amna: When folklorists went to
the American south last century
to record and preserve
traditional string band music,
they probably didn't imagine
that someday a 27-year-old like
Jake Blount would come along to
not only update the tradition,
but to help ensure its future,
too.
Blount is gaining recognition
for his work and is up for
artist of the year at the
international folk music awards,
being held tomorrow night.
Special correspondent Tom
Casciato met up with him for our
arts and culture series, canvas.
♪♪
Tom: Jake Blount is a musician
on a mission.
Upon first listen on this night
at Brooklyn's jalopy theatre,
you might think it was simply to
keep up the tradition of what's
known as old time or string band
music.
Jake: I try to cultivate a
really close relationship with
the body of source recordings
that we have that comes from
these bygone musicians who are a
generation or two or three ahead
of me.
Tom: He's studied those sources,
extraordinary artists born over
a century ago like Bessie Jones,
Vera hall, and lead belly.
But Jake Blount isn't content to
simply research and copy the
past.
In fact, he's pulled the sound
right into the present, and put
his own spin on it.
Jake: ♪♪ Didn't it rain, children
♪♪
string band music whether it's
spirituals, whatever, is still
alive and breathing and growing.
It is not restricted to old
times.
I think it's perfectly allowable
to admit that people who are
young and alive today have
things to contribute to that.
Tom: He proved that point on his
first full-length release,
2020's spider tales, where he
covered lead belly's classic
tale of jealousy and suspicion,
where did you sleep last night.
>> ♪♪ My girl, don't lie to me
tell me where did you sleep last
night ♪♪
Tom: Blount's version changes
the girl to a boy, giving the
song what the guardian called an
arresting new power on an album
it called an instant classic.
Jake: ♪♪ My boy, my boy, don't
lie to me ♪♪
Tom: His most recent album is
called the new faith.
It contains a song called the
downward road.
This 1934 version is sung by a
group of incarcerated black men
in South Carolina.
It's a spiritual about the
damnation awaiting unbelieving
souls.
♪♪
but Jake Blount has repurposed
it.
The road still heads downward.
And it's still crowded with
imperiled souls, perhaps for
eternity.
But the doom that awaits is a
new kind of help --
environmental catastrophe.
-- New kind of hell,
environmental catastrophe.
Jake: Hello Brooklyn.
If you're anxious about climate
change saywoo!
>> Woo!
Jake: When we started this trip
a third of Pakistan was under
water and 50 million people were
out of their homes.
And we started this tour off to
the joyous news that apparently
mankind has wiped out an average
of 70% of animal populations
over the past 50 years.
Tom: One really feels listening
to the new faith the
precariousness that your
generation must feel about the
future.
Jake: I am terrified.
And everyone I know is
terrified.
I don't know what we're supposed
to do.
I know I'm gonna be old and
infirm, and the world's going to
be collapsing around me.
I felt like I needed to approach
it somehow.
Tom: His approach is to put a
futuristic spin on the songs of
his black musical ancestors.
The new faith imagines how black
refugees would be forced to
recreate their lost music from
memory once the world is ravaged
by climate change.
Jake: Designing the sounds,
designing the concept meant
thinking about people who've
heard all of the music that
we've heard up until today,
inclusive of rap, of disco, of
of all of these different genres
that have come out of the black
community.
And then had to make those
things again because they don't
have access to our technology.
Tom: Didn't it rain, is a
spiritual about Noah's flood.
It was once sung by pioneering
electric guitarist sister
Rosetta Tharpe in early rock ´N
roll fashion.
>> ♪♪ Didn't it rain, children ♪♪
Tom: For the coming deluge,
Blount takes a swinging
approach, but the electric
guitar becomes ominous.
And he not only reworks records
of the past, he imagines records
that were never even made.
He says when field recording
went from collecting folklore to
making commercial releases, many
black musicians were erased, or
nearly so.
Jake: Industry folks went down
to the south and started
recording people, they made two
kinds of records.
They made hillbilly records,
which were string band music,
and they made race records,
which was whatever black people
did.
And they wanted that to be
blues, jazz, eventually gospel.
And you have black musicians
like cuje Bertram who was a
black banjo and fiddle player.
Cuje never got recorded until he
was like a 70-something year old
man.
And there are a set of
recordings that a folklorist
made in his living room with his
grandchildren running around
banging on things and yelling.
♪♪
I do love it.
But the end result is that
people were written out of the
sound.
What I'm doing is re-imagining a
version of string band music
where black people were not
erased.
Tom: And where Jake Blount's not
afraid to mix old time fiddle
with hip hop verses, from his
friend, the rapper known as
demeanor, about sea levels
reaching new heights.
>> ♪♪ They heard about the water
rising, made a claim to take
advantage, how to enterprise it
♪♪
Tom: You might say that's the
sound of the future of
tradition.
For the pbs newshour I'm Tom
Casciato in Brooklyn, New York.
>> ♪♪ Crowded, crowded my crowded
♪♪ ♪♪