings his dexterity on the guitar, banjo, drums, percussion, electric bass, electric guitar, and quills – the latter an African-American folk instrument from the days of slavery. Producer Ted Hutt plays guitar, with Los Lobos’ drummer David Hidalgo and Matt Poynn on pedal steel.

It's a rich-sounding set, from the opening, elegant waltz, ‘Slow Dance With You’, through the liminal spookiness of the title-track, on which he sounds like a velvet-voiced Leonard Cohen, to traditional pieces (including ‘We Are Almost Down to the Shore’, a spiritual from the Lomax collection) and covers of Eric Andersen (‘Song to JCB’) and Bob Dylan (‘Guess I’m Doing Fine’). Cuts like ‘Nobody Wrote It Down’ are drenched in atmospherics, haunting and pointed in its redressing of silences in the history of the American West. Silences this excellent music fills and reshapes into a new musical history.