Dom Flemons’s outgoing voice mail message has a nice ring to it.
“Hello, this is Dom Flemons, American songster,” he says before instructing you to leave a message after the beep.
Most folk artists go by “singer-songwriter” or simply “musician.” But “American songster” speaks to a greater truth about the work Flemons, a multi-instrumentalist, has accomplished as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and now, since leaving that group last year, as a solo artist.
“Paul Oliver has a book called ‘Songsters & Saints,’ and he describes the songster as a person who plays and sings,” says the 31-year-old Flemons, who kicks off the Museum of Fine Arts’ Elaine and Jerome Rosenfeld Concerts in the Courtyard series on Wednesday. “I find a songster not only defined a lot of my favorite performers, like Leadbelly and [Mississippi] John Hurt, but it’s also what I’ve done on my own journey. I didn’t come into music thinking I would do it as a profession, but then I stepped into it and I’ve tried to retain my interests as a musician but also as a collector and fan.”
Since emerging with the Carolina Chocolate Drops in 2005, Flemons has been a torchbearer in contemporary American roots music, blending his love of old-time styles with a scholarly interest in their history. His forthcoming solo album, “Prospect Hill” (due July 22), allows him to stretch even further, with a mix of traditional and original songs that explore different moods and strains of Americana.
On the phone from his home in North Carolina, Flemons recently reflected on his past and how it will inform his future in the spotlight.
Q. “Prospect Hill” is your third solo album but the first since leaving the Chocolate Drops. What did you want it to capture that we hadn’t heard from you before?
A. With the Chocolate Drops, I created a lot of the sounds of that group as we were going. For this record, I really wanted to introduce people to my solo repertoire. I think people are going to find some similarities, but I really have a different repertoire of songs than I was able to put extensively into the Chocolate Drops. That was a group that was celebrating North Carolina’s old-time music, so there was only so much I could put into it before it was a digression into one direction or another.
Q. What’s a particular song or moment on this new album that you wouldn’t have attempted with the Chocolate Drops?
A. Every one of them except “Polly Put the Kettle On.” I really wanted to make a studio record, so I brought in great jazz session guys and worked very closely with the engineer. All the people I worked with for the Chocolate Drops — Joe Henry, Buddy Miller, T Bone Burnett, Jac Holzman — I took the ideas I saw when I was in the studio and tried to use them on my own album. But then I have my own discerning tastes. There’s a certain point as a musician you have to defer to the producer to have the final word. That’s just the way it works. It was nice for me to be the final word on this record.
Q. It’s apparent that you approach music from both the head and the heart. How do you describe that combination of taking an academic interest in music but also playing it with such deep feeling?
A. I’ve always enjoyed music as literature, compared to seeing music as numbers and math. When I sing, I really try to enunciate. If I’m writing a song, I need to sing it so you understand what I’m saying. I feel like a lot of times singer-songwriters aren’t taught that and they don’t do it. Even people I really admire — Tom Waits, for example — are very hard to understand. But when you hunker with the lyrics, it’s great. I try to think of people who influenced me, like Hank Williams, Jim Croce, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, where the enunciation and phraseology are very important.
Q. In the liner notes for this new album, you write, “As the year has progressed, I can proudly proclaim I see 2014 as the year of the folk singer.” What did you mean by that?
A. There’s a lot of energy and movement in the folk community that has been happening for several years. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, and I’ve seen it growing. I was in Australia earlier this year and thinking about “Inside Llewyn Davis” and the backlash that came from that soundtrack and that movie. They advertised it as a ’60s folk movie, but it wasn’t really that, which was OK. It was just a movie. But at the same time, they hit a nerve with a community of people that have historically been very finicky people. The folk-music community has kind of dug its own grave by setting up these boundaries that are so strict, nobody can come up in the ranks. When Pete Seeger died, that started the idea for me: “Holy [expletive], the definition of a folk singer in our modern world is finally gone.” Folk singers are spokespeople for their own communities, and I’ve been putting that idea out there ever since it came to me.
Interview has been condensed and edited. James Reed can be reached at james.reed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeJamesReed.