Jake Xerxes Fussell: “It was always traditional music that I took the most seriously”

If ever a man was born to the world of roots music, that man is Jake Xerxes Fussell. His folklorist parents filled the family home with musicians, song collectors and artists, often taking the young Jake along on research trips through Georgia and Alabama. Long before he was 20, he’d already met many of the region’s folk and blues giants – Etta Baker, Art Rosenbaum, Albert Macon – and begun what amounted to an apprenticeship with the Piedmont blues guitar legend Precious Bryant.

Fussell’s father worked for an immersive museum aiming to recreate the experience of 19th-century American life for its visitors. “His job was to go out and find people like blacksmiths or folks who still made baskets out of white oak,” Fussell tells me. “I would go along with him when he would interview people. A lot of times it was craftspeople, but occasionally it would be somebody who made fiddles or sang old ballads. Later on, he was hired to write a guidebook on the traditional music of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I went with him on a lot of that fieldwork. He wasn’t a field recordist in the way that Alan Lomax was, but he was involved in some of that, and I was around for a lot of it. My job was usually to make sure the tape was running and to be quiet.”

Around the age of 12 or 13, Fussell got interested in playing guitar and in learning all he could from the state’s older musicians. “As soon as I could drive, I would go out to Precious Bryant’s house in Talbotton,” he recalls. “I have really fond memories of that. I got to be around with her a lot and sit with her and play guitar. She didn’t teach me in any kind of formal way, but she would play, and I would sit in and try to learn what I could.” Soon, he’d inherited his parents’ old role as Bryant’s driver, taking her to and from gigs as far afield as the Newport Jazz Festival on Rhode Island. Occasionally, he was allowed to join her on stage: “Sometimes she wanted to do a song where she didn’t play guitar, so I would play the part and she’d sing. She was a great musician and a really fun person to be around.”

Fussell’s new album, When I’m Called – his fifth since 2015’s self-titled debut – will be followed by a short UK tour in August and September. The record is a delightfully gentle affair, full of warm, acoustic tones and quiet sympathy for the human condition. His softly burred vocals and guitar are front and centre but often augmented by subtle colouring from a host of other instruments. Producer James Elkington’s spare piano accompaniment on ‘Cuckoo!’, Anna Jacobson’s mournful brass band horns on ‘Feeing Day’ and Joe Westerlund’s careful, muted percussion all add to the welcoming atmosphere.

Although he denies himself a co-writer credit when adding new tunes to the vintage folk lyrics he unearths, it’s clear Fussell’s contribution goes well beyond slavishly duplicating the originals. Did he ever feel he was short-changing himself there? “I don’t know where to draw the line,” he replies. “Sometimes, I’ll take a traditional song that has a pre-existing tune with it and just make my own version. Other times, I’ll create a melody of my own and apply traditional lyrics to it. I’m not just playing a version that’s very faithful to a field recording I’ve heard, but it feels a little bold to say I’m composing because I don’t write lyrics and I’m not coming up with the thing whole.”

It was only when he’d completed the new album that it dawned on Fussell just how much it owed to the Grammy-winning song collector and painter Art Rosenbaum, another childhood mentor of his. Rosenbaum, who died in 2022, was someone Jake had known for his whole life. Looking at the album’s final tracklist, he realised with a start that nearly half its songs were ones he’d discovered through Rosenbaum’s work. Other versions had fed into his interpretations too, of course, but there was no denying it was Rosenbaum’s influence which tied the whole project together.

“I wound up dedicating the album to him,” Fussell says. “He was a great five-string banjo payer, a great fiddler and guitarist who knew tons of songs: just a real encyclopaedia of traditional music. When I was compiling the notes for this record, I realised that a lot of these songs I’d either learned from Art or learned from a field recording he’d made. He was somebody who was a constant resource for me and very generous with his knowledge. I was probably thinking about him more than I realised when I was making this record.”

All this talk of Fussell’s archive research belies a more playful side to his work, best exemplified on the new album by its title-track ‘When I’m Called’. Far from being the country gospel classic this title suggests, it’s based on a stray scrap of paper found in the street by Fussell’s friend, the New Orleans artist Chris Sullivan. This contained the repeated lines of a schoolboy’s penitent resolutions: ‘I will answer when I’m called / I will not breakdance in the hall / I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name.’ Sullivan liked those lines so much that he began reciting them as he walked around, a process which lodged the verse firmly in Fussell’s head too.

“I thought it sounded interesting, so I put it into the setting of this piece I was working on,” he explains. “It was initially just a space filler, but when I came to record it, I thought it worked pretty good. It was interesting to place it alongside some lyrics that were more traditional. So many of these old folk songs are fragmented in the way they come to us anyway. It might just be a verse and a half, but within that fragment, there’s something you can draw out. I’m always paying attention to that kind of stuff.”

As our conversation draws to an end, I ask Fussell if he’s ever been tempted to rebel against the folk music that so consumed his childhood and adolescence. “My parents were sort of outsiders themselves, so that didn’t give me a whole lot to rebel against,” he replies. “What I was witnessing in our household and among the art world people that we knew was already ten times more interesting than whatever was on television. I had friends in high school who played in bands, played punk or garage rock or hip-hop, you know. But it was always traditional music that I took the most seriously. That music carried the weight of the world in a way that other music didn’t to me. I felt it was my own particular path.”

Fussell’s UK tour begins in London on August 30, then visits Lewes, Bristol, Leeds, Glasgow and Manchester.