He hears America singing. Jake Xerxes Fussell brings new life to folk music.
| DURHAM, N.C.
Jake Xerxes Fussell got his start in music as a toddler banging on pots and pans, and was “immediately good,” according to his sister.
Since those early days, Mr. Fussell has emerged as one of the most singular interpreters of folk music. He breathes life into familiar and forgotten songs and verses.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAmerica has a rich tradition of folk music. Jake Xerxes Fussell breathes new life into this legacy as one of the country’s leading folk musicians.
“He’s a real-deal folk singer. And there’re not very many of those,” says Eli Smith, organizer of the Brooklyn Folk Festival.
Mr. Fussell doesn’t consider himself a songwriter, though. “I’ve never written a lyric,” he says. “I’ve taken texts that I’ve found and messed with them musically.”
The folklorist has always looked to the past for musical inspiration. He was first introduced to traditional music by his father, who was a collector of oral histories and an organizer of folk festivals. The young Mr. Fussell was particularly drawn to songs that had been passed down from generation to generation.
“You hear a song you relate to. It doesn’t matter what year it’s from,” he says. “To me, that was always the most powerful thing about traditional music was that it was, like, immediately transcendent, no matter what era it was from.”
In the summer of 1993, Fred Fussell, a folklorist and museum curator in Columbus, Georgia, packed his family van for a monthlong road trip to document the crafts and traditions of Native American tribes. He brought along his son, Jake, who had just finished fourth grade and was riding shotgun, where he kept a daily tally of roadkill.
That summer, the Fussells visited artisans from Native communities in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana, those whose forebears had been expelled from the Southeast in the 1800s but kept alive their spiritual ties to the land. Jake took charge of a Sony tape recorder. He taped his father’s interviews, learning to “sit back and shut up” while people talked, which “is the key to good documentation,” says the elder Mr. Fussell.
His young son also recorded performances, which included music. On another road trip with his father, Jake witnessed a 2 1/2-day Yuchi ceremony in Kellyville, Oklahoma, that marked the birth of a new sun, using a flint from Georgia, the tribe’s homeland, to light a fire.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onAmerica has a rich tradition of folk music. Jake Xerxes Fussell breathes new life into this legacy as one of the country’s leading folk musicians.
Jake liked vernacular arts and crafts, and he showed an early talent for drawing. But what lit his fire were the songs he heard at folk festivals his father put on in Georgia, songs that had been passed down from generation to generation and performed like the oral traditions of Homeric verse.
These were songs of sorrow and strife that spoke to him as a young man. “I always knew I would play music because music was the thing that was a constant source of joy,” the younger Mr. Fussell says today.
His family’s circle of friends included musicians, from blues singers to bluegrass pickers, and veteran collectors of traditional songs who never stopped looking for more. Mr. Fussell remembers them dropping by his house clutching tapes of field recordings. “Y’all wanna hear this?” they’d ask. He soon got his own guitar and started singing these songs himself.
From this unusual upbringing, Jake Xerxes Fussell has emerged as one of the most singular interpreters of folk music and all its tributaries. In his live performances and across five richly textured albums, he breathes life into familiar and forgotten songs and verses. His fifth album, “When I’m Called,” releases July 12.
“He’s a real-deal folk singer. And there’re not very many of those,” says Eli Smith, organizer of the Brooklyn Folk Festival. “I don’t think there’s anyone that’s doing exactly what Jake is doing,” he says.
From spirituals and jigs to fiddle tunes and sea chanteys, folk music is part of America’s cultural bedrock. It has long braided commercial music – from the folk revivalists of the 1950s and 1960s, who include Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, to contemporary Americana artists like the band Wilco, which serve as a counterweight to more sculpted and stylized pop productions.
Some traditional songs arrived with the European migrants who brought their fiddles and hymnbooks to Appalachia and other regions. Others sprang from the Black experience of enslavement and freedom. “Folk music belongs to everyone. It’s our collective inheritance,” says Mr. Smith.
Mr. Fussell draws on that inheritance to create music that sounds both contemporary and timeless. His creative process carries him down rabbit holes of archival research and experimentation with musical motifs, even while tinkering on his guitar at home or on tour.
He adds melodies when none exist and transposes verses, acting as both a caretaker and a remodeler of songs. What fires his imagination isn’t always clear to him.
“Usually it’s just a feeling,” Mr. Fussell says. It’s about “drawing something out of the melody or the rhythm or the syncopation of the thing that feels appropriate to me.”
