Multi-instrumental roots artist, Jake Blount, revives Black and Indigenous folk music for modern audiences at McCabe’s in Santa Monica on Friday night.

By Bliss Bowen

Acclaimed roots artist Jake Blount to perform at McCabe’s in Santa Monica

Hearing “The Man Was Burning,” an obscure spiritual recorded in 1936, sparked excitement and a sense of recognition in multi-instrumental roots musician Jake Blount.

First, because it had been recorded at a Virginia state prison about an hour away from Blount’s family’s farm, which is located near a plantation where his enslaved ancestors had labored; and second, because the knife-edged intensity in 71-year-old inmate Joe Lee’s performance immediately directed Blount to “where that song needed to go” in a modern arrangement. Blount’s new version sharpens the original’s edge.

“My interest in this music is always at least partially coming from wanting to know what my family would have been singing,” said Blount, who found the song on “Virginia Work Songs,” a Smithsonian Folkways collection of field recordings made by John Lomax.

Searching for folk songs not already embedded in the traditional canon is challenging when so many potential sources have already been “scoured,” but Blount believes finding something nobody’s heard before is less vital than approaching the material with integrity.

“If you’re a modern musician and you’re going after these old songs, everybody’s gonna have a slightly different take on what to do with them,” Blount said. “Part of what encouraged me about working with ‘The Man Was Burning’ is that it would have been very easy for me, given my skill set and what I’m often doing, to make a bluegrass or old-time version; I’ve been performing a bluegrass version of that song on the road because I don’t have a rock band with me right now. But I’ve been reading a bunch about Sister Rosetta Tharpe and thought, ‘Oh, I can do this rock ‘n’ roll thing with this spiritual that nobody’s really been doing since her.’”

Recording amid pandemic restrictions, he wrote all the parts and played all the instruments except bass. Against an ear-tugging backdrop of electric guitar, handclaps and rhythmic loops, he updated the original anti-gambling lyric into a more timely condemnation of greed:

“That man was countin’ his money
Yeah he was grinnin’ mighty broad
He held a greenback dollar aloft, said
This money gonna make me a god!”

“I try to take approaches from across the timeline of folk music, rather than simply thinking I’m going to go back and update this thing for today,” Blount said. “I examine where it comes from as far back as I can go and then scan through all the approaches that black people have taken to folk music throughout the years and decide which one feels best for me to approach it. Even if you’re listening to something a lot of other people have heard, you can still wind up making such a different choice that it still feels unique to you.”

Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in ethnomusicology, Blount isn’t entirely comfortable identifying himself as an ethnomusicologist; he prefers to speak through his music and contextualizing stories he shares onstage and in post-show conversations.

His widely lauded 2020 album, “Spider Tales,” named after a trickster character from West African mythology, and his 2017 EP, “Reparations,” refreshed traditional tunes from Black and indigenous communities in the Southeast and became part of the ongoing conversation about what truly constitutes “Americana.”

That positioned the Providence, Rhode Island resident amid a burgeoning wave of artists — alongside the likes of Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Yasmin Williams — who are refocusing attention on how Black and Indigenous musicians have developed and shaped American roots music.

When he headlines at McCabe’s in Santa Monica on Friday night, he will be accompanied by fiddler and banjoist George Jackson, Lula Wiles bassist Mali Obomsawin, and guitarist/banjo-uke player Gus Rich. Even with such traditional string-band instrumentation, however, Blount’s arrangements take left turns; he isn’t hidebound in his presentations.

“There’s a lot of value in having people who are really invested in presenting these old traditions the way that they used to be heard,” he noted.

But having grown up playing in rock and metal bands in Washington, DC — “an urban, middle-class environment in the 21st century” — he said it “wouldn’t necessarily be realistic or respectful for me to go pretend I have the same background as Joe Lee or the same belief system or have the same aesthetic. It’s part of an ethical approach to this work to respect the differences between where those artists come from and where we come from.”

Jake Blount

WHERE: McCabe’s, 3101 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica

WHEN: 8 p.m., Friday, April 22

COST: $20

INFO: 310-828-4497

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Reviving Black and Indigenous Folk Music