One of traditional folk music’s less pleasing traits has been the tendency for its protagonists to engage in bouts of territorial pissing. But Jake Xerxes Fussell is having none of it. After watching bluegrass enthusiasts and old-time string bands stare daggers at each other at fiddlers’ conventions across the Southern states, the isn’t much interested in any inhibiting and arbitrary divides.
Fussell grew up in Columbus, Georgia, the child of folklorists, and is steeped in the Southern folk vernacular. And yet his easy-going albums, all back-porch guitar and homespun vocals, offer more than that, weaving in pre-war jazz, early country and obscure, centuries-old ballads. On 2017s name-making album, What In The Natural World, the found room for Duke Ellington’s Jump For Joy alongside Have You Ever Seen Peaches Growing On A Sweet Potato Vine? by Worth County folk-blues man Jimmy Lee Williams. His latest (third) album continues in the same vein.
Out Of Sight - Fussell’s first album with a full band - is a collection of intimate but pepped-up and eerily topical songs about working, loving and drinking, made more prescient still by its contemporary-sounding flourishes and river-clear electric guitar. With his song choices, Fussell paints a fuller and richer picture of folksong than most self-declared traditionalists ever manage.