The musical byways he explores also shine a light on perennial questions of song ownership and racial and cultural categories. The fact that he has found a growing audience, both in the United States and in Europe, speaks to the enduring appeal of folk-inflected music in an era of digital abundance and algorithms.
He takes “old stuff” and transports it somewhere else, says James Elkington, his record producer. “And the place that he’s taken it to is all him.”
Finding a voice
He started as a toddler on pots and pans, banging out rhythms at home. Then he got a drum kit and was “immediately good,” says Coulter Fussell, his older sister. “Which was unfortunate, because he played them constantly. It was super loud.”
From drums, Mr. Fussell moved to the upright bass, which he learned at school from a teacher who played in a bluegrass band. When he was 13 years old, his teacher asked him to take over as the bassist at a weekly gig at a barbecue restaurant.
“Everybody went there on a Friday night,” says Ms. Fussell, who is now a quilter in Water Valley, Mississippi. “The band would play, and it was these scruffy grown men and then little Jake up there.”
“That was the first gig I ever got,” says Mr. Fussell. “And it paid cash.”
He had started playing guitar, too. He learned fingerpicking and began to play, a little awestruck, with Art Rosenbaum, a painter and musician who was a family friend. Mr. Rosenbaum was a ballad collector who began recording folk songs in the 1950s on a reel-to-reel and had amassed his own archive. When Mr. Fussell asked about a song, Mr. Rosenbaum would tell him, “If you like that version, you should really listen to this one.”
Preinternet listening to field recordings meant ordering CDs from specialist labels. As a boy, Mr. Fussell would meticulously put them on his Christmas and birthday lists, along with guitar strings, books about music, and bicycle tires.
He was also listening to rock and hip-hop on the radio and going to shows, including of Georgia’s R.E.M., whose lead singer, Michael Stipe, had studied drawing with Mr. Rosenbaum at the University of Georgia.
But rock bands lacked the raw passion and poetry of the traditional songs he heard growing up. “None of that stuff really spoke to me in any real deep way,” he says.
Mr. Fussell also fell hard for the music of Mr. Dylan, whom Mr. Rosenbaum had known in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. But it was another local musician and family friend, Precious Bryant, who would influence Mr. Fussell’s rhythmic guitar picking and give him a taste of life on the road.
Since Ms. Bryant, a country-blues artist, didn’t drive, it was Mr. Fussell’s mother, Cathy, who would drive her to shows. Her eager son began to take that role once he got a driver’s license. He would also visit Ms. Bryant at her rural trailer home, bringing along his guitar. “She would play, and I would play along,” Mr. Fussell says.
“Jake always liked older people. He liked listening to older people. He liked hanging around with older people,” says his mother, a retired English teacher and quilter.
This patient absorption was how he learned his craft, says his sister. “Jake wasn’t very talkative, ... [but] he paid attention. He tagged along, and he read, read, read, and researched and researched, and listened to the music,” she says. He knew so many songs that Ms. Fussell would impress her teenage friends, asking the young Mr. Fussell to play a random song for them.
In his early 20s, Mr. Fussell relocated to the Bay Area in California to work at a record store owned by an indie folk label. He was able to mingle with musicians, filmmakers, and other creative people. In 2005, he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he graduated from the University of Mississippi. After getting his bachelor’s degree, he enrolled in the university’s master’s program in Southern studies.
In Oxford, Mr. Fussell started playing more gigs, both in local bands and as a solo act. He had a weekly show at a bar, where he played acoustic guitar and sang. Later, like Mr. Dylan, he went electric, but just so he could be heard above a crowd, not to signal a new direction. He found he preferred to plug in.
“I realized that I could just play electric guitar and play much more softly and be much more expressive just in my fingers,” he says.
In 2014, he released his self-titled debut album, produced by William Tyler, a Nashville, Tennessee-based guitarist whom he met in Oxford. Mr. Tyler was struck by how Mr. Fussell played songs that seemed untethered to any particular era. “It sounds very relevant and not necessarily modern. It’s like out of time, in a very cool way,” he says.
Mr. Tyler later got a cryptic email from Ry Cooder, the award-winning singer, composer, and slide guitarist not known for effusive praise. He had heard Mr. Fussell’s album, and he was impressed. Mr. Cooder’s email simply said, “Finally, somebody good.”
On the road
The autumn sky is dimming as Mr. Fussell pulls up at a converted railroad depot in Garrison, New York, where he’s playing an evening show. He has slept most of the way, letting David Swider, his tour manager, drive the battle-gray Toyota minivan through the Hudson Valley. Now they have a few hours free before showtime, midway through a two-week regional tour.
