Following Jake Blount’s excellently received debut, Spider Tales (2020), the musician, scholar and activist has followed it up with a new Smithsonian Folkways album titled The New Faith (reviewed here). Folk Radio UK recently got the chance to talk to Jake about his new release, working with Smithsonian Folkways, the impact of climate change and the ethos of folk music.
“Well, after I finished Spider Tales,” opens Jake, “Smithsonian Folkways came to me and said they’d like me to make a record and asked me to pitch a few concepts to them. The New Faith was one of those concepts.
“I had gone to record with a good friend of mine named Ethan Hawkins, in the summer of 2020, and the place where we were recording was about eight hours from where I was living at the time. On the way there and on the way back, I listened to the audiobook of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. That book kind of inspired me to spend some time with my own imagination of what the climate crisis might look like as it played out, and I just decided to follow that thread. That’s where the record came from.”
The album is released as part of the Smithsonian Folkways’ African American Legacy series—co-conceived with and supported by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Smithsonian Folkways of course has a long background in releasing recordings with cultural heritage as a keystone. For Jake, the collaboration has certainly been enjoyable.
“Oh, I mean, it’s been wonderful!” says Jake, “There are very few labels at that level that will give you the level of creative freedom that they do and being able to work with people who are that supportive of art, and also supportive of artists autonomy is something that not many people get the chance to do. That that really means a lot. They’re a wonderful label to work with. I consider myself lucky to be a part of it, and I hope I get to be part of it more in the future.”
The New Faith is essentially a dystopian Afrofuturistic concept album featuring ten reimagined and reinterpreted traditional Black spirituals across twelve tracks in addition to two original spoken word pieces. As the album’s PR notes, it “aims to envision what Black religious music would sound like in a not-so-distant future world devastated by climate change.” In the album’s sleeve notes too, Jake also makes a note of thanks to the Gullah Geechee people – an African/American people resident in the low country of the US.
“The Gullah Geechee are people who live in South Carolina and Georgia and Florida, just generally the deep southeast,” explains Jake, “and they originally, I think, were settlers of Sea Islands. They were brought there during the time of enslavement. Whether there were proportionally more Black people than white people on those islands they retained a whole lot more of their African traditions and cultural inheritance, even as they were converted; even as they were assimilated into Americanness, whatever that is.”
“They just have a really incredible body of work song then most other Black people have in this country just because they were able to hold on to more in in that time,” continues Jake, “so, when I go back and listen to old songs, and I definitely look for songs from everywhere, but I tend to find that a lot of the most wonderful things are songs that come from the Gullah Geechee tradition.”
A key theme of The New Faith is the effect of climate change, an issue with a definite impact on the Gullah Geechee way of life.
“I think in making The New Faith that felt especially relevant,” notes Jake, “because the Gullah Geechee people are some of the people in this country most threatened by climate change because the islands are sinking and their traditional lands are disappearing into the ocean. That’s a major part of the concept of this album that people are losing their land and losing their traditions and having to uproot themselves and travel to find new ways of life. It felt important to me, to pay tribute to them not only as people who have become such an amazing musical inspiration, but also people who are going to have to live out some of the parts of the story I’ve written before many of the rest of us. They have more than earned our support and protection.”
The first folk music that I really encountered in a communal way was what my friends were doing after school – people were rapping, that was folk music – that is what people are doing in the community right now.
The New Faith cleverly and effectively merges old songs with new voices and modern techniques, an aim from the outset for Jake.
“All of the songs on the record are old, traditional folk songs,” explains Jake, “the songs themselves are coming from that place. As far as the choices I make in the arrangement; I feel that our modern approach to folk music as this static, immutable thing to be preserved is quite new.
“People have this idea that they’re preserving something by trying their hardest to imitate these old recordings. Certainly, there’s merit in thinking that hard about an older style and then devoting yourself that intensely to any musical form, but people weren’t able to do that until, you know, 50 to 70 years ago, maybe 100 years ago at the outside – the recording technology didn’t exist, so the music would have been changing.
“Part of the thing that made The New Faith work as a concept is that these people are living hundreds of years after us – I’ve left it vague how many hundreds of years but hundreds of years. They’re living in a time when the recorded music technology that we have right now probably isn’t accessible to them. They are refugees confined to a refugee camp and don’t have the technology that we have right now – they’re not carrying an iPod listening to Alan Lomax field recordings; that’s not what’s going on!
“One of the cool things for me, was to take this old folk music and put it into the context of an evolving, living, breathing, Black folk music tradition, that this is what folk music would sound like, if we did not have the technology to listen to it and feel like we should be copying something. This is what Black folk music would sound like if we had allowed it to continue evolving and reflect new forms of folk music as they arrived.”
It’s an exciting, potent and entirely stimulating sound Jake creates and one, with the inclusion of rap artist Demeanor for example, that ties back to Jake’s own upbringing.
“The first folk music that I really encountered in a communal way was what my friends were doing after school – people were rapping, that was folk music – that is what people are doing in the community right now.
