With his 2020 album Spider Tales, Blount summons a rich history of American folk songs written and sung by Black and Indigenous musicians, tunes that have been there throughout the history of this country, even if they were obscured or drowned out, or audiences simply weren’t paying enough attention. “By doing that, they created a financial incentive for those traditions to stop interweaving with one another and stop communicating.” They marketed the Black people to Black people and the white people to white people,” Blount says. “They recorded Black people playing blues and jazz, and white people playing fiddle and banjo music. ![]() In the 1920s, record labels began differentiating between “race records” and “hillbilly music,” sometimes erasing Black musicians from the hillbilly records by not crediting them. Before then, Black string-band musicians were more commonplace in dance halls-“people used to talk about how you couldn’t run across a group of 15 Black people without finding a fiddler among them,” explains Blount, who has a degree in ethnomusicology. Who we think is supposed to be playing old-time string band music, whose contemporary adherents obsess over authenticity more than in almost any other genre, is based largely on a marketing scheme from the early 20th century. “I’ve changed the lyrics and just sung this love song-debatably a love song-to a man,” says Blount, who identifies as queer, “and people will still try and force this heteronormative perspective on what the songs are and who’s supposed to be playing them.” The song begins: My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me, tell me where did you sleep last night? Blount sings My boy, my boy, instead.īack before the pandemic, he tended to perform the song with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves, and people would sometimes approach him after a show and ask if the two were dating and had changed the lyrics to her perspective. Or take “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” a traditional folk song covered by blues musician Lead Belly in the 1940s and made famous for my generation by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. ![]() ![]() Blount often switches “girl” to “boy,” but keeps the dress, a fun way, as he says, “to upset the usual way of doing things.” He does it with the jovial song “Roustabout,” which contains the lyrics Pretty little girl with a red dress on. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.īanjo player and fiddler Jake Blount likes to mess with his audiences: He’ll swap the pronouns in the lyrics of the old-time tunes he covers.
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