There are many reasons you may know the name Jake Blount. Perhaps it’s from the Providence, RI-based musician’s excellent 2020 album Spider Tales, which earned praise from outlets like The New Yorker for both Blount’s virtuosic musicianship and for his interpretations of Black and indigenous songs. Or maybe you recall Blount, a multi-instrumentalist, receiving the coveted Steve Martin Banjo Prize that same year. There’s also Blount’s writing — informed by his background as an ethnomusicologist — like his Paste essay “The Insidiousness of ‘Afro-Americana’.” That piece was a direct rebuttal to a racist article that lumped Black Americana artists into one category, one in which they were unfairly (and illogically) pitted against one another. It's safe to say, then, that Blount is a true multihyphenate and an important, necessary voice in roots and old-time music.
He’ll play the Station Inn Tuesday night, for a show that’s sure to be as informative as it will be entertaining. The Scene caught up with Blount to discuss returning to live performance, interpreting the songs of others and expanding the popular definition of Black folk music.
You’re playing the Station Inn. Is this your first time performing at the venue?
This will be my first time under my own name. I played there with my band Tui, I think right before the pandemic hit. It was one of my last shows.
What does it mean to you to headline such a beloved and historic venue under your own name?
It's a dream. And I think it's really exciting to be there doing the specific thing that I do, and knowing that it's in this historic place where so many awesome Nashville acts have played and where so many of my heroes and the people I look up to have toured through over the years.
You’ve been able to get back out on the road some now that venues are opening back up and people are going to shows again. How has that been? Do folks seem more excited than ever to see live music?
I think it goes in waves. I think a lot of people are still tracking the numbers where they live. And in moments where the numbers are low, when we're between variants or what have you, people seem really excited to come out and enjoy the music. And we’ve played some really great shows. Then once another big wave hits, the shows get very sparsely attended again. And it seems like we're just gonna have to be aware of this; it's almost like a weather pattern. But for the most part, I would say people are really happy about what it means to be coming back. And that even at our more sparsely attended shows, people there are really engaged, and they're really appreciative that they get to do that.
I’d love to talk about your most recent song, “The Man Was Burning.” I read the song originated from a John Lomax field recording you found during quarantine. How did you discover the song and what drew you to record your own version?
I was going through the Smithsonian Folkways archive working on a playlist for them, and found it on this compilation record called Virginia Work Songs. I always get excited when there's a compilation that's on Virginia music. A lot of the music that's out there is from the mountains in western Virginia. My family's from the Tidewater, near the coast — far southeast. So finding a record like that, that incorporated both places, was really exciting to me. I was able to find things that were from not far from where my family's from, and “The Man Was Burning” is one of those songs. As far as what drew me to play it, I just really liked how it sounded musically. It had a cool drive to it and a really cool intensity that I liked.
And sometimes when you're playing old songs, it can feel like the tendency early on was to tackle really intense material and really intense subjects in casual or whimsical ways that don't necessarily communicate that intensity to a modern audience. It was an artistic choice, and it was where they were at the time, but it doesn't always feel meaningful to me as a performer. So, it was exciting to be able to approach it from a different angle.
You were able to rework some of the song’s lyrics to reflect current issues and did so in a way that still retains the spirit of the original. How do you approach finding the sweet spot between making a song your own and respecting the source material?
It is definitely a case-by-case situation. And this particular song, the only thing that really bugged me about it is that there's there's a broad tendency, I would say, in religious music from that era, to be really concerned with gambling, specifically. And I don't really care if people gamble. I think putting out a song that is so condemnatory of something that I don't care about didn't feel right. I can wind up in a tough spot. If you change the lyrics to an old song like that, and if it's perceptibly a rewrite of the original song, it tends to lose a lot of its magic. And the middle ground that I found is, usually, to find something that still fits in the original cultural context.
For “The Man Was Burning,” I decided I would change it to be about someone who's hoarding wealth and hoarding money, which is something that I see as a really big problem here in the modern day. But it's something that's also condemned biblically, right? Even coming out of that fire-and-brimstone Christian perspective, it would have been considered wrong at that point in time. For me, it's about finding spots where my ideals and the things I want to express do square with the original cultural context of the song. And then I think that opens the door much more comfortably to a rewrite that doesn't feel like it's forced.
