BmoreArt

Jaddie Fang: How would you define the terms “traditional singers” and “folk song interpreters”? Is there any particular reason that you don’t claim yourself as a folklorist?

Jake Xeres Fussell: I have been called a folklorist quite a bit, sometimes a traditional musician or something like that. There is a difference. I grew up around folklorists, including my dad. Both my parents were involved in folklore and documentation.

My dad worked as a folklorist for many years, and that’s different from what I do—even though what I do is significantly informed by that. It’s a specific thing that involves a lot of documentary work and interviewing, and I know some people are trained academically to do that. Many documentarians might engage with folk or vernacular cultures but are not necessarily folklorists. Some people might be like social workers, historians, oral historians, or musicologists, but they’re interested in something other than precisely the same things that a folklorist might be interested in.

I tend to think of a folklorist as something specific, even though I might draw some of that into my music. But I’m more interested in the music side of it as a musician. I don’t call myself a traditional musician because I am outside the tradition. If I come from any tradition, it might be the tradition of urban artists interested in folk music.

What I do is different from people whose great-grandmother sang all ballads, and they see themselves as inheriting a legacy. Or they wanna sing ballads precisely the way that their great-grandmother sang. I don’t think of what I do as inheriting a legacy that way. I grew up outside of the community which produced a lot of this music.

The closer you look at many of these traditions, you’ll see that they’re not cut from whole cloth. They’re involved in a more extensive conversation at every level, like where they’re drawing from popular culture. I avoid calling myself a traditional musician for that reason. Because I don’t think of what I do as inheriting a legacy, bearing the sort of weight of a historical legacy in that way.

Do places, such as Columbus in Georgia, or North Carolina, to some extent give you different creative perspectives? Or does place stimulate you to have different thoughts on music?

You’re perceiving the world around you, and then that starts to find its way into the music you play. And it’s a hard thing to know precisely what the result is. I might feel like playing music often if I’ve been in some specific environment, and I’m trying to figure out why. Other times, if there’s a lot of noise around, such as in a bustling city, my senses will be blocked up.

If I’m on the beach or something with many more natural sounds, it works for me. As far as the region goes, it does impact me. But I’m always reverting to my childhood and my earliest memories of music, no matter where I am.

I’ve lived away from Georgia most of my adult life, but I still go back there musically quite a bit, even though there’s a great and supportive music scene here in North Carolina and so much wonderful traditional music from this area. I’m very much based on where the rudiments of my music are from—Georgia and Alabama, where I grew up.

A couple songs from the new album give the sound space of rich texture, and even the sound of the guitar is more malleable. Did James Elkington—your producer on the recording and arrangement of the album—bring some influence for you?

He’s really great to work with. In terms of the guitar sound, I wanted to improve by working with James Elkington, who is really great at it. In previous albums, before I started working with him, my approach was usually to get everybody in a room and record simultaneously. And then, just hope for the best. (laugh) That can be good and bad.

You can come away with a weird, sloppy mess. But working with him was like being intentional about arrangements and thinking about how to write those beforehand. If other instruments come in, make sure they can be really heard, and they’re not muddied up or cluttered. For instance, if we want a saxophone and a harmonica playing together on one song and want to sound like we’re hearing those instruments, we try to be careful about that. Making albums is an opportunity to bring in other instruments I wouldn’t have on a live show. When I tour, I usually play alone or with someone else. The new album is an excellent combination of working with James and Jason Richmond, the recording engineer.

Art Rosenbaum said, “I was also a product of the folk music revival. My parents had the Almanac Singers’ labor song records around the house. I admired Pete Seeger’s banjo playing and took up the five-string banjo in my high school years.” Is your work also a revival of folk music? In other words, have you always looked up to artists dedicated to traditional music, such as Art Rosenbaum, Lawrence McKiver, etc.?

Maybe so. If I’m a part of any tradition, it might be more like a folk revival tradition, as you said, because it was composed of many people who were mainly from the sort of urban north as opposed to the rural south. And there were definitely Southerners involved in the folk revival.

It also depends on what particular era we’re talking about. We tend to look at the late fifties and early sixties as a significant era in that sort of evolution, but there were also various waves of people getting into folk music at different times, like Pete Seeger, and there’s a singer named Paul Clayton. Certainly, Art Rosenbaum had a significant influence on me growing up. I have known him since I was a kid, and he was really drawn to many different genres and types of music within the folk music world.

He and my dad (Fred Fussell) located that group in coastal Georgia in the early eighties. Because it was thought for a long time that the ring shout had died out, it didn’t exist anymore. Along with Frankie and Doug Quimby, who were part of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, they were trying to find people who sang old songs and storytelling and such, but also like craftspeople who made fish nets and baskets along the Georgia coast. They were organizing a festival, the Georgia Sea Island Festival, at St. Simon Island, Georgia. They also located the Ring Shout group right outside Darien, Georgia. It was around the time I was born.

Rosenbaum was interested in so many different types of music within the world of traditional music and saw connections between all of them. It opened my eyes to how huge that world is, whether you’re talking about blues religious music from the Southeast or old-time string band music. He was also a great visual artist and an outstanding painter.

I chose one of his pieces for my last album, Good and Green Again. Just because he was a friend, it might be nice to have one of his pieces for the cover, which he agreed to. So that was one of my last correspondences with him, which was to finalize the details for that record cover.

I knew he was sick, and then he died. It was the fall of last year when I was in England playing at a festival. This album is coming out now, and it wasn’t until after I’d put everything together that I realized so many of the songs had some connection to Art. Either I’d learned them from him, or I knew a version of a song because of him, or sourced directly from one of his field recordings. So, I decided to dedicate the record to him.

