‘When I’m Called’ Review: Jake Xerxes Fussell’s Poetic Album
On his eclectic, sprightly fifth album, the musician makes a compelling argument for the old-fashioned folk tradition, stitching together songs and verse from the past.
By Mark Richardson
For much of the 20th century, a folk singer was someone who preserved and performed vernacular music that had been handed down through generations. While plenty of artists described as such were also composers—Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly come to mind—the folk tradition was built atop songs that had been passed from one performer to the next, some going back hundreds of years. Since the 1960s, an expectation gradually took hold that singers should also write their own work. By the time the singer-songwriter movement rose to pop prominence in the ’70s, one assumed that a “folkie” with an acoustic guitar probably wrote confessionals, mining his or her own life for material.
The tradition of handed-down songs whose relevance is continually renewed never went away, it just became a niche. Jake Xerxes Fussell, a 42-year-old singer and guitarist raised in Georgia and currently living in North Carolina, is the old kind of folk singer, yet one with a distinctive approach. Like many before him, he performs his own arrangements of work written by others, some of which are so old they are in the public domain. But he’s the son of a folklorist who has himself studied folk music in an academic setting, and he brings a rare rigor and adventurousness to his selection of material. He has a skill for finding odd tunes few people have heard and transforming them into music that sounds fresh and resonant in the present. Most of the songs on his fifth album, “When I’m Called” (Fat Possum), has a long and knotty story behind it, and some of them come from unusual sources. But no knowledge of that background is needed to appreciate the record’s charms.