On a music festival stage, our writer found folk’s deepest-diving scholar

Episode transcript

Simon Montlake: What is a folk singer to do today? What is the role? Is it just to transmit this meme, to carry it on, to, you know, exchange with those songs and give it to another generation? Or is it to put a stamp on it? 

Clay Collins: That’s the Monitor’s Simon Montlake. 

[MUSIC SAMPLE]

All of these decades after music first poured down from the hill country of Appalachia and rose up from the South as songs of yearning and emancipation, folksy Americana or folk revival music has seen repeated waves of festival interest and ever more listens. It’s a broad genre with old acts and new, big names and risers.

We’ve seen The Avett Brothers and Rhiannon Giddens out of North Carolina. Noah Kahan from Vermont, who was playing 500 seat venues just a few years ago and now fills stadiums. Americana isn’t even solely American. The long running and now well known duo First Aid Kit is composed of Swedish sisters. 

Simon profiled Jake Xerxes Fussell for the Monitor back when that artist’s fifth album, “When I’m Called,” dropped to very positive reviews in July.

[THEME MUSIC]

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins, and Simon joins me today. Hey there.

Montlake: Hey, Clay.

Collins: Simon, a lot of listeners won’t have heard of Fussell. I hadn’t. He’s pretty interesting, though. He plays everything from pots and pans, as you write, to drums, to bass, to guitar. He does fingerpicking. He’s acoustic, he’s electric. He’s also a sponge for influences and kind of a preservationist. He calls his work a “collective inheritance.” In your story, you call Fussell an “interpreter.” 

Can you say more? Who is this artist?

Montlake: Jake Fussell, he grew up in Columbus, Georgia, in a very interesting family. You know, he was exposed to a lot of folk music, but also folk art and others – basket weavers, artisans. His family were really, you know, folklorists and collectors. And so he grew up in that world surrounded by essentially people of an older generation who played these songs that fascinated him, and he wanted to learn them and eventually to research them and find out where they came from, and it almost seems inevitable now to think that he would become a professional musician – and he’s a very accomplished one.

But he told me that he actually was more drawn to art and drawing as a young child and, his father thought that was where his talents lie, but it’s really gone down the musical path and, As you say, he’s not super well known, but I mean, I think it seems each album he gets a bigger audience.

To listen to his records he’s definitely gone from playing smaller places to bigger ones, not quite at the stadium level yet, though, but really someone worth searching out and I found his live performance was what sold it to me.

I just caught him playing at a music festival last year in a back room of an Irish bar, and there [were] probably 50 people in there, and I was [seated] very close to the front and it was an electrifying performance. No one left the room for the entire set, I think, and in fact I went back and heard him play another night because he was playing at the same venue, so that’s what got me interested in his music, and him as a personality and what he represents.

Collins: I did want to hear about that discovery story. How did he fit in the pantheon of other artists that you like, and how did you end up liking him enough to make him kind of your road trip music of choice, for you and your son?

Montlake: Yeah, I mean, I enjoy folk music, traditional songs, you know, often with acoustic guitars and other musical instruments on there. And so that’s something I really appreciate. But at the same time, I should point out that the festival I was at was a very wide-ranging one with classical and jazz and electronic and all other kinds of music.

So I was kind of flitting between different acts, playing different styles. Sort of … the idea of the song that he plays, the music he picks up on, one description I’ve read is that, you know, a good folk song should be easy to learn and hard to forget. And I think that fits for him.

I mean, you hear these songs and they sound very simple and elemental and almost like you’ve heard them before. There’s a nursery rhyme quality to some of them, not all of them. And that does go back, if you look at the history of people who fanned out across the South in Appalachia, trying to collect some of these folk songs, you know, a hundred or so years ago. Some of them were tracing those songs back to English and Scottish ballads of the 17th century, for example, recognizable as nursery rhymes, or songs sung to children or songs sung by children. So there’s that quality to it. And I, would play these songs on road trips, and my son, who is entering sixth grade this year, he would, I mean, he’s not got strong musical opinions, I don’t think he would sort of call out for stuff, but he would let you know pretty quick if he didn’t like what we put on.

