The Past is Present

Finding new meaning in the public domain with Jake Xerxes Fussell.

Jake Xerxes Fussell is known as much for being a song collector as he is a performer. From 17th century sea shanties to Appalachian ballads culled from the Library of Congress (and YouTube), the folk guitarist recasts and reimagines traditional tunes and ballads lying dusty in the archives — shopworn odes passed down through the oral tradition with names like “The River of St. Johns,” “Love Farewell” and “Breast of Glass.”

“It’s all part of my love for traditional music,” says the Columbus, Georgia native. “I’ve been interested in these songs for a long time and it’s a well I like to draw from. And yeah some of them are more obscure than others, but there’s so many out there.”

Fussell, who performs at the Richmond Music Hall on Thursday, July 20 with fellow guitarist and fiddler Sam Moss, doesn’t embalm the past. He keeps it alive. The longest track on his latest album, “Good and Green Again,” is a nine-minute rendering of “The Golden Willow Tree,” an Anglo-American maritime ballad originally called “The Golden Vanity.” Fussell weaves other folk songs in and out of the original text, highlighting the cruelty of life at sea, creating an entirely new and affecting work out of a rusty old sailing tune.

“I do like to find things that haven’t been overplayed,” he says. “I figure, why not take some out that you haven’t heard a bajillion times.” To him, that means ancient tunes about the sweetness of peaches, the life of an outlaw and the musings of 19th century fishmongers, even an ode to the father of our country that concludes, ““General Washington / noblest of men / His house, his horse, his cherry tree / and him,”

“I like a lot of standards but I don’t necessarily feel the need to play ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ I mean, there’s so many great versions of that. Why would I do that?”

Folk music in the blood

For the 41-year-old Fussell, history and excavation is in the blood. His father is the distinguished historian and folklorist Fred C. Fussell. “Both of my parents were involved in folklore when I was growing up,” he says. “Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were working in material culture, crafts and that kind of stuff … they would locate people who were blacksmithing and quilting and making coverlets on a loon and pottery.” For years, Fussell’s dad oversaw the Chattahoochee Folklife Festival, held in downtown Columbus along the Chattahoochee River. “It was a weekend festival of blues, gospel, country fiddlers, and sacred harp singing. I mean, I would be around all of that stuff as a kid, soaking it in.”

Fussell started playing the drums at 5, and only became interested in string instruments later on when he taught himself the guitar and started playing upright bass in the school band. At first, he was like any other kid, listening to alternative rock like the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction. “But that stuff didn’t hold much weight,” he says. “When I was 12 or 13, music took another direction for me. I knew immediately that I had access to this other thing that was a little more serious.”

That was the blues and old-time country music. Thanks to his parents’ friends, musicologists George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum, who each made important field recordings of musicians in the deep South, he became transfixed by the roots of American song, and later gravitated toward the fingerpicking styles of Blind Blake, Elizabeth Cotten and Rev. Gary Davis.

The editor of the local paper, an amateur guitarist, took an interest in Fussell and tutored him in fingerpicking. All the while, his upright bass chops earned him a place, at 13, with a group of bluegrass players — “they were all in the 60s” — as well as a younger band of folk singer-songwriters in Phenix City, Alabama where his father’s family is from. When he graduated high school, he began playing with the country blues singer Precious Bryant, traveling to Europe with her as well as to the Newport Folk Festival.

At the same time as his sideman duties, he would do the occasional solo gig in Columbus, but when he moved to the Bay Area, Fussell began to focus more on developing his own aesthetic, rooted in the old songs he was discovering. “It was a training ground. It was all incremental, slowly finding myself and my sound. I’m still doing that really.” He adds, with a chuckle: “It’s a lifelong thing, becoming an artist.”

He ended up living in Oxford, Mississippi for nearly a decade, attending graduate school at the University of Mississippi and honing his craft. “I started playing there a bunch. I had a couple of standing weekly residencies, and began to cultivate a little following, even before I made a record.”

Critical acclaim

His first album, simply titled Jake Xerxes Fussell, was produced by “cosmic folk” guitarist, William Tyler, formerly of Lambchop and Silver Jews. The 2015 disc began Fussell’s relationship with the Paradise of Bachelors label, known at that time for issuing indie-rock acts like Hiss Golden Messenger.

“I told them I didn’t know what I was doing in making a record, I’m not good at bossing people around in a studio, and it would be great to find someone to do that for me.” The atmospheric debut featured contributions from Tyler, on organ and guitar, Chris Scruggs, who guested on steel guitar, bass and mandolin, and fiddler Hoot Hester.

He and Tyler were good friends, and that helped the creative process. “I had been around studios before but never as a solo artist. We had a similar vision to how we wanted to build the sound. Looking back, I still play those songs and I’m proud of that record, but you hear it and think about how it might have been different.”

Fussell has since released three other records on the Paradise of Bachelors label, including 2017’s “What in the Natural World” — which the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich named as one of the ten best albums of the year — and “Out of Sight,” from 2019, which concentrated on songs found in the public domain. The Guardian in the UK, in a five star rave review, wrote that “the sense of someone soaked in music and place comes through strongly as Fussell arranges and performs his own versions of traditional folk songs that hail from North America, Ireland, the UK and, in the case of the deckhand’s song ‘Oh Captain,’ the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.”

“I do really well in England and Ireland,” says the troubadour, adding that he’s traveling to Finland this summer to perform. “I went there years ago playing guitar for a gospel guy from Memphis and wanted to go back. I’ve played Europe a few times but I’ve yet to do much of Scandinavia outside of Sweden and Denmark.”

People around the world seem to love these old songs, he says. “Some places will surprise you.”

Jake Xerxes Fussell will perform with Sam Moss at the Richmond Music Hall at Capital Ale House, 623 E. Main St. on Thursday, July 20. 7 p.m. $20. http://www.capitalalehouse.com

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