Prospect Hill : the American songster omnibus

"As a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dom Flemons specialised in reviving pre-war African-American string-band styles, and now expands his range to include jazz, blues and R&B ... Flemons sounds as if he's sitting on the front porch enjoying himself. This is a cheerfully varied set".

Read review

"Dom Flemons, who ended his nine-year tenure as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops following a December tour, sounds like he had a lot of fun making 'The American Songster: Prospect Hill', his wonderful, variety-filled maiden voyage as a solo recording artist ... Having almost singlehandedly reestablished the long-dormant songster tradition once performed by many itinerant African American musicians that included blues, rag, pop, folk, hillbilly, hokum, and church songs, Flemons also shows himself to be a first-rate tunesmith ... No musician in recent memory has tackled so many different idioms with such sincerity and style as Flemons, making him easily the most gifted American songster of his generation".

"Dom Flemons' first solo album since leaving the hugely successful Carolina Chocolate Drops finds him coming out with all guns blazing, gleefully scat singing over clarinet and six-string banjo on Til The Seas Run Dry. It's as authentic a piece of early New Orleans-style jazz as you're ever likely to hear ... When he does venture into confessional singer-songwriter territory with Too Long I've Been Gone, what emerges is a song of timeless fingerpicked melodicism and lyrical economy that sits just as comfortably in the present as is would on a late '60s LP by Arlo Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk or Ramblin' Jack Elliott ... Undoubtedly one of the best albums of the year in its own right, Prospect Hill is also a portal through which would-be time travellers can enter on their journeys into previously undiscovered musical territories".

"The recordings of this two-disc set mash up a remarkable range of American roots music - from fife and drum to country blues, country and western to bebop, string band til R&B, traditional jazz to bluegrass, Chicago blues to hip-hop - that have been "refashioned ... to highlight the definition" of the songster "in a modern context." For these sessions, Flemons plays an array of instruments, including banjo, guitar, bass drum, quills, harmonica, cane fife, and bones ... The Omnibus is comprised of three parts, including two previously released recordings ... A kind of post-modern roots extravaganza".