Biography

Business Contact: Prentice Mills
Red Opel Records
info@redopel.com


Promotion: Mary, Red Opel Music
info@redopel.com



Prentice began singing and playing piano professionally fifty years ago as a teenager, the only civilian member of an otherwise all-convict band at a federal prison outside El Paso, Texas. At fourteen years old Prentice was asked to join The HyTones, a group of incarcerated professional musicians who performed regularly at military installations in the Southwest as part of a federal inmate "work release" program. Playing an extensive repertoire that included everything from jazz to classic country music, the band expanded his musical vision, stretched his developing skills, and began a lifetime of songwriting and musical composition.

Over the intervening decades Prentice has documented each twist and turn in a very unusual life with an unusual collection of original songs. The best of Prentice's large catalog of songs is now being recorded and released on Red Opel Records. It is a far ranging collection of true folk and Americana which tells genuine stories of life in America from the 1960s to this 21st Century and lifts up life, love and traditional American values.

The recordings, mostly ballads in the folk, singer/songwriter, classic country and Americana genres, feature Prentice not only as a vocalist, but as an accomplished multi-instrumentalist on guitar, piano, keyboards, pedal steel guitar, hammered dulcimer, mountain dulcimer, harmonica, bass, percussion and whatever else is required to tell the story and shape the song.

Prentice wrote his first song, "Absence Is To Love As Wind Is To Fire", in 1965 at the age of fourteen. In the intervening years he has compiled an impressive catalog of more than two hundred songs. In the early 1980s he composed and produced 14 hours of production music tracks for the internationally distributed Synthonic Sound Music Library, contributing the musical soundtrack to many documentary films, radio and television commercials.