Ocean State Session: For Jake Blount, Folk Music is Always Evolving

Rhode Island PBS

If you try to describe the music of Providence-based artist and scholar Jake Blount, chances are you may fall short. And in a few months time, that description could be totally off. He plays the fiddle, banjo, and guitar, and you could say it’s “traditional” or “folk.” But to some people, that might mean something different and more static than what you’d hear on his recordings, or what you’d see at his performances – which, by the way, you might have encountered on NPR’s Tiny Desk, or at the Newport Folk Festival. For Jake, reinvention is a crucial part of American traditional music.

Arts and culture reporter Mareva Lindo talked with Jake earlier this year as part of Ocean State Sessions, a collaboration with our colleagues at Rhode Island PBS. Below are some of the highlights from that conversation. Listen to the attached audio for a special web-only version that features a longer cut of the interview, along with several songs he performed at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island.

Jake Blount: I just did a little tour with two of the folks who were playing on the set with me, Augustus Tritsch and Flannery Brown. And one of my friends came to the show in Chicago, who’s been following me for years. And he was like, “man, I’ve seen you so many times, and it’s a different show every time. And the throughline is there, but the sound keeps changing.” And I feel like each time I go in to make a new record, or like, design a new set, I wind up learning how to do something I couldn’t do before. Growth and innovation is the shape of the tradition that I’m a part of, and it asks that of me constantly.

Blount: I am studying musicology and ethnomusicology, and also just got accepted to this cool thing called the Open Graduate Education program. So I’ll be getting a master’s degree in anthropology while I’m there.

It was kind of the original plan. … And then I got enough gigs that I couldn’t have a job in between the gigs, and wound up becoming a professional musician for six or seven years. And yeah, I have learned that that specific thing as it exists right now is not for me. … More power to all the people who are keeping it up. But I felt the need to return to grad school really get a beat on what I’m trying to do artistically, because I’ve become a much more focused and competent musician in my time in the graduate program, as opposed to just being on the road, playing the same 12 songs every night and not really getting the chance to do anything else. You know, it’s been a great opportunity and a welcome return to a path that feels true to me, and I think the performance and the scholarship feel inextricable to me and always have, and I think both of them will always be part of life going forward.

Rhode Island PBS Staff

Blount: The first one we played was “Haul Away Joe,” which I learned initially during my brief period of living on a sailboat, while hauling up the main sail with a bunch of other people. And one of the ship scientists started yelling out this song that just sounded so cool to me, and I hadn’t heard it before. And I think encountering a sea shanty doing the thing it was meant to do, as opposed to just like on a record, or you know, at a pub sing or whatever – it’s cool in those settings too, but it just was like hair-raising to hear it where it was supposed to be done.

And I got back to dry land and discovered that Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, had recorded that song. So I sort of wound up hybridizing those two experiences of it. Lead Belly’s version is not super in time rhythmically. I mean, he could play in time when he wanted to, but he liked to let it stretch, I think, whereas if you’re using it to coordinate work, like, you know, pulling up the sail in unison, you need it to be pretty nailed down to a beat. So I tried to kind of harmonize those two things and create a version of it that felt true to me. And certainly I think a lot of my Providence influences got in there, kind of got grungy in a way I did not expect.

Blount: I think right now, because of the kind of authoritarian stance that our government is taking toward protest and the, you know, maybe not overtly authoritarian, but certainly oppressive acts that they’re making toward the arts in particular, I’ve been thinking about Pete Seeger a lot … I’m like, we are so back to the McCarthy era in some ways. And I’ve been thinking about all of these folk revival figures who were getting, like, hauled up before Congress and made to testify because their music was seen as such a threat to that political agenda at the time.

And I think we’ve gotten to a point now where folk music is so comfortable for people that there’s this like nostalgia that it indulges, and people don’t really hear what it’s saying. And I think what’s important to me about the maybe broad, but in some ways focused, body of music that I play is, whether it’s a sea shanty or a work song, whether it’s a fiddle tune meant for dance music, whether it’s a blues song meant to be played for dancers in a juke joint, all of these songs are meant to unify working bodies toward a common purpose, right? Spirituals the same way, right? Whether it’s labor, whether it’s pleasure, whether it’s worship, it is meant to bond us together in pursuit of a common cause. And I think that is what made it so scary at the time. That’s what made people freak out about those folk revivalists.

And I’m kind of feeling the need to get back there, which is funny, because my friends could tell you I’m, like, pretty critical of the 60s folk revival in a lot of ways, right? There are some things that were commonplace then that I don’t think I would ever want to do now, on an ethical level, as a scholar, as an artist. That being said, there are lessons to be learned. … I think at the moment, I’m trying to step up to the challenge of putting myself on the line to let this music do the thing it was designed to do.

Rhode Island PBS staff

Blount: I think that it has a really rare balance of richness and variety and groundedness. Like, I haven’t met anybody here who’s a jerk in the music scene, and usually you do. And that’s not to say there aren’t any. … That being said, I think I see a phenomenal variety of music being played all over the place, that I couldn’t tell you one genre predominates here in the way I could in a lot of other cities, or that there’s more venues for a certain type of thing. I think the thing that drew me to Providence in the first place when I moved was that I had traveled through here and played shows, and people just seemed down for anything. … I knew there was an openness and a vibrancy and an urge to experience and try new things that you just don’t find that often these days.

• “Haul Away Joe” (trad., arranged by Jake Blount)
• “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” (trad., arranged by Jake Blount)

You can watch Jake Blount’s full Ocean State Sessions performance Aug. 1 at 8 p.m. on Rhode Island PBS, also available on YouTube.