When we talk about the melody and rhythm of the guitar arrangement, usually its sound is presented as a continuous tone constructed in music. Do you have the so-called ultimate guitar tone in your mind?

I like so many different tones. There are definitely some players out there whose tone I really admire. My tone is pretty simple with my electric guitar. I just have a Telecaster and plug it straight into the amp. So, I’ve never worked with effects or anything. I’m not trying to claim that I’m some purist about it, either. There are specific musicians out there who have really beautiful tones, like Jeff Parker, a jazz guitar player, and Steve Gunn.

I also really love the jazz guitarist Jim Hall. He’s so amazing. He played an arch-top Gibson guitar straight into a Gibson Amp for many years. There was just no frills about it. Steve uses a good bit of effects on his guitar, which sounds amazing, too. Also, Bill Frizzell is another great one who’s really good at jazz. I don’t listen to a ton of guitar players.

I was so excited about that stuff when I was 15 and 16, especially with finger-picking and that whole world of traditional guitar playing. I tore through that stuff early on and then didn’t look back. So, I listen to only a few guitar players now, even though I greatly respect the people we were talking about.

Your songs give a sense of imagery related to subjective emotions such as perception, memory, and loss—that develop spirally and integrate into non-narrative music. Do you think your creativity is reproduced or transformed from personal memory or connected to life experience?

In general, the answer is yes. One of the things about playing this folk music is that a lot of it is historical from a distant past or a seemingly distant past. One way of getting at it is to play a character and pretend that you’re like a cowboy or something interesting. As for myself, I’ve had the opposite thing, maybe in the early days when I was just starting out. And you’re starting out from square one and haven’t developed your identity as a musician or artist. The more you play this music, at least for me, the more I have the prerequisite for getting into it or wanting to play a song. It has to be on some personal, emotional level.

I’m fairly picky about the songs I sing, and I’ve served a song better from my own point of view. Just because they have to sound right for my voice and they have to feel legitimate. And that’s usually a very intuitive and emotional thing. If I can relate to the singer or the melody, or the implications that are in the harmony or something that I can relate to and draw out, I can trust that other people will relate to it too because I’m singing from an emotionally genuine place.  

Do you see yourself as more like a songwriter than a guitar player?

I’m more of a singer or song interpreter. I am definitely interested in song form instead of long guitar pieces. Many of them are more in the world of guitar music than I am, like Steve Gunn, Nathan Salsburg, William Tyler, and Daniel Bachman.

I use finger picking and guitar riffs or whatever you want to call it, which is a particular way of playing guitar. But I really only do it to support the song. I’m interested in rearranging songs and singing. And as far as songwriting goes, I don’t call myself a songwriter. I like to work with old sources and texts, play with them in ways that a songwriter would, and try to get at something somebody else wrote.  

From recent collaborators that participated on your new album, such as Blake Mills (guitar), Joan Shelley (vocals), Ben Whiteley (bass), Joe Westerlund (drums, percussion), Robin Holcomb (vocals), Anna Jacobson (horns), Jean Cook (strings), and Hunter Diamond (woodwinds), what are your thoughts on co-writing with different musicians and finding a balance in song arrangement?

This record was mostly made with a lot of basic tracking by myself, but Jean was there for all of it. And the drummer, Joe Westerlund, was there for most of it. Sometimes, it was Joe and I tracking together, or three of us tracking together with Jim playing piano. And then we built on top of that with a lot of space because we would put other instruments in there.

So we asked people to bring what they can to the arrangements. Sometimes, it would be peculiar, but for somebody like Blake Mills, it was just having him do whatever he felt like doing and not giving him much direction, which is nice. Sometimes, people want direction and more input about what you think they should be doing. But I like it when people let their intuition lead them somewhere.

In the book “Crosstown Traffic” by Charles Shaar Murray, Jimi Hendrix said: “Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” Blues music that streamlines emotions into notes is also your favorite style. What are your thoughts on the emotions that can be expressed by perceiving folk music?

All music, whether folk or any other kind, can affect our emotions or trigger certain emotions. Music creates certain feelings and conjures up memories. It’s hard to articulate because I know it is one of the most potent forces for me, and it always has been. It’s not intellectual at all. I even have this interest in old historical music, and there’s always that side to it. That’s another part of it that’s very interesting. When it comes to the song itself, I’m always searching for something that feels genuine—to create a feeling in me emotionally.

If I don’t have that, then the song usually goes nowhere. And it’s not a success for me creatively. You can trick yourself into liking something as an artist and listener. Because it might be interesting historically. It doesn’t necessarily make it a good song for me, or I like the idea of singing it. I had done things before that I regretted later, just because I liked the original source material so much, and I decided to sing it myself. After I recorded it, I thought, That’s a great song, but it didn’t necessarily need me to do it. The original was good enough; why did I try to re-engage with that?

You mentioned earlier that you’ve never really played in Baltimore before this tour. What do you think of Baltimore?

It’s a beautiful historical town that is also culturally interesting. When we talked about my childhood, my parents were involved in folklore. People were coming through the house all the time when I was growing up, who were like friends of my parents who were involved in documentary work; one of them was Art Rosenbaum, of course, and there was this one guy named Roland Freeman, who recently passed away last year. He was an African-American photographer from Baltimore who had taken amazing photographs of African-American life in Baltimore in the sixties and seventies. He was like a family friend to me. So, every time I’ve been through Baltimore, I think about him.