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JAKE XERXES FUSSELL
’m a YouTube addict,” confesses
Jake Xerxes Fussell. The folk singer
is sitting at one of the brightly
coloured tables at Cocoa Cinnamon,
a mexican coffeeshop that he
declares the best in Durham,
North Carolina. Nursing a mug of
strong coffee, he’s explaining how
he finds the old folk tunes that he
has been arranging and recording
for five years now. He has a nearly
encyclopedic grasp of various strains of musical tradition in
the southeastern United States, but mainly he finds his
material just surfing the web, dialling up YouTube videos, and
seeing what sticks with him once he’s off the computer.
“I listen to a lot of old songbooks, and I’ll even go to physical
archives and look through collections
outofa genuinecuriosityaboutthings,”
heexplains.“ButI alsoletmyselfgo
downwormholesonYouTube.Oh,I’ve
neverheardtheLibraryofCongress’
fieldrecordingsfromthisparticular
regionofmichigan.Oh,I’veneverheard
thisNewEnglandfiddletuneorthis
batchoflumberjacksongs...”
Fussellsportsanoldcaponhishead,
perchedaskew,almostlikea raised
eyebrow,andhe’swearinga T-shirtwith
a pictureofStEom,a ruralmysticwho
createda folkutopiacalledPasaquan,
near where Fussell grew up in Georgia. “Occasionally,” he
says, “I’ll find a song I can work with. But that happens slowly,
just me turning it over in my head. It’s kind of a lazy process,
but it’s something I’m constantly doing.”
His so-called lazy approach has produced three albums of
vivid, inventive folk music, with Fussell giving new spins to
old songs. He’s a spirited guitar player – having studied nearly
all his life to synthesise a range of country-blues and folk styles- and he is a hearty singer with a robust, empathic voice. But
most of all he’s a skilled and intuitive arranger: an artist who
can take an obscure tune from, say, the Gullah tradition in the
Carolinas or the Georgia Sea Island Singers and reinterpret it
without having to try to update it. There’s no revival in his folk.
Rather, his songs are lively and present-tense, full of richly
imagined characters, grim tragedies, and everyday triumphs.
“Bringing something magical to the mundane,” he calls it.
One admirer is Will Oldham, who sees
Fussell’s idiosyncratic, open-hearted
investigations as refreshing, positive
work: “As long as Jake Fussell is making
records and playing shows, there is
ample cause for optimism in this world.”
What might be esoteric, Fussell makes
accessible. “It occurred to me at a certain
point that I didn’t need to think of myself
as a scholar or as a musician per se.
What is the difference on some level?
maybe I could do both somehow.” He
sips at his coffee and takes a moment to
listen more closely to the song playing
“I let mYSelF
go doW n
Wor m-
holeS on
Youtube”
Jake xerxes FUsseLL