Jake Xerxes Fussell: When I’m Called album review — folk songs brought back to life

The folk musicians of North Carolina seem to feel the countervailing tugs of what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan termed the Cosmos and the Hearth. Members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops are scattered to the winds — Leyla McCalla to New Orleans, Rhiannon Giddens to Dublin — returning only to rootle in archives. But others have gone deeper into their own landscape and memory, their Hearths. Jake Xerxes Fussell, for instance, collects his material from around the Deep South. The son of song-collecting parents from Georgia and taught by the folklorist Art Rosenbaum, Fussell finds fragmentary songs that are sometimes little more than the musical equivalent of outsider art, created by the untrained, so it takes all his musical skill to bring them back to life.

Happily, that skill is considerable. On his fifth album, When I’m Called, his fingerpicking recalls a slightly less nervy John Fahey and he has recruited wisely among his friends. Joan Shelley, for example, makes her way from Kentucky to add harmony vocals behind Jean Cook’s strings on a reading of Benjamin Britten and Jane Taylor’s children’s folk song “Cuckoo”, while Seattle-based Robin Holcomb (who spent a few years in North Carolina in the 1970s) brightens the sea song “Gone to Hilo”.

Elsewhere the call of the Cosmos is insistent. “Leaving here, don’t know where I’m going,” he sings, as producer James Elkington throws more and more instrumentation into the edges of the mix and then offers up destinations a railroad away, from Salt Lake City to Alabama. The most outsider of the songs is the title track, its lyrics taken from a school exercise book. “I will answer when I’m called/I will not breakdance in the hall/I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name,” he sings. The music turns that child into every sinner and that teacher’s call into the end of every life.

★★★★☆

‘When I’m Called’ is released by Fat Possum