Music that bridges generations

American folk music is a kind of oral storytelling that dates back long before even the printing press. It is a vehicle to transmit culture from one generation to the next.

Back when I was teaching preschool, folk musicians regularly came to sing with the children. Their goal was to pass down traditional songs – and by extension an oft-forgotten sense of American life and community. For many of the adults in the room, these were songs we hadn't heard since we were young, but all of a sudden we were all little kids again.

There's just something about folk music that brings people together. Its simplicity and easygoing nature makes it readily accessible to people of all ages, across racial and economic boundaries. But something more overt is at work, too. The American folk tradition is rooted in oral storytelling that dates back long before the internet and even the printing press. It is a vehicle to transmit culture from one generation to the next. A good folk song is an earworm with a history, born of a community and a people, that adapts to its era.

Jake Xerxes Fussell, the subject of a recent cover story by Simon Montlake, is particularly steeped in that tradition. The Georgia folk singer is part musician, part cultural historian. He doesn’t think of himself as a songwriter, preferring to draw lyrics from artifacts of Americana. 

"What Jake Fussell does is almost like archaeologists going back and finding fragments and trying to put the fragments together to figure out the culture that produced them," says Simon.

In that sense, Mr. Fussell's gift is not just musical. It is also the ability to fill in the blanks and make those fragments whole in new ways.

That's what drew Simon, a music lover and a journalist, to Mr. Fussell. The performer's story is not just that of a single musician. It is a tribute to the legacies that have shaped American music.

Raised in Britain, Simon might seem like an unlikely fan of American folk. His teenage affinity for Bob Dylan sparked his curiosity. This "voice of a generation" had roots that extended much further back, from Woody Guthrie to the blues masters. The tracing of this lineage intrigued Simon. He was fascinated to learn that some American folk songs started as traditional English songs from the 17th and 18th centuries.

But beyond that shared passion for musical history, Mr. Fussell's music simply spoke to Simon. And true to the genre's capacity to bridge generations, Simon's 11-year-old son, Sylvester, feels the same way.

Simon bought two CDs after seeing Mr. Fussell play twice at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, hoping that they could bring some harmony to long car rides. It’s never easy to find music that satisfies the whole family. 

"It’s the backcountry of Maine that we're driving through," Simon says. "It seems to fit that landscape, even though a lot of the songs are rooted in the South."

That’s the beauty of folk – it belongs to us all, whether a British American family driving through New England, or a pile of preschoolers gathered around a dulcimer.