Given that Jake Blount’s first EP, Reparations, came out less than ten years ago, his career has been quite the journey. Those early records – Reparations and 2020’s full-length debut Spider Tales saw him re-establish the historical links between old-time music and black, indigenous and queer American culture, mostly through fiddle and banjo tunes – by turns stark and rousing – and haunting traditional songs. Songs like his deeply-felt rendition of Where Did You Sleep Last Night and a raucous instrumental re-imagining of Rocky Road to Dublin saw him feted by the press in the world of American roots music and beyond. His next two albums – The New Faith (2022) and Symbiont (a 2024 collaboration with Mali Obomsawin) – represented a left turn into the world of afrofuturism. There was a growing wildness, and a willingness to encompass a wider array of influences, notably gospel, blues, hip-hop, spoken word and a kind of fractured folk experimentalism. Other artists – Matana Roberts springs to mind – have trodden similar paths. But unlike Roberts, who worked from a base of jazz, Blount’s music has always grown out of folkier traditions.
On his latest album, Single-Footing Horse, Blount has come full circle, returning to the music that first nurtured him: the very specific variety of old-time mountain music played by Appalachian string bands. And in the tradition of those string bands, there is a strongly collaborational feel to Single-Footing Horse, which brings together fifteen tunes – some well-known and some less so – and a collection of excellent musicians, including fiddler Judy Hyman and banjo-uke player Jeff Claus from the Horseflies, guitarist Ethan Hawkins, bassist Felix Sartori and banjo player Cap Cooke. Blount, known as a talented multi-instrumentalist, here focuses exclusively on fiddle and vocals.
This self-imposed constraint – and the freedom it gives his bandmates to explore their own specialisations – seems to have allowed Blount to dig deeper into his material. Familiar tunes like Shady Grove and Stagger Lee fly by with a discernible zest and a sense of joy. Working on a Building, with Megan Jean contributing additional vocals, feels crisp and stomping, Cooke’s banjo accentuating the jerky rhythm. The opener Grand Forks establishes the high-energy template that the rest of the album will largely work within: quick-fingered banjo and high, swooping, crystal-clear fiddle.
Blount is a fiddler of considerable skill, able to tap into a range of moods. Although the pace rarely lets up, there are subtle but noticeable shifts of atmosphere from tune to tune. Snowshoe sees him light and airy: a frisky romp through a pristine landscape. Abe’s Retreat is quick, high and twisty, full of sustained energy. Hannah at the Springhouse has a vernal pastoralism to it that almost borders on the baroque. The dual fiddles of Biddy create a captivating harmonic swirl and Garfield’s Blackberry Blossom is an out-and-out cartoon cat-and-mouse chase between fiddle and banjo.
Country Blues – a song from the Dock Boggs repertoire – was one of the first recorded songs to combine African-American blues and Appalachian folk, and Blount’s version perfectly captures the fraught, high-tension atmosphere that was a hallmark of American songs from the 1920s: a time of financial instability, widespread poverty and racial injustice. Pork Fat Makes My Chicken Tan, adapted from a version by the Horseflies, combines a sultry, slithery fiddle tune with an unexpected vocal refrain, providing one of the album’s most memorable moments. Equally striking is the instrumental title-track, an impressive combination of sustained energy and constantly evolving melody.
The biggest shift in pace comes in the form of the final track, When the Angels Call My Name. This one was recorded live, with an entirely different band, and is a slow, tender, aching lament. Augustus Tritsch provides a short electric guitar solo that practically weeps through the speakers, and Blount’s singing is equally saturated with emotional resonance. If we hadn’t already realised, this is when we become certain that Single-Footing Horse is every bit as potent – and in a way, just as experimental – as Blount’s earlier forays into afrofuturism. In presenting a successful synthesis of forms that have previously been segregated along racial lines, Blount has also perfected the tricky art of merging the personal, the historical and the political, all while forging a joyous and technically brilliant batch of tunes.
Single-Footing Horse (September 18th, 2026) Self Released