The Old Beloved Path

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell announces his new album, The Old Beloved Path, out September 18th via Fat Possum Records and releases the lead single, “Rock Island Line.” Over six unique and very personal studio albums, Fussell has found his musical future by reimagining, reorchestrating, and reunifying the past. By combining different traditional music sources in a completely original way, he routinely creates fresh works of art that are at once rooted in history and ingeniously modern.

It's Fussell’s inspired intuition that remakes a classic American folk song, like today’s “Rock Island Line,” into something that still rings with inherent wisdom but is completely his own. In the past, Fussell says he might have avoided a song like “Rock Island Line” because it seemed too commonplace to him— many folk singers had already done it. But after listening to a recording of the song by Lonnie Donegan, something about the incantation of the chorus struck a chord. In typical Fussell fashion, his remarkable ear and intellect took over.

“The song struck me as very beautiful, but just singing the verses wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t relate”, Fussell comments. “So, I wound up putting it together with an old English nursery rhyme that I had been kicking around. ‘Wire, briar, limberlock /How many geese is in our flock?’ and ‘If you want to ride you got to ride it like you’re flyin, get your ticket at the station on the Rock Island Line.’ Marrying those two things, I felt like something worked, it felt like a song to me.”

The son of two artists and documentarians in their own right, Fussell grew up in Georgia around a community of people who were documenting traditional culture and craftways like storytelling, log cabin building, and basketmaking. Imbued with this deep respect for the past as well as an unquenchable intellectual curiosity, he grew up appreciating the beauty in those supposed lost arts and remains privy to them in a unique way.

“For people in the folk music world, songs are their religion,” states Fussell. “But traditional music is not a bee stuck in amber. I tend to think of everyone who plays traditional music as being on a spectrum from conservative to wildly creative. I am somebody who tends to sit on the edge of those two worlds. I don’t always present these songs in a historical context. I have to relate to them personally. I approach these songs through my own worldview.”

Recorded in North Carolina, The Old Beloved Path was mixed by producer Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station), who has also played bass on tour with Fussell. Friends Dominic Billett, Isa Burke, Wayne Horvitz, and Ken Whiteley add their instrumental voices to Fussell’s singular musical amalgams. As producer, Whiteley fulfilled Fussell’s desire to make an album that was more a document of musicians playing live together in a room, dwelling less in atmospherics and musical elaboration. Working together, they intentionally limited their palette - focusing less on all the things a song could be, and honing in on the essential.

The songs Fussell chose for The Old Beloved Path are songs he has heard for years, but many of them felt newly illuminated - hitting different.

“Traditional music gets more intense the older I get. The way that I see the world is through these songs. The world of traditional music has been such a gift to me. If nothing else, a lifelong companion.”