Matt Katz: This is All Of It. I'm Matt Katz filling in for Alison Stewart. February Get Lit musical guest, Jake Blount, is a performer and scholar of Black American folk music and a recipient of the Steve Martin Banjo Prize. His most recent album, The New Faith, is an Afrofuturist folk record that imagines Black religious music in a world leveled by climate change. For his set list at the book club event this week, he drew from an archive of blues and spiritual songs, tapping into themes of abduction found in Tananarive Due's The Reformatory, our February book selection.

All Of It and Get Lit music producer, Simon Close, interviewed Blount at the library on Wednesday. In a moment you'll hear their conversation, but first, here is an excerpt of Blount's opening song fittingly titled Where is My Brother Gone?

[MUSIC: Jake Blount: I Wonder Where is My Brother Gone]

Simon Close: Hi, Jake.

Jake Blount: Hey.

Simon Close: Thank you very much for joining us tonight.

Jake Blount: Thanks for having me.

Simon Close: When we were talking about putting this event together, as we were talking with the library and Tananarive's team, The Parable of the Sower came up. Immediately that brought my mind to you because I know that that was an influence on The New Faith. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about The New Faith, and all the influences that went into it, and, I guess, also how literature in general plays into the influences that inform your music.

Jake Blount: I have to say, my dad is an author. I would be an author if I had the attention span to write a book. Truly, big respect. I always approach my work in that way. I try to think in that mindset. It was one thing when I was working with more traditional old-school stuff, like on my first record, Spider Tales, which is a straight-up string band record with some commentary and twist in it. The New Faith is a full-on Afrofuturist concept album that explores what Black folk music might sound like in a future that's been drastically altered by climate change.

Was obviously influenced in the conception by Parable of the Sower, even though I think the tone and content of it wound up very different. The idea was tracing the way that this music has evolved over time, will continue to evolve over time, and envisioning the ways in which as maybe we lose access to some of the technology we have now, we're going to hear some of those older sounds that have become buried in today's popular music reemerge, but altered in a new way.

There's pieces of disco in there, there's pieces of house music in there, there's also banjo tunes from 1687. I got to throw it all into one big pot and let it cook, and it did a lot of the cooking on its own. I didn't have to do very much.

Simon Close: I'm interested about that big pot, I guess. You are a scholar of folk music, you've talked a lot about folk music, and The New Faith is a folk album, but it also incorporates hip-hop, all the other elements you were talking about. What does folk mean? What does that word mean to you?

[laughter]

Jake Blount: Oh, we can all go home. I think that any person you ask would give you a different definition of that term. Now that I'm in grad school, I am really leery of definitions. That would be the first 10 pages of the dissertation that I wrote on this question. I guess when I say Black folk music, what I am referring to is Black music that emerges in a non-commercial or pre-commercial context.

I think even though there are folks involved in the commercial record industry and certainly the commercial record industry produces a product that is sold to folks, I think a lot about, yes, folks, we're all folks.

[laughter]

Jake Blount: I listen to Dua Lipa on the way here. I'm not better than you. I think about the music that people are making together rather than just listening to together. Part of the reason why I drew the things together that I did was because of when and where I grew up. I'm playing this old fiddle banjo, blues, and string banding whatever stuff that everybody seems to acknowledge as folk because it falls before a certain unnamed time cutoff.

Which is very arbitrary to me and kind of silly because I grew up in Washington DC in the late '90s and early 2000s, and everybody around me was rapping or producing EDM later on. That was the music that was happening around me. It was Go-go, it was hip-hop, it was funk, it was EDM, all that stuff. I don't personally see the rationale for saying that folk music has to stop at a certain point or at a certain demographic, which is also often implied.

I think it was part of my mission to be expansive and to envision what folk genres might look like today if the Black people who were present in those spaces had been empowered to bring in all of their influences and to be their whole selves, as opposed to having to chop out various pieces to conform to the legalities of the time when Black people were not allowed to own drums in this country or to conform to the demands of a market that expects very specific sounds from Black people and white people because the early record industry made it that way.

I am in a position now of being more free than anybody who came before me. I may pay a cost for that in commercial appeal, but that's why I go to Brown University and they give me all their slave money. I hope they didn't listen to that.

[laughter]

Simon Close: We won't say anything. Don't worry. Speaking of going to Brown University, so you're doing a PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology?

Jake Blount: Yes.

Simon Close: I guess maybe you can challenge the premise of this question, but, when did music become not just a hobby and a creative output for you, but also a scholastic pursuit?