And this was something that seemed to be agreeable, and then … I found him requesting it, and then I told him about the artist, and he told me which was his favorite song, and so I made sure to keep playing more and more of it, and so … I think that I’m handing something down in the way that I suppose, you know, Jake Fussell was handed down music from the other generation to his, you know, much more capable in musical hands than mine. 

Collins: You’re a Bob Dylan fan, I learned from the editor’s note that accompanied your cover story. So, I’m assuming you see music as you’re describing it as sort of a continuum of influences and reinvention. And so, you know, this story in many ways became more than a story about an artist and his latest music.

Talk about how much you broadened it into that area. 

Montlake: Bob Dylan’s a fascinating figure. I’m not the biggest Dylan fan. In fact, Jake Fussell himself is a Dylanologist of, you know, some repute. He can reel off all sorts of albums and bootlegs and different performances that he knows. He clearly absorbed a lot of the Dylan songbook himself.

I mean, if you go back to Dylan himself, I mean, at the very beginning, he was very clearly modeling himself on Woody Guthrie. He idolized Woody Guthrie and even sought him out in his early years to learn from him and to make a connection to him. So, what Dylan did was he took that traditional music, you know, the folk music inheritance that I suppose he claimed, and then once he’d mastered it and really made his name for it and became a popularizer of it.

He then moved on and started writing his own songs and going off in all different directions and not being held back by it, you could say. He did go back to it again and again in his career, though. Even later on, he would record traditional songs and bring them back again and again. It was something he was returning to.

I think with Jake Fussell, what I hear is that, you know, someone who’s almost a scholar in terms of how he. digs into the past and he will take these songs and he will go back and say, well, what are the different versions of this? And there’s often like a branching tree. I mean, think of a folk song almost as a meme where, you know, there is the original creation and people pick up on it and they sort of go with it and maybe echo it or add something to it and it sort of can change form.

And if you try and track that or trace it, you can recombine different elements, different versions to make something new. And in some cases, I feel like Jake Fussell is a, he’s almost like a magpie, and I mean that in a very positive sense of, sort of, finding shiny objects and overlooked objects and recombining them and bringing them out.

I mean, in some cases, I will go back and be fascinated to find from his sleeve notes that you can find an archived version from 1937 of some fiddler or guitar player in a remote mountain town playing this song and someone’s got the recording. And then I can listen to it and think, oh yes, I see where he’s coming from.

I can understand how that has been adapted or modernized. And there are other cases where I’ll hear a song that’s a snatch of what inspired him, and I just can’t fathom the process that went on, that he took this element and recombined it and added his own style and delivery and music to it and made something, which to me at least seems entirely new.

Although he’s very modest about this and he tells me he’s not a songwriter, that’s not what he does, but he has a real gift for hearing and understanding and recontextualizing vernacular music and vernacular traditions, I mean, it’s hard to think of many other people who do it exactly the way he does, and also there’s a sense in which I hear it and it sounds traditional and ancient and modern and yet not quite anchored to any particular time or space.

Collins: He’s a manifestation of what came before and an interesting link to what will come next, I’m sure. 

I want to ask you about the intersection of fandom and writing, because you write on a lot of heavy topics for the Monitor. 

You write on U.S. politics and activism. You were our Brexit guy, back when that was a story, shuttling back and forth to cover it in London. I think every writer who veers into sports or the arts, every once in a while gets a chance to talk to someone whose work they admire. It can be kind of a deep-breath moment. I remember trying without success to get Peter Gabriel for a non-Monitor magazine interview back in the ’90s Finally corralled him briefly backstage at a human rights event. How did your familiarity in fandom affect your approach to reporting this story and writing it?

Montlake: It was a bit of a challenge. I mean, I’m a fan and I appreciate his music, but it wasn’t someone who I spent years listening to. I heard him play last year and then a few months later, I got in touch with his manager and, after a bit of back and forth, I ended up sort of hanging out with him on the road a few months later and, having a drink with him and getting to know him and, you know, he’s a pretty simple down to earth guy.