You mentioned that it was the driving feel of “The Man Was Burning” that initially attracted you. I’m a big fan of the way you arrange your songs, that one included. What does arranging a song look like for you?
I would say that’s changed a lot over the past couple years, obviously, because there weren't any people in the studio. I did everything in my bedroom. So, I wrote all of the parts for “The Man Was Burning,” and I played everything but the bass, which was a very different process for me than something like Spider Tales, where a lot of that stuff was put together over the course of a few years. … For the new stuff that I've been working on, it's been very different because I am opening up the door to a wider spectrum of Black folk music than I have in the past.
Before, I don't want to say I was restricted by the people I was playing with, because that's wrong, but we had a certain skill set in common that we were there to use. And no matter how good we were at it, it was going to fall within a certain set of parameters. If I'm by myself, working something up as an arrangement in a vacuum and then sending the parts out to other people, it lets me you know, say, “Oh, this song works better as a rock ’n’ roll song, I don't need to make this into an old-time song.” And I think that's where I landed with “The Man Was Burning.”
Tell me more about the wider spectrum of Black folk music you just mentioned.
I think one of the things that has been — I'm not sure what the word is, restrictive or violent — in the suppression of Black culture and Black music in this country has been that we have never been in control of what the definition of our folk music is. If you look back at the early folklore, it's John and Alan Lomax who set out to find Black folk music and went immediately to prisons, right? And we're digging up stuff that they found there and completely ignoring the ascendant Black middle class of the same era, who were making completely different kinds of music in their churches. And we’re ignoring a lot of the Black string band musicians.
John and Alan Lomax, they made some recordings, but early record label folks didn't believe that music would be profitable. You look at how unprofitable gospel recordings were back in the day and how, for a large part of their history, record labels were hesitant to invest in that. There's a lot of stuff that never got recorded back in the day. … I also think that to the folkie crowd, what is considered folk music is still under white control, and that they’re not going to be willing to welcome something like hip-hop or rap into the space. Like, me making a rock ’n’ roll song is going to be a step too far for some people, even though rock and roll is quite clearly Black folk music. I think we have to start owning the fullness of what we've made. And I think that we have to stop waiting for someone to give us permission to put these things in the same space as one another.
How would you recommend a music fan find Black folk music that doesn’t fit neatly within those restrictive parameters? Do you have any favorite resources from your own research?
Definitely. So, I think part of it is not so much that it's difficult to find the music. But it's difficult to know what to look for. A big key for me, as far as that goes, has been just reading biographies of artists, because they all knew each other back in the day. It was through reading a biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe that I learned about Arizona Dranes, and things like that. Then I could go look her up and her stuff is very easy to find.
Sometimes that's not the case, though. And I think for people who maybe don't know what names to search, I found the Smithsonian Folkways archive really easy to parse in that way, because it gives you filters based on, for example, what ethnic tradition the music belongs to. … This stuff is out there. And especially in the age of the internet, it's easy to find. It's just a matter of knowing what keyword to search, and there's no easy trick to that part. That's just reading and research and word of mouth for me.
You mentioned recording in your bedroom and approaching music creation differently than you have in the past. Will “The Man Is Burning” be part of a larger project? Or do you otherwise have plans to release new music this year?
“The Man Was Burning” is a standalone single. It's not going to reappear on anything moving forward, but it definitely shares a certain perspective and a certain creative process with other stuff that I have done, which I can't say very much about, but which will be on the way in the next several months. There will new stuff coming, but I cannot give it to you.
Later this month you’ll perform as part of the inaugural Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival. What does it mean to you to be part of that, and how do you view the importance of that new festival within the broader live music ecosystem?
I'm very excited about it. I do have to own, for the sake of transparency, that the organizer is one of my best friends. So, I am excited for her, knowing how much work she's put into this project. But more broadly, festivals like Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival are really important in that this is going to be one of the first times that there's been a public, commercial festival that is inviting the folk music crowd onto Black territory, as opposed to inviting Black people into the white folk music crowd’s territory.
And I think that it's something very different to invite Black people in, in a way where their presence and their respectability as artists is dictated by the perspectives of another group of people, as opposed to having us be running the show and being empowered to do what we want and own all the different aspects of what it is that we do. We haven't really been empowered to do that before. I think that events like this festival are really putting the power back in our hands to define our own traditions and to make them sound the way that we want them to sound. I think that, in terms of creating an inclusive scene over time, this is what has to happen.