Two weeks is Mr. Fussell’s limit for being away from his wife and son in their home in Durham, North Carolina. Lately, he’s taken both of them on the road with him for shows within range of Durham. But he’s mostly alone behind the wheel, driving between cities where he stays with friends or in budget hotels to save money. Up until 2022, he still worked part-time jobs; life as a full-time folkie is a precarious trade.
On this tour, though, he’s traveling with Mr. Swider, an old friend from Oxford.
Tonight, Mr. Fussell is talking onstage before the show with Amanda Petrusich, a friend and a music critic for The New Yorker. The venue, Philipstown Depot Theater, holds 80 people under a sloped roof with exposed brickwork and girders, beside a commuter rail line to New York City.
As Mr. Fussell waits offstage, an audience of well-heeled locals and New Yorkers with weekend homes fills the tiered seats. He wears cuffed jeans, brown leather boots, a patterned blue shirt, and a beige cap with a sky-blue brim.
After the lights go down, he joins Ms. Petrusich onstage, sitting in folding chairs next to his spotlit guitar and amplifier. She asks Mr. Fussell about his upbringing, his influences, and how he sifts the past for inspiration.
“It’s a constant thing for me. It doesn’t begin in any conscientious kind of way,” he says. “That’s what I’m always doing: listening to old songs, old material.”
“You hear a song you relate to. It doesn’t matter what year it’s from,” he adds. “To me, that was always the most powerful thing about traditional music was that it was, like, immediately transcendent, no matter what era it was from.”
When he talks about the ballad collectors he knew growing up, a passenger train rumbles past, jolting the theater. Mr. Fussell looks around. “The blues, y’all,” he jokes.
After the talk ends, Mr. Fussell takes a break, and then returns to begin his set.
He sits over his Telecaster electric, his right hand plucking and hammering notes as he sings of railroads and sea passages and land battles. His cap stays low on his forehead. Each song unspools at its own pace, propelled by his rhythmic playing and keening voice.
Come Philander, let’s be marching
First for France, then for Holland Cannons roar, colors flying
Oh, my love, there’s no denying
Ring farewell, to my love farewell
We’re all marching around very well ...
Between songs, he retunes his guitar and thanks the audience, which claps appreciatively and beams at him. Nobody checks their phone or starts a conversation. More passing trains shake the rafters. But nothing seems to break Mr. Fussell’s spell.
“When he starts playing, even if it’s in a bar or a club where it’s kind of noisy, people tend to stop talking pretty quick and start paying attention to what he’s doing,” says Mr. Swider. “It’s amazing to see.”
By 9 p.m., the show is over. In a tiny lobby, Mr. Swider sells merchandise while Mr. Fussell comes out to chat with concertgoers and sign albums.
This journalist is a fan, too. I ask him to sign an album for my fifth grade son, who already knows the songs from our own summer road trips.
Then it’s time to pack up: Mr. Fussell loads his guitar and amplifier into the back of his van, nestled beside boxes of records. It’s been a long day, and tomorrow brings another show.
Collaborating with the past
Mr. Fussell’s albums contain detailed scholarly footnotes on his songs. But he doesn’t get into all this – who, what, which year – when he plays live.
“I’m pretty quiet throughout my shows, just because I find it to be such a distraction between the playing and singing the songs to talk about the history of them,” he says.
Not all his songs are excavated from folk archives or song sheets. A musical magpie, he plucks verses from unexpected places. The elegiac track that ends his 2022 album, “Green and Good Again,” is titled “Washington” and has one lyric:
General Washington, noblest of men. His house, his horse, his cherry tree, and him.
Mr. Fussell found it in an illustrated book on hooked rugs, written in needlepoint and dated to 1890. He liked the words and their rhythm and memorized them, eventually marrying them with a tune he had kicked around for years.
On the new album, the title track, “When I’m Called,” is similarly obscure: Mr. Fussell heard the lines, possibly penned by a penitent student, recited by a friend in San Francisco who collected and published bits of Americana – flyers, notes stuck on doors, and other informal writings. It reads, in part, “I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name.”
“At some point I memorized it, too. When I was playing this song it just came back to me, almost like a space filler,” he says. “But then I thought that it was interesting.”
Nearly all Mr. Fussell’s song credits are “traditional & in the public domain,” which means he claims no copyright. This reflects both his scholarly desire to trace and showcase their historic lineage, and a moral stance against any exploitation of his source material.
