SOUTHERN FOLK AND BLUES PATHFINDER JAKE XERXES FUSSELL MAKES ANTEDILUVIAN SONGS NEW.
UNLIKE MOST artists who appear in MOJO Rising, Jake Xerxes Fussell has never written a song in his life. He’s a song collector, a folklorist who delves into the neglected corners of the Old Weird America and rehabilitates the strangest and catchiest examples of lost tradition. Tales of peaches growing on sweet potato vines, and fishmongers who sell mullets with diamonds in their mouths. “I never had a desire to write music,” he says, at home in Durham, North Carolina. “For me, the search is the creative process, that’s the art.”
The latest examples of how Fussell breathes new life into esoteric blues and folk songs can be found on Out Of Sight, his third solo album. In these vibrant reimaginings, the academic and the soulful intertwine, and the songs tell stories that are at once earthly and magical. “The mundane is often transformative in a way that’s hard to explain,” he continues, “I’m attracted to songs like that.”
Fussell cultivated a taste for the arcane growing up around Georgia and Alabama. His parents were friends with bluesmen and folk scholars, and while Fussell listened to the Beastie Boys as a teenager, he never felt the need to reject the culture that surrounded him at home.
“I didn’t rebel against my parents because my parents were rebellious,” he laughs. “Growing up in the segregated
South, getting into blues music or quilting or basket-making was one avenue to appreciate value in African American culture. You don’t have to get too far into traditional music to see it’s extremely rebellious and nonconformist. In an era when everybody was getting into indie rock or whatever, it seemed way more radical for me to be into Ewan MacColl.”
A voracious and rigorous interest in history does not, however, mean that Fussell strives to recreate the sound of a 1920s blues session, or a 19th century Irish ballad. Starting out, he “learned Blind Blake songs, really complicated rag pieces, note for note, slowing down the record and trying to really hear what he was doing. I think there’s a place for that.”
But Fussell and his band place the songs in transcendent, country-tinged new contexts. “I try to find something in a song I can relate to on a personal level,” he says. “If you’re singing about food or a place or something concrete, it stays with you.”
And of course, writer’s block is never an issue when there are, say, libraries full of field recordings of Florida fishmongers to explore.
“People have asked me if I worry about running out of material,” he says. “That’s the last thing I worry about.”
John Mulvey