He’s not quite on that celebrity pedestal. He hasn’t sort of, you know, ascended to that level. So I suppose both the celebrity and the fan qualities were there, but they weren’t overwhelming for me. I actually, you know, frankly pitched it to my editors as this is a palette cleanser for me. This is a way for me to take on a topic and a story and a theme and something that’s going to, you know, bring me some joy and happiness and hopefully the reader can get some of that as well before I go back into the more hot and spicy and sultry flavors of politics and current affairs.

So, I really felt it as sort of a break from that. And at the same time, I’m also, you know, I’m a hard news person. That’s what I’ve done for much of my work for the Monitor, covering conflicts in Asia, for example. Where, you know, you’re always trying to take a very critical opinion and look for different views and to sort of not take any of your sources for granted.

In this case I mean I obviously talked to people who knew him and collaborated with him, with friends, I read reviews and looked at what critics had said I didn’t really see much value in trying to find someone who was, you know, a detractor, or a foe or an enemy. It didn’t really seem to apply here. People gave me thoughtful responses when I raised, you know, questions about his work. I talked to the person who was on the former label he worked for, who basically, not discovered him but at least kind of gave him his first chance to record a record, and it was very much a boost of him.

I asked him, you know, “How far do you think Jake Fussell can go?” I mean, “How much crossover appeal? Do you think this is limited? Can he grow his audience?” And people gave me interesting responses to that, but I didn’t really feel like my job was to sort of handicap his, selling potential as an artist so much as, yeah, as you said yourself earlier, it was really a launch pad to explore this folk tradition he represents and perhaps, you know, on some level to ask what is a folk singer to do today? What is the role? Is it just to transmit this meme, to carry it on, to, you know, exchange with those songs and give it to another generation? Or is it to put a stamp on it? 

And I suppose, you know, you could even see what he does as some aspect of a remix culture, A hip hop idea of sampling and recontextualizing and moving things around to make them new again.

And I don’t know what the role of a folk singer should be. I guess on one simple level it’s to entertain and enthrall and having seen him play in different spaces to different audiences, I’m very sure he can achieve that.

Collins: You’re a storyteller. As he is, and what does it say to you as a storyteller? What does it mean to you that this kind of music, from Fussell and from others, music that really passes down culture, keeps getting these new generational waves of interest.

Montlake: I think there’s always a hunger for both something new and shiny and attractive and never heard before that coexists with the desire to pull on the roots of the past, to feel some connection and to feel some sense of a journey that we’re all on. And that’s really what a good songwriter, a good artist can achieve.

And I think a storyteller does the same thing as well. I mean, there are almost no new stories, most classic narratives involve certain tropes, certain structures and dilemmas and conflicts and journeys. And I feel like a song can do the same thing. So for me, I wanted to understand his work as an artist and his thought process that goes into it.

And I think some of that is. It’s reflective of what a writer tries to do, in terms of creating narratives and stories, whether they’re true stories or fictional stories, that stay with the reader and in some way carry them forward to the next one.

Collins: In your 11-year-old son, do you see a new fan of the genre, or of Fussell himself?

Montlake: My son actually is playing drums, so in some ways he is in Fussell’s part, because Jake Fussell started off hitting drums when he was a young child and that was before he moved on to other instruments. I don’t know if my son has much of a musical bent, really, but he is quite good at the rhythms and the notation and trying to stick with the beats. 

He’s got a very, very brilliant mathematical/scientific mind, and I don’t know if [on] some level perhaps that could be a musical mind as well. So maybe I’m introducing him to a genre that he can play with on the side.

Collins: Absolutely. Well, thanks Simon, both for your piece, your discovery and for coming on to share about it.

Montlake: Thanks, Clay. That was a good conversation.

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Collins: And thank you to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes with links to the story we just discussed and to all of Simon’s monitor work at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Our sound engineer was Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.