Jake Blount: I think probably toward the end of high school. I grew up playing in rock bands around the DC area. They weren't good. I just moved house and found my bands like EP that we recorded, and sophomore year of high school wasn't good. I ran into this band called Megan Jean in the KFB and in an Ethiopian restaurant unused street in downtown DC on the way to a James Blake concert because the dubstep was there. This guy got up and started playing the banjo in a way that I'd never seen anyone play banjo before. I went up to him afterward. I was like, "What was that? I've never seen anyone play a banjo like that." He said, "Oh, that's called the claw hammer style and it comes from the African instruments that the banjo descends from." I was like, "The what?"

Wound up going and doing a little more research and learning that the banjo was invented by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and had its first major site of growth in the continental United States in the Chesapeake Bay region, which is where my own ancestors are from.

I found this very close direct ancestral connection to it. Then when things started heating up around Black Lives Matter, I started feeling the need to reach back for some of that to understand how my ancestors had thought about and coped with all of the pressure that they were under, because I learned that a lot of the people I'd grown up around were not as invested in my well-being as they thought they were.

I wound up buying a lot of books and it started me down a rabbit hole and when I got to college, I said I'm either going to make college about this or drop out of college to do this and I wanted my parents to still talk to me. Working so far.

Simon Close: The banjo has had new life in pop music. Beyonce just announced a country album that Rhiannon Giddens is on. Rhiannon Giddens for anyone who's not familiar, a prominent banjo player, scholar of music history, excellent musician. I'm curious about, I guess, for you, as a musician and scholar of this history, what would you hope to emerge from a mainstream pop acknowledgment of banjo and the Black roots of country music?

Jake Blount: It's a complicated question. I do think that we're already seeing some of the benefits of what went down. Where I and my colleagues who are out there on social media and are publicly associated with these topics, have seen an influx of followers and engagement and everything else on social media from other Black people who are trying to figure out how this works.

It's been really exciting and Rhiannon has dedicated a lot of time this month after realizing what was going on because she didn't know. She recorded her tracks for that two years ago, and then woke up in the morning in Ireland, and she was on a Beyonce song. She had no warning.

She got on Facebook and on Instagram and has been posting Black History Month banjo Renaissance shout-outs to everybody who's involved in reviving the tradition today. That's been me my bandmates Tray Wellington and Kaia Kater, Dom Flemons, Justin Robinson, Jerron Paxton, and Valerie June were today. She's been shining out a light in all these different places, as she always does.

That's the thing that I think has been really exciting to see the community pounce on this chance to lift each other up and lift the tradition up and hopefully, reach some segments of the community that we've wanted to for a while. A lot of us have been struggling for a long time to get knowledge about the banjo and of just rural folk music and rural music in general into the mainstream Black cultural discussion. Nobody's getting covered by Black publications.

Nobody's getting hired to go play Afro-punk or whatever. It finally feels like those eyes that have been narrowly focused in very specific genres, or maybe narrowly focused away from our genre are starting to become aware of the work that we've been doing for decades to bring this thing to light, particularly, to Rhiannon and people who are 10, 15 years older than me, and I'm here benefiting from the groundwork that they laid to have the career that I have.

They had to, oh, man, it had to be so hard. I hope that she is feeling the love and understanding that this is the payoff for something that she spent decades trying to create. I wished so much more success for her.

Matt Katz: That was musician Jake Blount in conversation with All of It and Get Lit music producer Simon Close at the New York Public Library earlier this week for the book club series Get Lit. You can find the full event including all four songs that Jake performed online through all of his social media and to play us out here's a bit of Jake Blount from the event with a song City Called Heaven.

[MUSIC - Jake Blount: City Called Heaven]

I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow

Tossed in this wild world alone

I have no hope for tomorrow

I'm tryin' to make heaven my home

Sometimes our boat's tossed and driven

Sometimes I know not where to roam

I've heard of a city called heaven

I've started to make it my home

My mother has received bright glory

My fathers did walkin' in sin

My brothers and sisters won't own me

Because I am tryin' to get in

Sometimes our boat's tossed and driven

Sometimes I know not where to roam

I've heard of a city called heaven

I've started to make it my home

Hark, what is that calling

My blood runs so chilly, and so slow

The ones who have gone before me

Gon' pilot me through as I go

Sometimes our boat's tossed and driven

Sometimes I know not where to roam

I've heard of a city called heaven

I've started to make it my home

[00:20:00]