• 1 The choice to capitalize “Black” throughout this article reflects an understanding of Black people (...)
• 2 At the initiative of two Black female Atlantic Records marketing executives, Brianna Agyemang (now (...)
• 3 D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s “The Charade” (2014) tackles police brutality in general, while J. Cole (...)
• 4 Though the term was coined by conservative political commentator Andrew Sullivan in a 2018 article (...)
• 5 Alongside a Spotify playlist of 2020 “protest songs” inspired by the murder of George Floyd, NPR pu (...)

1Since its beginnings in 2013, Black Lives Matter has had both a disruptive and reinvigorating effect on US music. While it wasn’t until after the death of George Floyd that the black-screen operation “Blackout Tuesday” and the hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused opened up a discussion on how the popular music industry had exploited the creative labor of Black1 artists and perpetuated racism through problematic hierarchies and structures of oppression2 (Coscarelli)—a reckoning whose results are still being weighed (Leight, 2021; Onapa; Downie)—by that point scores of musicians had already released songs that echoed the conversations spurred by the movement. The artistic outburst was such that African American studies scholar Daphne A. Brooks stated in The Guardian in 2016 that, in the space of three years, Black Lives Matter had ushered in nothing short of “a new golden age of protest music,” half a century after the Sixties. Undeniably, Beyoncé’s Black-panther-inspired launch of “Formation” at the Superbowl halftime show and Kendrick Lamar’s performance of “The Blacker the Cherry” and “Alright” at the Grammys ceremony earlier that year were reasons enough to state that African American artists had turned to more politically explicit lyrics and performances which paid tribute to the victims of police brutality3 and foregrounded their racial identity—at the risk of alienating mainstream audiences for those who had achieved widespread pop recognition, as could have been the case for Usher with “Chains” (2015) or Janelle Monáe with “Hell You Talmbout” (2015). US mainstream media noticed the change, nicknamed pop’s “Great Awokening”4 in a 2019 Pitchfork article (King), and used the opportunity to look back to earlier periods of African American protest music, presenting this new development as furthering a legacy of socially committed Black US art and establishing continuity with earlier periods of US history when state-sanctioned violence had targeted the Black population.5

• 6 In contrast to the “folk” genre (a commercial label used to sell the music descended from the 1960s (...)
• 7 “Alright” was the fourth single from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly. See Claude Ch (...)
• 8 For a detailed study of BLM chants, see Noriko Manabe’s “Chants and Music from Black Lives Matter P (...)

2Just like during the Civil Rights movement, music didn’t solely provide a commentary on issues of racial and social justice—it was consubstantial with the mobilizations. At about the same time as the outpour of political songs became evident, BLM birthed its own folk music.6 The chant “We gon’ be alright,” the hook from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 song “Alright,”7 became a fixture of demonstrations after it was first used at Cleveland State University in July 2015 (Limbong).8 As a chant, in spite of its ambiguities, the song became a “symbol of hope and strength” (Manabe, 2019) for protestors, a tool they could use to “build solidarity,” “feel part of a strong community,” and “spiritually uplift” one another (Kutschke 268). This act of bricolage was consistent with the sentiment that inspired Lamar to write the song. The rapper recounted that it was inspired by a visit to Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, South Africa, in 2014, which led him to reflect on how the enslaved forebears of the BLM generation had dealt with hardship. Lamar told NPR in 2015, “Four hundred years ago, as slaves, we prayed and sung joyful songs to keep our heads level-headed. And 400 years later, we still need that music to heal” (Limbong).

• 9 On February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida by George (...)

3It was that same impulse to find healing and strength in music that led Jake Blount, a queer Black banjoist, singer, fiddler, and scholar from Providence, RH, to turn to traditional music when, fresh out of high school, he heard that a jury had found George Zimmerman not guilty in the death of Trayvon Martin9 on July 13, 2013:

• 11 As will be demonstrated in this article, Blount ended up including spirituals in his repertoire for (...)
• 12 “Old-time” was one of the first names given to the fiddle- and banjo-based folk music of the rural (...)

4Black Lives Matter didn’t just provide the occasion, but also the context for Blount’s exploration of his musical heritage as the musician had grown more interested in his cultural roots because of the movement (Winick, 2020; “Jake Blount Performs Live”). Yet the spirituals he found did not provide any relief. In a June 2020 interview, Blount told Decolonizing the Music Room, “I wound up [with] just a whole lot of, ‘When I die things will be fine,’ which was not really what I was going for” (Waller-Pace).11 Blount only found the resilience and the sense of lineage that he yearned for in the secular music Black banjoists and fiddlers played in string bands during slavery and thereafter in the rural South—old-time music.12 While old-time is generally played and listened to by white Americans, Blount discovered there had been substantive Black and Indigenous contributions to the style. He went on to learn the banjo and fiddle and subsequently released an EP, Reparations (2017), and two solo albums, Spider Tales (2020) and The New Faith (2022). All these recordings came out while Blount was engaged in the conversations launched by Black Lives Matter both inside and outside the folk scene.

