I am the lore
North Carolina’s songfinder general weaves new folk art out of old material. By John Mulvey.
“FOLK MUSIC,” wrote Bob Dylan in one of the more trustworthy passages of Chronicles, “was reality of a more brilliant dimension… It was life magnified. Folk music was all I needed to exist. Trouble was, there wasn’t enough of it.”
Jake Xerxes Fussell, a singing folklorist from Georgia who currently resides in North Carolina, would probably beg to differ. Back in 2019, when his exceptional third album Out
Of Sight was released, Fussell told MOJO about the boundless reserves of folk songs still to be reclaimed. “The last thing I worry about is running out of material,” he said.
Fussell’s the sort of folk singer who makes an art of picking the richest songs, honouring their historical and cultural contexts, and making something new and idiosyncratic out of them. He has the charm of the best bar raconteur, a storyteller who can sell fantastical yarns in a companionable way. Out Of Sight featured his version of a Florida fishmonger’s cry, where shoppers were promised mullets with diamonds in their mouths. Magic realism transforming the everyday, then and now; life magnified.
Good And Green Again moves the narrative on a little, while staying essentially true to his roots (Fussell’s father was also a folklorist).
The tunes are still naggingly memorable, but often less convivial, more melancholy. Nineteenth-century soldiers make lingering goodbyes to their sweethearts; mills burn down. The most familiar song is The Golden Willow Tree, a 17th-century naval adventure also known as, among other things, The Golden Vanity. A cabin boy swims across to sink an enemy ship by boring holes in its hull, promised rewards by the captain for his bravery. In some versions, the cabin boy succeeds and survives, but Fussell offers no such consolation. After nine looping, elegantly unhurried minutes, the boy is betrayed and left to drown.
There are affinities with Nathan Salsburg and Steve Gunn, and their sometime collaborator James Elkington, the British multi-instrumentalist who produces Good And Green Again. Fussell has been subtly enhancing his sound for a while now, and layers of horns, strings, piano and steel flesh out the likes of Rolling Mills Are Burning Down, without ever distracting from their core simplicity.
But even that simplicity, it transpires, can be malleable. Lyrics apart, Rolling Mills Are Burning Down barely resembles Fussell’s source, a raw 1965 recording by North Carolina banjoist George Landers. The melody might as well be a Fussell original, and indeed Fussell makes his formal debut as a songwriter on four tracks here. Three of them are instrumentals, ethereal roots compositions that extend the album’s dream-like atmosphere while giving gothic and ambient clichés a wide berth. One, the closing Washington, takes folk art – the words embroidered on a hooked rug from the late 19th century – and makes a song out of them that sounds as old, and as new, as everything else on this most understated of albums. “I never had a desire to write music,” Fussell told MOJO in 2019. But now he does, and where he goes next will be illuminating; an emergent figure in a folk revival that keeps reinventing itself, in perpetuity.