For as long as it's existed, the American music industry has obsessed over Black music, co-opting it into a package to be marketed and resold. Many Black perspectives deemed too threatening were defanged or erased in the process-particularly in genres like country, bluegrass, and folk, which draw on African-American sources but are usually performed by and for white people. Banjo player and fiddler Jake Blount resurrects those perspectives on his new album, Spider Tales, out May 29, 2020 on Free Dirt Records. He's digging deep into the roots of the music, pushing all the way back to Africa; the album's title, Spider Tales, is a nod to the great trickster of Akan mythology, Anansi. "The Anansi stories were tales that celebrated unseating the oppressor," Blount says, "and finding ways to undermine those in power even if you're not in a position to initiate a direct conflict." Blount is also drawing out the coded pain and anger in the songs to give voice to those who were shunned from America's musical canon. "There's a long history of expressions of pain in the African-American tradition," Blount says. "Often those things couldn't be stated outright. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person back then you could die from it, but the anger and the desire for justice are still there. They're just hidden. The songs deal with intense emotion but couch it in a love song or in religious imagery so that it wasn't something you could be called out about. These ideas survived because people in power weren't perceiving the messages, but they're there if you know where to look." Blount is determined to show that this music didn't form in a vacuum, but in the face of ruinous hardship.
The music of Spider Tales is haunted, full of "crooked" instrumental tunes, modal keys, stark songs, and confounding melodic structures. Jake Blount spins effortlessly through this music, playing his instruments with a focus on subtlety and on relaying meaning even in the melodies that have no words. Blount handpicked the tunes and songs from his own extensive research drawing out the Black and Indigenous roots of Appalachian music. Some songs, like "The Angels Done Bowed Down," are downright apocalyptic, speaking of blood moons and sacrifice, while "Mad Mama's Blues" is so ferociously violent that it's surprising it was even recorded in the 1920s. Even the instrumental tunes have a raw, abstract power to them. "'Old-Timey Grey Eagle' for me is the track that screams," Blount says. "There's an intensity in the build of the first two parts, followed by the destruction of the structure of the song, the destruction of the meter. Just a protracted vocalization coming out of the fiddle that I was emulating on the banjo. That spoke volumes about the intensity of the feeling behind the piece."Videos