• 13 While Black Lives Matter is a grassroots movement, I will mostly use statements by two of the many (...)
• 14 Because this article focuses on how Blount targets mainstream representations of old-time and blueg (...)
• 15 In Saidiya Hartman’s work, the “afterlife of slavery” refers to the continuation of structures of o (...)
• 16 The anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff coined the term “re-membering” in her 1982 ethnographic study o (...)

6This article aims to demonstrate that the relation between Blount’s music and the BLM movement13 far exceeds context and inspiration: his work has acquired an increasingly visible political function, from curating minority voices from musical elders in his debut EP Reparations to amplifying their radicality in his first album Spider Tales. I contend that Blount’s involvement with BLM evidences the “chronopolitics” of folk, an expression I derive from Kodwo Eshun’s Afrofuturist analysis of “critical and utopian” uses of “contextualizing and historicizing frameworks” (292-293). Blount’s recontextualization of old-time within African American experience throws light on distorted historical narratives which limit the music’s reach today.14 In addition, as traditional songs from slavery and the Jim Crow era find an echo in the context of BLM, they effect a musical superposition of timeframes which both situates the present in the “afterlife of slavery”15 and allows for the re-membering16 of a transgenerational community in search of emancipated futures.

• 17 Among those are Rhiannon Giddens (Williams), Kaia Kater (Kallao and Perez), and Amythyst Kiah, who (...)
• 18 Blount is very much aware of this history, which he sums up in a scholarly article (2024).

8Most Black practitioners of old-time active today entered the white-dominated folk scene experiencing discomfort, followed by surprise, then validation,17 when they discovered the true history of the banjo. A central instrument in old-time, the banjo was initially created by enslaved people in the Caribbean before it was appropriated by white minstrels in the mid-nineteenth century (Conway xiii; Epstein 360).18 From then on, it grew into a symbol of American whiteness (Winans ix). Blount belongs to a generation for whom this knowledge was more readily available: he started taking banjo lessons precisely because he stumbled upon a musician playing in the African American clawhammer style who volunteered an impromptu history lesson (Eno; “Jake Blount Performs Live”). Blount then set out to read on the subject and realized he had a personal connection with the instrument, as it first made its home in the US amongst the enslaved population of the Chesapeake Bay Region, where Blount’s ancestors were held in bondage (Cholst; Waller-Pace). Blount took clawhammer lessons in college, where he progressively integrated the study of old-time into his curriculum. In the Summer of 2015, he participated in a week-long intensive workshop with Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins of the Carolina Chocolate Drops (“Jake Blount—Reparations (Ep. 94)”), the first band to educate the public on the Black history of country and old-time music (Fink).

• 19 On the shared traditions of “Black” and “white” rural musics, see Russell.
• 20 Jimmy Rogers and the Carter Family, arguably the first country music stars, had close musical ties (...)

9Through liner notes and during live performances, the Drops have taught their audience a story which received mainstream attention with the release of Beyoncé’s country-infused album Cowboy Carter in March 2024. Although old-time and country music are separate genres—and can even be said to belong to separate music categories (popular for country and folk for old-time)—both share the same history, as “old-time” was one of the first labels used to designate commercial recordings of the folk music which would eventually morph into country (Peterson 4). In the early 1920s, New York music companies, feeling increasing competition from the radio (Peterson 16), decided to invest in niche markets. Having recently discovered the existence of a profitable Black audience (with the successful release of Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”), they went searching for Black blues artists in the South and stumbled upon white fiddlers. They recorded those who had acquired a large following in the South through fiddling contests (starting with Fiddlin’ John Carson), a guarantee that their records could be sold at a profit. As records were mostly retailed in segregated furniture stores, and because New York executives assumed that musical taste broke along racial lines, the companies that explored the potential of Southern folk music created two separate catalogs—“old-time” or “hillbilly” (white) music and (Black) “race records” (Miller 196-214; Peterson 195-196). In doing so, they constructed race-specific commercial categories out of a transracial, participative Southern music,19 while Southern musicians continued collaborating across the color line.20

• 21 For example, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were able to revive the North Carolina Black string band (...)
• 22 In his first and only scholarly article to date, “Jail the Zombie: Black Banjoists, Biopolitics, an (...)

12As a folk practice, old-time mostly differs from commercial country music because of its focus on preserving musical traditions. In addition to playing their instruments, singing, and performing, old-time musicians learn material that has been handed down from generation to generation, sometimes through an older practitioner,21 sometimes through recordings and transcriptions.22 For this reason, old-time includes at least two sets of ethical challenges that bear a relation to the objectives of BLM—the first one concerning the continuation of tradition (what songs to continue playing, and how close to their known versions) and the second about how to give proper credit to those who contributed to the handing down of the US musical heritage. Jake Blount has been involved in both efforts.

• 24 For example, Rhiannon Giddens transformed “Git Up in de Mornin,” a minstrel tune from Briggs’ Banjo (...)
• 25 My use of the acronym BIPOC for “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” reflects Jake Blount’s own (...)

