When Florida security guard George Zimmerman was acquitted over his shooting of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2013, 18-year-old Jake Blount turned to the past to cope with his despair. “I wanted to know how music has historically allowed Black people to feel human in the face of racism,” he says. “My ancestors would have sung spirituals and work songs when they were enslaved – this music is all that remains of how they survived.”
Initially, Blount found their message jarring. “It felt like they were saying: ‘Life is terrible, but at least we get to die someday,’ which isn’t what you want to hear when you’re 18,” he says, laughing over a video call from his home in Rhode Island. “But I felt a sense of rightness in the act of singing them. This is music that my people have been singing for generations. It felt like what I was raised to do.”
Blount had been playing the guitar since the age of 12. In his later teens, he was delving into the world of fingerpicking and pop-folk groups such as Nashville duo the Civil Wars. His encounter with spirituals set him on a new path of discovery to research Black people’s often-forgotten contributions towards the fiddle and banjo music of early 20th century string bands. In 2020, he released his debut album, Spider Tales, putting this ethnomusicology to use in reviving songs of the Indigenous Gullah Geechee people, as well as reworking standards such as Lead Belly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night, to critical acclaim.
Yet, as a mixed race artist in the majority-white space of US folk music, Blount is an outlier. “I’m used to being the only person who looks like me in most rooms,” he says. “There’s an awareness that not everybody’s going to be down for what I’m doing. But if everyone finds your art agreeable, you’re not getting anything done.”
This uncompromising ethos governs Blount’s latest album, The New Faith. His most complex work to date imagines a religious service for Black refugees who live in a dystopian near-future where society has collapsed because of the climate crisis. Blount’s compositions combine contemporary genres such as rap and ambient electronics with reworked songs from gospel singers Bessie Jones and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, as well as Alan Lomax’s rural field recordings, to create a holistic depiction of Black music.
“I say that I play ‘traditional Black folk music’ because that allows me to be expansive,” Blount says. “It could mean I sing spirituals, or play string band music, make disco, house, rap or jazz. Really, all major American musical exports come from Black vernacular traditions and when I was visualising the music of the future, I knew that is what would survive.”
The result is Afrofuturist music made in ruins, darting from the past to the present in its vision of the future. Blount’s soft tenor harmonises on the plaintive Take Me to the Water, before hand claps and body percussion provide a beatbox-style backing to rapper Demeanor’s verses. Throughout, Blount’s voice provides a hopeful tone amid the darkness. “I wrote this album during the pandemic, when I was isolated from my community and had no idea what the future would hold,” Blount says. “Just as I turned to spirituals in the uncertainty of 2013, now I wanted to know how this music would help us even further into the future. What would it sound like when we’re all dead?”
Rather than write and record with a band, as on Spider Tales, isolation forced Blount to find that sound of The New Faith alone and to overdub each element in his bedroom studio. The constraints ultimately opened up a new creative path. “Tunes come in trends and it can be hard not to follow what other people want you to play,” he says. “There was something really freeing about making this record since there was nobody there to tell me no, or to push me in a particular direction. I just got to explore.”
Although the album comes to a harrowing conclusion, he wants it to serve as a cautionary tale. “I hope it will motivate people to take action now,” he says. “If we carry on as we are, denying individual and institutional responsibility for the environment, this dystopia will be our reality.”
Musically, Blount also sees The New Faith as a radical interjection in a community that can spend its time obsessing about the past. “Folk music can be so oriented on thinking about what has been done before that people don’t devote time to what it’s going to look like going forward,” he says. “This music can’t stay fossilised.”
And the response to his breaking of tradition has been positive. Blount recently played at a fiddler’s convention in West Virginia – where traditional musicians gather to jam – and his genre-spanning tunes were met with approval. “I was expecting the old time community to think it’s tacky, because they so often do that to people who are pushing the tradition in interesting directions,” he says. “But that didn’t happen. Perhaps I’m not the outsider in the room any more.”