“It has never made a whole lot of sense to me that we are so interested in preserving the form of folk music that we neglect the ethos of folk music, which is just as important a part of its nature, and that includes change and mutability, and the songs taking new shape, to suit new circumstances and envisioning the folk music of people living hundreds of years from now. They would have heard echoes in their oral tradition of everything that we’ve heard, and it’s not possible to think of Black music at any point in the future that does not strongly feature rap. Rap has been the dominant force in our music for decades. It’s not possible for me to envision Black music that doesn’t reflect those production techniques because that’s what we all grow up listening to for the most part – not just Black people, but people in general. That’s what runs pop music, that’s what runs the radio these days. I think for me there was a level of joy in just being able to expand those definitions, or question the way that we approach folk music, that leads to us fossilising it and treating it like something that’s dead, rather than something that will continue to live and breathe and reflect the circumstances we live in, as it always has.”
From the aforementioned Demeanor to country singers D’orjay: The Singing Shaman and Rissi Palmer; harpist and guitarist Lizzie No to singer and multi-instrumentalist Brandi Pace, banjo and uke player and Lillian Werbin, roots artist Samuel James, vocalist Kaïa Kater, and bassist Mali Obomsawin (read our review of her new album Sweet Tooth), Jake has enlisted a formidable guest list on The New Faith, and it’s one he had final decision over.
“I basically handpicked the people that I wanted to work with for this,” says Jake, “Obviously, there were some limitations because it was during the pandemic, so I wasn’t able to actually be in a physical space with any of the folks on the record, except my co-producer Brian Slattery and Mali Obomsawin, who played the bass. Everybody else sent in their parts remotely.
“Demeanor was an absolute pleasure to work with in that regard, because like most rappers that I know, he has his own setup, and he was able to make some really high-quality recordings. He wrote some incredible verses. It was just a really, it was a huge pleasure to work with him.”
Wabanaki bassist and songwriter Mali Obomsawin is also a welcome addition to The New Faith.
“Oh, Mali’s incredible, you know!” enthuses Jake, “She’s played in my band for some amount of time here. It’s been really fun to make some music with her. I’m really glad that she was able to be a part of this. I think it was important for me, even aside from just hiring one of the best bass players I know, that we also pay some homage to the way that black and indigenous people’s futures are linked in that way; that there will continue to be connection and interplay between our communities and that building solidarity between us as part of the process of survival for all of us. So, there were a couple layers of wonder and joy in working with her, and I hope I get to continue working with her going forward!”
There certainly feels to be an upsurge of interest in Black folk traditions, or at least there is a welcome increase in airplay of Black folk artists. The perceived rise is one to be met with a caveat though.
“Part of me is always sceptical, when we characterise the movement that’s happening now in the Black community is this like groundswell that’s new,” cautions Jake, “there have always been people there, who were interested in doing that. I know, just within my own little old-time bubble. within our community, there have always been Black people who’ve been interested in playing the music and who’ve been present. I know that within the mainstream folk revival of, you know, the 60s and 70s. In the USA, we had people like Terry Callier, who was probably my favourite of that set, and just very little known and probably not by coincidence. So, I’m always a little bit hesitant to say that this is a new thing, when I know that there were people there, and they just didn’t get the same amount of airtime because they were black. That is an element. I’m not sure whether the interest is new, and whether there are more people now, or whether people are just listening to us finally.
“That is exemplified in say, the amount of success that Alison Russell has had. Alison’s incredible, and she deserves all of it, but she’s kind of getting painted as this emerging new artist, but she’s been out here performing for decades, you know! And she’s been on this level for a long time. The only thing that’s changed is that people are ready to hear it. People are finally listening to her and understanding the depth and the skill and the talent that’s been there the whole time. That is a larger story as well. I think we’ve been here. The interest has been here, and the thing that’s changing is how ready the industry is to receive that.”
As our chat came to an end, we talked about Jake’s tour and plans for the future. Would, for example, the tour include all the contributors on the album?
“No, I think that would be a larger bus than I can afford to these days!” says Jake, “I will actually be touring the album mostly with my same four- piece band that I’ve been touring Spider Tales with, and we are all ‘electrifying’ to various degrees and it’ll be a new thing for all of us that we’re excited to experiment!”
“We’re going to be touring it this fall. The first gigs of the release tour starts on September 7 in North Carolina, and we’re doing the East Coast, we’re doing the Deep South, we’re doing the Midwest, we’re doing the west coast. It’s going to be a wide-ranging thing! I’m excited for that!”
The New Faith is a provocative, pertinent, yet also beautifully recorded release. The subject matter may be critical and timely, yet Jake ensures the sound of The New Faith is engaging, invigorating and exhilarating. The New Faith is another notable release from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and a strikingly thought-provoking album from the ever-magnificent Jake Blount.
Jake is touring the US now. Details can be found on his website here: https://jakeblount.com/
The New Faith, is out now on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings – Listen/order