Culture
Jake Xerxes Fussell talks traditional music ahead of return to Stuart’s Opera House
By: Julia Weber
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NELSONVILLE, Ohio (WOUB) – For Jake Xerxes Fussell, performing traditional music simultaneously draws upon extensive research and is rooted in intuition. When asked about his influences, Fussell might cite half a dozen archival sources and several influential people in his life. Still, ultimately, his contemporary reinterpretations draw upon his inclination toward exploration and instinct.
On Thursday, Fussell performs at Stuart’s Opera House (30 Public Square). The Georgia-born musician is no stranger to the region. In 2023, he joined the Nelsonville Music Festival lineup and has made multiple appearances at Stuart’s alongside contemporaries like Joan Shelley and, this time around, country auteur Dougie Poole.
Ahead of the performance, WOUB’s Julia Weber spoke with Fussell about his artistic process, the people who shaped his development as a musician, and the role research plays in his approach to interpreting traditional songs.
A transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
JULIA WEBER: For folks who haven’t seen you before, can you tell me about what they can expect from your upcoming show?
FUSSELL: I’ll be doing my thing, which is: I play guitar, and I sing. I work mainly with traditional material, and my setlist tends to vary a bit from tour to tour. I usually try to do a handful of songs that people who are familiar with my records will recognize. Then I’ll change it up with things I have not recorded or haven’t recorded yet, or (I’m) just feeling on that particular tour. Sometimes I travel with a drummer or a bass player. This tour, it’ll just be me, but I’ll have Dougie Poole with me every night. I’ve been a fan of his music for a couple of years now.
Who are some of the people who shaped your development as a musician?
FUSSELL: First and foremost: my parents. My dad was a folklorist, and my mom is a teacher, an English high school teacher. She incorporated folklore into her classroom.
In music, there was Art Rosenbaum, a painter with a very long career beginning in the ‘50s, who made field recordings of vernacular music. When I was a kid, I knew him and his wife, Margo, a great photographer. There was also Precious Bryant, a blues guitarist and singer from Talbot County, Georgia, right down the road from where I grew up. She wasn’t a formal teacher; she would just play, and I would try to play along.
There were a number of people like that — particularly in the rural blues world and old-time and string band tradition. I played upright bass in a string band when I was growing up with some local guys at a barbecue restaurant in my hometown, just trying to pick up what I could.
At the same time, I got into pre-war vernacular music — 78s — as well as field recordings by people like Alan Lomax, the Library of Congress, and Smithsonian Folkways. I dug pretty deep into that beginning when I was 12 or 13.
What is your approach to research as it relates to your songwriting?
FUSSELL: It’s just what interests me. I used to have a little bit of an identity thing about whether I wanted to be a researcher or a musician. But then I realized I wasn’t cut out to be an academic or a researcher. It took going to grad school for me to figure that out. The whole time, I was always playing music, and my music was always developing and evolving in its own way.
It was always another side of my head because it wasn’t intellectual; definitely informed by some of that stuff, but all of that didn’t predicate it. It was another, deeper exploration going on that had more to do with the gut way I see the world. It was interesting to approach the world through songs and try to find myself in them.
That’s always been the way for me. There’s a lot of traditional material I don’t do just because it doesn’t feel right for my voice, or it feels illegitimate for me to sing because it’s not my experience. I don’t get hung up on playing a lot of coal-mining songs or anything, even though I love the material; I never worked in a coal mine.
Not that I feel like somebody has to in order to sing those songs. I don’t think there’s a purity test people have to pass to be authentic. I think it’s the role of a singer to convince you in a way that what they’re singing is “true.” Whether it’s a historical truth or not is another matter. I think there’s a different level of truth with songwriting.
Anyway, I don’t mean to get too metaphysical about it, but I do always want to approach those songs in a way that was considerate of all that stuff, but also trying to find myself in them. If I didn’t hear myself, I’d go onto another song. That’s always been my approach.
You collaborated with guitarist James Elkington on the score for Rebuilding, a neo-Western drama released last year. Can you talk about the differences in your process when writing a film score versus one of your albums?
FUSSELL: Recently, James (Jim) Elkington and I have been doing press for the soundtrack, and it’s funny— from his perspective, the process felt pretty similar to how we’ve worked together before. When we were first approached about the project, we had just finished the final mixes for my last record, which Jim produced. We had just turned everything in—artwork, masters—and were finally able to come up for air. Then almost immediately, I got a call about the film.
Because I had a record coming out and a full touring schedule ahead, I didn’t think I could take on scoring a feature-length film in such a short timeframe. So I called Jim and asked if he’d help. In the end, I wrote most of the cues—around 17 out of 20—and Jim contributed a few as well. I’d send him pieces, and he’d build them out with strings and other instrumentation in this lo-fi, cassette-demo style. We would just toss ideas back and forth, which was how we had worked in the past. So, from his point of view, it was like ‘Oh, this is just like working with Jake, like we were a few weeks ago.’
For me, though, it was different from a composition standpoint. I’m usually working with traditional materials, drawing on a wide range of sources. I’d done some instrumental work before, mostly solo acoustic pieces for short documentaries, but this was a much larger undertaking. Writing for film means serving a specific purpose, with clear constraints—and I actually found that pretty liberating.
What music have you been listening to lately?
FUSSELL: I was listening to this record called Harmonica Solos a couple of days ago—really beautiful—by George Winston, who’s mostly known as a jazz piano player. He made a lot of solo piano records, some more ambient, and some similar to what I do, but instrumental, interpreting older folk songs.
I’ve also been getting into Wayne Horvitz, who was part of the downtown jazz scene in New York in the ’80s and now lives in Seattle. I’d seen his name on a lot of records—he produced some of Bill Frisell’s work, and I’m a fan of Frisell—but a couple of years ago I toured the West Coast with Robin Holcomb, who I’ve admired for a long time. She’s married to Horvitz, and he came along, played a bit of piano, and tour-managed. He’s just a great guy—one of those people where you think, “I really like this guy, I need to dig into his music more.”
At home, I listen to a lot of jazz and stuff like that. I have a four-year-old who is really into The Stooges and Black Sabbath. There’s a guy from Texas who’s a younger singer-songwriter; I think he’s a high school teacher. He records under the moniker Acre Memos. Robin Holcomb — married to Wayne Horvitz — her records have been on constant rotation for the past couple of years. There’s a West Coast jazz guy named Jimmy Giuffre and (I’ve) been loving his recordings lately, like late ‘50s, early ‘60s.
It’s funny—I grew up on a lot of traditional music. My parents had some jazz records, but I wasn’t deeply schooled in it. We listened to a lot of blues, folk, and rock—Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, Janis Joplin. Then growing up in the ’80s and ’90s with MTV and the radio, it was Beastie Boys, Nirvana, all that.
But jazz was always something I felt I was missing. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been trying to educate myself more because there’s just so much beautiful work there. Especially in terms of recording, those artists were incredible at making records. That’s something I’ve been trying to dig into more, and it’s what I spend a lot of time listening to now.
Jake Xerxes Fussell and Dougie Poole perform at Stuart’s Opera House Thursday, February 19. Find tickets and more information at this link.