The child of a folklorist and teacher, Fussell finds historic songs and sings them in a modern way. His latest album is When I’m Called.
by David Menconi
About 12 years ago, Brendan Greaves got a message from a new friend that caused him some uneasiness. It came from Jake Xerxes Fussell, a young man from Mississippi whom Greaves knew from folklore work at the University at North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, they had been part of a project compiling a box set of recordings for the Southern Folklife Collection. Fussell told Greaves that he was a musician and was going to send some of his music.
Greaves operates Paradise of Bachelors Records, a small independent label in Chapel Hill, so this happens a lot. But it could be awkward with friends — what if Greaves didn’t like Fussell’s music?
Turns out, it wasn’t an issue.
“He sent a few songs he’d digitized from recordings on a cassette at home, and I was immediately blown away,” Greaves recalls. “Even in this raw, basic state, what he’d done with these songs was amazing. They were traditional folk songs, but rendered unrecognizable and transformed. I still don’t fully understand the alchemy of how Jake does it, but he transmutes every song into something else through his voice and reverence for the material.”
After Fussell moved up to Durham in 2014, Paradise of Bachelors went on to release his first four albums, all of them brilliant examples of folk music that’s not at all musty. His 2017 release What in the Natural World felt like a breakthrough, with songs ranging from the Pete Seeger/Byrds classic “Bells of Rhymney” to delightful obscurities like the quirky folk chestnut “Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing on a Sweet Potato Vine?” Fussell’s fifth album, When I’m Called, (his first on a larger label, Fat Possum Records) is another wide-ranging set of songs from as recently as the mid-1980s and as far back as the mid-1740s.
When I’m Called is an elegant album centered around Fussell’s amiably drawling baritone voice, which goes down smooth as a shot of good whiskey. The arrangements are spare, not a note out of place, rendered by a supporting cast of reliable quality signifiers for this style of music: Fussell’s fellow folk artists Robin Holcomb and Joan Shelley, Watchhouse/Megafaun drummer Joe Westerlund and studio aces Tucker Martine and James Elkington, among others.
Though his parents aren’t musicians, Fussell is sort of in the family business. His father is a folklorist, while his mother is a teacher with an affinity for quilting. And they gave their son his distinctive middle name in honor of a potter in his native Georgia, Dorris Xerxes “D.X.” Gordy, who was a hero and mentor to the family while Fussell was growing up.
“Growing up in a folklore household kind of got me into all this,” Fussell says. “My parents were more from the world of material craft culture, but it was a household with music in it. And my dad has worked with musically inclined people. So I grew up in that world, going to folk festivals and hearing field recordings.”
After years of song collecting, Fussell has voluminous material to draw from. When I’m Called is full of songs that feel brand new despite their mostly ancient history, with some first brought to the public from the likes of folklore icon John Lomax and 1950s folk-revival legend Jean Ritchie.
“I’m always kinda filing things away that I find in old songbooks or online archives,” Fussell says. “Just about everybody playing traditional music is also looking for source material. I’ll slowly work up versions of songs. When it comes time to do a record, I’ll think about songs that go together. I also compile bibliographies of it all. I like to be transparent about sources for anyone who might be curious about where something came from.”
Fussell’s only formal music lessons were in elementary school, when he learned to play bass, which led him to guitar. There were always instruments around the house for his father’s folklore work, so he taught himself to play.
Tagging along on fieldwork excursions to hear artists like Georgia blues singer Precious Bryant and Piedmont blues guitar legend Etta Baker provided further inspiration. So did encouragement from his father’s friend, musicologist Art Rosenbaum, who would become a mentor to Fussell before his death in 2022. (When I’m Called is dedicated to Rosenbaum.)
“I developed a style as I got deeper and deeper into playing and became more aware of different recordings,” Fussell says. “Art Rosenbaum was a big part of that. He knew tons of banjo and fiddle tunes, ballads, shanties. He bridged a lot of worlds. Whenever I had questions about something old and weird, he was who I’d call.”
For all his interest in songs, however, writing them himself doesn’t hold much appeal for Fussell. Interpreting songs that are already out there, and seeing where he can take them, is an approach that suits him well. He’s also an active member of the local music community, deejaying the weekly “Fall Line Radio” show Wednesday afternoons on Hillsborough low-power community station WHUP, 104.7-FM, when he’s off the road.
“For the longest time, I thought music would be something just for me, private,” he says. “Whether I could make a living at it seemed so unlikely. An abstract dream. I worked day jobs for a long time, including as a fact checker in a liability-insurance office — the most boring work imaginable! — and doing highway-traffic surveys. So I don’t take it for granted. This area’s a good place for a musician to live. You can dart in and out of local scenes and everybody’s cooperative, polite and pretty cool. People here mostly get along. It’s more a series of scenes than ‘a scene,’ which is kinda nice.”
This article was originally published in the January 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.