After a gig in Brooklyn, in fact, he planned to see a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, which was displaying the work of Harry Smith, an eccentric visual artist whose 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music” influenced Mr. Dylan and other folk revivalists. Mr. Fussell didn’t end up getting to see the exhibition, but he is well acquainted with Mr. Smith’s compendium. A collection of mostly forgotten old 78 rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s, the anthology was reissued in 1997, and a new generation of folkies began to sift it for inspiration.
But Mr. Fussell has reservations about Mr. Smith’s anthology because of what it didn’t include. For his master’s thesis at the University of Mississippi, Mr. Fussell researched how record labels combing the South in that period for new artists mostly ignored the music of certain ethnic groups. Folklorists, for their part, ignored the rich tradition of fiddle playing among the Choctaw, since it didn’t conform to stereotypes of Native American culture.
Such scruples are commendable, says Brendan Greaves, a folklorist and co-owner of Paradise of Bachelors, the Durham-based label that released Mr. Fussell’s first four albums.
“There’s a long history of artists taking traditional material and claiming publishing on it and saying that they wrote it because there’s no one who can prove that they did not,” Mr. Greaves says.
He had to push Mr. Fussell to take credit for the music he wrote. The song “Washington” is credited to “Jake Xerxes Fussell/Anonymous,” while three instrumental tracks are indeed fully credited to him.
But he doesn’t consider himself a songwriter in the vein of folk singers who started out playing traditional songs but then became contemporary singer-songwriters. In 1963, Mr. Dylan told the New York Daily News, “There’s mystery, magic, truth and the Bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that. But I’m going to try.”
Another Dylan lyric, however, would better describe Mr. Fussell: “It ain’t me, babe.”
“I’ve never written a lyric, and I’ve never had any interest in writing poetry or lyrics,” Mr. Fussell says. “Now, I’ve taken texts that I’ve found and messed with them musically. ... I don’t really think of that as songwriting.”
In tribute
The new album is on Fat Possum, an Oxford-based independent label known for discovering older blues artists as well as newer acts. Recorded last December, it adds new hues to Mr. Fussell’s distinct sound, undergirded by his magpie mustering of old songs and lyrics.
Six months after hearing him perform two shows in New York, I visit Mr. Fussell at his home in Durham on a hot, cloudless day. Inside the brick single-story house, he prepares coffee as I admire his artwork and music collection.
On the fireplace mantel, above an acoustic guitar, is a fluted ceramic pot made by Dorris Xerxes Gordy, a Georgia potter and family friend (and his namesake). He was reluctant at first to use his full name on his albums, because he didn’t want to be pretentious. But Mr. Greaves insisted. “I said, ‘Absolutely, we have to use it. It’s memorable,’” he says.
“When I’m Called” features an old whaling song, a Scottish ballad, and a nursery rhyme first published in 1744. There’s also a jocular song about Andy Warhol written by Maestro Gaxiola, a California artist and bodybuilder, culled from a 1986 cassette.
When you see me coming better get on your horse and ride,
’Cause this world ain’t big enough for both of us to fit inside.
More than half the songs came via Mr. Rosenbaum, who either taught them to him personally or left recorded versions, Mr. Fussell says. As a collector, Mr. Rosenbaum never stopped truffling for folk songs wherever he went. He was always attuned to local variations of classics, or the faint possibility that a song had somehow been overlooked. “It wasn’t like there was a [defined] hunting expedition,” Mr. Fussell says. “His whole life was that.”
Mr. Rosenbaum died in September 2022, when he was in his 80s. Mr. Fussell had just come offstage at a festival in England when his mother texted him the news. Mr. Fussell dedicated the album to his former mentor.
“I didn’t set out to make an Art Rosenbaum memorial record, but I kind of did, in a de facto way,” he says.
There are songs Mr. Fussell wouldn’t try to perform, he says, such as prison songs or Confederate ballads. He’s also wary of material that has a history of exploitation, including blues songs. “You always have to try to be a little bit self-reflective about your own position and privilege,” he says, adding that cultural appropriation is real and troubling.
“At the same time, I don’t always know where appropriation ends and creativity begins because I feel like so much of art is borrowing,” he says.
Even the notion of a pure, unadulterated song is a false concept, he says. “They all have such complicated histories, and they’re put together from pieces of this and that.” Folk musicians belong to communities, work other jobs, and learn from other musicians.
As his profile has risen, Mr. Fussell has played in larger venues. He’s also opened for bigger bands who fill arenas. In August, he has a solo show in London at a 600-seat capacity venue.
“I’m not interested in grabbing anybody by the collar and converting them to my way of seeing the world,” Mr. Fussell says. “My approach is to cultivate and nurture and trust the audience I already do have and to have some faith that that will lead somewhere interesting.”
