Artist:     Dom Flemons

Album:     Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus

Label:     Omnivore Recordings

Release Date:     2.28.20 90

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When I first got this new-to-me release from Dom Flemons, I slipped disc 1 into my car’s player as I cruised down Florida’s highway 441. Yowsa! I was immediately smiling and tapping my “clutch foot” with the boys in the band as they let things rip for all they are worth on the opener, “Til The Seas Run Dry,” complete with a woodblock solo that could raise the infirm out of their chairs and have them struttin’. As I listened, tapped and smiled on, I thought Flemons sure has gathered up a fine mess of good old obscure songs that have flown under my blues, old timey, and whatnot radar. It wasn’t ‘till I was safely parked and reading the fine print, I saw that Flemons had written a bunch of them, tunes that seamlessly sound and feel like they were written 100 years ago, minus thank goodness, the recording tech of that era.

This former Carolina Chocolate Drops co-founder—and no stranger to PBS viewers—certainly lives up to the appellation “American Songster” in his omnibus of My T Fine songs and some unique instruments, e.g., Big Head Joe, a one-of-a-kind banjo with an 18-inch head, as opposed to the usual 11-inch diameter.

This double disc is comprised of his two solo albums, Prospect Hill and What Got Over along with what the record company calls 11 bonus tracks, but Flemons just calls them “The Beats.” In his short dissertation, included in the very complete and artistic booklet, he explains why “the beats”—which I would call just stripped-down instrumental tracks of several of the songs—are important to him, a former high school drum-and-bugle corpsman. Educator that he is, I also learned from “They Got It Fixed, Right On,“ a major hoot written by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey, that a goodly amount of my song catalog is “hokum,” another term for double entendre or sexual innuendo, and that’s a good thing (good example from that song: “A man came home ’cause he felt kinda queer / Knocked on the front door, run to the rear / Called up Poppa, but the very next day / Somebody took the back door away.”

Totally non-hokum is Dom’s “Too Long (I’ve Been Gone).” For me, it as good a folk love song as has ever been written, and I hope it’s not too long before we hear from him again.

—Ken Spooner