Dom Flemons (photo by Tim Duffy)

We noticed a few months ago that Dom Flemons started “liking” and re-posting some of our posts on Facebook. Grateful for his enthusiasm and advocacy … and not wanting to let any good deed go unpunished…we reached out to see if he’d be willing to spend some time with us talking about murder ballads and his career in folk music.

A professional musician for the last decade, Flemons has made a name for himself as a performer and folklorist, breaking into national prominence with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Since then, Flemons has been performing and recording as a solo artist, with his most recent album, Prospect Hill, appearing last year. In solo and ensemble work, Flemons has sought to master the traditional forms and present authentic and often unheard strains of American folk music, especially the tradition of African-American string band music from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today’s post and the next post will feature our conversation. Today, we’ll discuss Flemons’s original murder ballad, “The Ghost of Jim Reilly,” written before his professional career began, and talk about murder ballads that figured prominently with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and Flemons’s earlier group, Sankofa Strings.

MBM: Dom, thanks very much for talking with us today. I believe I first heard your music when my fellow blogger, Pat, posted a link to you playing “Georgie Buck” on the grounds of UNC-Chapel Hill.

DF: Yeah, that’s right, when we were part of the Great Eight [of 2007] for the News & Observer. Yeah. Those are good times, man. [Watch the performance here.]

Well, “Georgie Buck” is not a murder ballad – maybe an elegy – but I hope you’re willing today to go back to some of your older material, and share your thoughts about the genre, how it feels to you as a listener, and how it fits within your work as a musician.

Oh, sure thing. You were digging deep. You found “The Ghost of Jim Reilly.” You’re no slouch here with the research. Anyway, I’m all about it.

This wasn’t going to be my first question, but now that you’ve brought it up, tell me a little bit more about how “The Ghost of Jim Reilly” came to be.

I wrote that in college. The video on YouTube was done in about 2002, I believe. At the time, I was writing a lot of songs. When you pick up the guitar, you want to write songs. You get influenced by people. I was in a period of trying to get the feel of a lot of older songs.

I was in a History of Photography class. We were in a section about daguerreotype photos and silver nitrate collodion tintypes. People used to use photos as a way to analyze mental health. That’s why a lot of people don’t smile in the pictures. If you smiled or showed any emotion in the pictures, that was a way people could say, “OK, this person’s crazy because of this, this, that, and the other. Their forehead looks a certain way,” etc. They used a lot of physical cues that now we find completely absurd, but that’s how they used those things.

I saw in this class a picture of a young boy, maybe 12 years old. He’s sitting on a stool. A little caption handwritten under the photo said, “Murderer.” That image just really struck me, and so I decided to try to make up a story that would tell this particular person’s story. I had been listening to a lot of murder ballads, educating myself in folk music of different sorts.

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