When Dom Flemons first came across the story of African American songster Gus Cannon, one fact took him by surprise. "[Gus Cannon] was a blackface performer, but he was a black man," Flemons says, recalling his initial reaction. "How can this be? That you can have an African American man be a part of a type of entertainment that, when I’d read about it in books, they would say that it was demeaning to black people?" Dom pursued this question in his own historical research and eventually