That same year, Blount won the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, and on that widening platform, increased his advocacy. When he excelled in old-time competitions in 20 at a venerable festival popularly known as Clifftop, he made it an instructive moment, emphasizing that he and some of his peers brought their Blackness or queerness to that setting right alongside their musicianship, just as his first solo album, 2020’s Spider Tales, excavated the buried lineages that he’s proudly carrying on. Jemisin.Īs performer and scholar, Blount has taken the whitewashing of folk traditions, not to mention the heteronormative lens that’s been applied to them, head on. The singer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist begins The New Faith‘s liner note essay by calling himself an “unlikely devotee.” He’s talking about how his queerness has complicated his relationship to Christianity, the Black church and its music, but he could just as easily be referring to the divide between the Black folk and old-time songs on which he’s an expert and the fierce forward thrust of Afrofuturism, to which he adds his transformative imprint on a concept album that he’s dedicated to literary luminaries Octavia Butler and N.K. “In my vision for these people’s religion, because of what they’ve been through and what their ancestors have been through,” Blount explained in a recent interview, “they’re not going to talk about God as a force that intercedes and saves them.” That’s one chapter of the story he unfurls on this revelatory full-length, a tale of a small group of Black Americans who’ve survived the environmental destruction of the earth and founded a new civilization with its own mythology, creed and context for the old songs. The story he’s telling predicts a day when a catastrophic flooding event, already unleashed on the world, can never be contained or trusted to permit tranquility again. Stretching across the recording is a harsh, high-pitched droning tone. The rendition he performs on The New Faith, his new album, is as rhythmically spry as its predecessors, but the guitar solos he plays are deliberately unsettling, insidious, volatile. Jake Blount has pored over those archetypal versions of “Didn’t It Rain,” and discerned a different resonance in the song. “Just listen how it’s rainin’,” they urged, adopting present tense, “all day, all night.” Their ebullient, imaginative readings of the scriptural event of the Great Flood testified to past divine judgment and deliverance, then plunged their congregants right into the immediacy of it, as though they were pressing their faces to the window of Noah’s ark. Generations ago, gospel giants Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson each sang the rhetorical question, “Didn’t it rain, children?” and bent time with the emphatic answers they supplied.
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