I thought I was going to be a psychology major in college
and then I realized I was making all of my papers about the banjo anyway.
My name is Jake Blount.
I am a performer and scholar of traditional Black folk music.
I live in Providence, Rhode Island.
What's the name of it?
Altamont.
Altamont. Got it.
I first heard that song on
the field recording from Murph Gribble, John Lusk and Albert York
which is on a release from the Library of Congress
called Black Stringband Music from the Library of Congress.
Say what you will about the title.
It's easy to find, you know.
There's Albert Yorke playing guitar
John Lusk playing the fiddle
and Murph Gribble playing the banjo.
They were a black stringband
they recorded in the 1940s and by most definitions
they're actually an early bluegrass band.
But for a variety of reasons,
I would consider their race to be probably the main reason
they aren't really embraced as part of the bluegrass story.
When I study modern day Black banjo players...
I am studying not only the music that they make
but what makes that music significant to them within its social context.
The banjo was descended from West African instruments
and during enslavement and during the time immediately following
people associated the banjo with Black people.
Toward the end of enslavement
we start to see blackface minstrels come to the fore.
Blackface minstrelsy was this really...
gross performance practice in which white musicians
would black up their face and
lampoon Black musical traditions for a white audience.
That had the effect of popularizing the banjo
which was featured very prominently.
And eventually bluegrass emerged.
And that became the main way that people knew the banjo
and interacted with it.
Early on in the record industry
when folks started going down to the south
they began to record artists
and consider how they could sell those records.
They decided to confine Black musicians
to a category called "race records"
and confine white musicians to a category called "hillbilly records".
The end result of that was that Black people
who played what might have been considered hillbilly music
which would have been early country string band music...
they were not recorded
because they weren't marketable in that category.
Race records were by Black people and for Black audiences
but were supposed to be blues or jazz.
Many of the early country musicians
had Black mentors and Black collaborators.
Lesley Riddle, for example, who taught the Carter family.
Many of the Black musicians who were teaching early white country musicians
did not get recorded themselves.
And that's just one iteration of this pattern
we see where the music industry
extracts artwork from Black communities
uses them to generate a ton of money
and then directs absolutely none of that money back
into the community that invented the music it's selling.
People spend a lot of time deriding and belittling Black folk music traditions
instead of studying them.
And that's one of the big flaws
with our current canon of folkloric recordings.
But the vast majority of these recordings were made by white people.
We know that many of the Black
string bands at that time, including Gribble, Lusk, and York,
had separate repertoire that they played for Black people then they played for white people.
Which means that probably much of this music never got
put down on any sort of semi-permanent medium
because it wasn't safe to perform it for them in that time and place.
My new album, The New Faith, is an Afro-futurist story
that explores what traditional Black folk music might sound like
post-climate crisis.
My idea for this album was to make a field recording from the future.
It lets me go backward and forward in time, at the same time.
Once there were no sun.
And I learned "Once there was no sun"
from a recording of Bessie Jones.
Once there was no sun.
Lord, once there was no sun.
She was a fantastic singer
and lived for most of her life
in Georgia amongst the Gullah Geechee people.
It describes the world before the creation of Sun and Moon.
This particular song comes out of a ring shout tradition.
The ring shout is a religious ritual
that's been passed down among the Gullah Geechee people for a very long time
and it includes someone with a broomstick banging out this
bum bum bum, bum bum bum rhythm.
We wound up just putting that on the kick drum
because I tried to come up with a different part
and it just turned into that anyway.
Once there was no sun.
once there were no sun.
Turns out the thing that they've been doing for several hundred years
is... right.
I knew I wanted to draw off of this Hans Sloane text
because it's the oldest stuff that I've studied.
Hans Sloane made a trip through the Caribbean in the late 1600s.
His work is one of the earliest written descriptions
of a banjo that we think we have.
And he included sheet music
for some of the songs that he heard people singing.
I was really drawn to this very simple
but very epic sounding song called Angola
which is just nice call and response arrangement between an instrument and a voice.
So the little banjo piece that I incorporated there is...
Because of the way the progression of the song goes
I wound up changing it to...
A lot of these songs either have no hook or only a hook.
There's there's never a verse and a chorus.
And that left me with with a little bit of a heavy lift
as far as finding things to put in between the verses.
And I wound up coming up with these
rhythmic fiddle parts.
The clapping pattern.
Clapping is very prominent
in all these old ensemble recordings of Black folk music.
It's just, you know, one of the most accessible
percussion instruments you have.
When drums are illegal, as they were for black people
for most of this music's developmental period.
I knew that it had to be in there.
There was no obvious place to put it on this
because of the way the beat lined up.
And it's a very weird pattern,
even though that's not a sound
or a texture that you would find in those field recordings.
I tried to use the same approach of the field recordings
in building those sounds and...
I think it wound up integrating pretty well.
Once there was no sun.
I heard the angels singing.
I think part of what drove me to this new project
is thinking about the continuity of those sounds.
Instead of trying to reenact something.
Maybe envision something instead.
When it comes to the older stuff...
because those folks were exploited by the record industry
because they were misrepresented by academics
and by PR reps and everybody else
along the way who was sold this music
but was not part of that community...
I feel duty bound to set the record straight.
I think there's something that is very cool
about representing those old traditions
and feeling like I'm part of a solid lineage that way.