14While other old-time musicians have opted for altering the lyrics of offensive songs—sometimes in an effort to flip their meaning and turn them into resistance anthems24—Blount considers that omitting offensive couplets or altering lyrics cannot erase the general intention of the song: “I’m still going to know what the song is about” (Eno). Instead, Blount suggests expanding the cannon to include more BIPOC25 perspectives. In addition to contributing to these debates, Jake Blount has given inclusivity workshops at folk festivals and is a founding member of Bluegrass Pride: to him, the most effective way to increase Black and Indigenous participation in old-time and bluegrass spaces is to make music festivals safe to everyone (Cholst). In recent years, this has meant getting rid of Confederate symbols on the grounds in addition to avoiding minstrel standards (Sawyer; Laney 38).

• 26 The Roud Folk Song Index, devised and compiled by Steve Roud and hosted on the website of the Engli (...)

15The same concerns permeate Blount’s music curation, starting with his choices in terminology. Blount avoids the term “old-time,” being aware of the exclusionary logics that have presided over the cooptation of traditional musical styles into commercial categories. When asked what kind of music he plays, Blount usually answers with a sentence: “I play fiddle and banjo music from Black and Native American musicians, mostly in the Southeastern United States” (Cholst). The emphasis on performers is not just a way to circumvent commercial labels chosen to market the music by outsiders: it displaces the focus from anonymous pieces listed in the Roud Index26 to the particular BIPOC contributors whose versions and variants Blount has showcased in his records.

• 27 The EP contains only one original composition, “Going Home to Dorris” (a tribute to his grandmother (...)

16Because folk music is transmitted from generation to generation and incurs modifications across time and space, authorship is a difficult notion to define in folk. Songs are considered collective creations (Roy 59; Seeger 95) and access to them depends on the filter of the folklorists who transcribed or recorded them and may or may not have written down the name of their originators. Yet specific versions of songs can be traced back to particular singers and musicians, especially when they made recordings from which later generations of musicians learned. At a time when BLM was encouraging discussions of reparative justice, the title of Blount’s first EP, Reparations, reflects the musician’s intention to give proper credit to his sources and to present the diverse contributions of BIPOC artists to old-time: “my idea of reparations was like, ‘we are giving these people their due’”(“Jake Blount—Reparations”).27 In an interview conducted by Tom Wilmer for KCBX in April 2024, Blount explained why, to him, it had been important to “say their names,” extending the BLM slogan which had been used to keep the memory of victims of police brutality alive to obscured folk artists:

• 29 Paradoxically, while the self-released EP Reparations originated from a research project that Bloun (...)

17During his performances, in liner notes,29 as well as in interviews, Blount gives details about his sources, which include field recordings, collections of folk tunes, transcriptions found in travelogues, and archival footage, among others. He often mentions who made the first transcription or recording of the songs, who sang them first, and where they were from. For example, in his Tiny Desk concert of January 2023, when introducing “The Downward Road” from The New Faith, Blount made sure to explain that this composition included a snippet of a banjo tune from 1687, “Angola,” “taken down from enslaved Africans in Jamaica by a man named Mr. Baptiste, who was working with a guy named Hans Sloane” (“Jake Blount: Tiny Desk Concert”). He has given more details about this archive and referenced an academic book, Kristina Gaddy’s Well of Souls, in which readers and listeners can learn the history of the tune, in various interviews and performances (e.g., Eyre; Ainsworth; “Jake Blount LIVE at Heartwood Soundstage”).

• 30 Old-time, like country, is commonly accompanied with rural imagery referring to the South of the Un (...)
• 31 Adinkra symbols are used by the Akan and Ashanti peoples of Ghana and Côte D’Ivoire. From the seven (...)

19Blount’s re-Africanization of old-time visuals30 extends to his banjo, which was custom-built by Will Seeders Mosheim of Seeders Banjos, a luthier and musician: instead of ornate Victorian inlays, Blount chose to have three Adinkra symbols31 engraved on his instrument (Fig. 1): Epa (for “handcuffs”), a reference to slavery, law and justice, on the fingerboard; Akoben, the war horn for vigilance and wariness, just below the nut; and Sepow, the executioner’s knife, which stands for justice, on the peghead and brass plate (Eno).

• 32 Historian Hayden White defines the “practical past” as “the past that people as individuals or memb (...)

22A fitting “soundtrack to the Black Lives Matter movement” (Sawyer), Blount’s curating of minority voices in Spider Tales establishes a genealogy of anger and resentment, providing a practical past32 to the 2020 protesters and situating the present time in the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007 6), a perspective which matches BLM’s call for reparations. At the same time, the album constitutes a counter-narrative to the mainstream view of old-time and other country-adjacent styles as celebrating a nostalgic “used to” (Mann 86) based on the escapist fetishization of a cheerful rural past. This explains why, upon the release of Spider Tales, Blount told Jeremy Gaunt of New Depression, “I am not here to make happy music.” In this part, I will analyze Spider Tales as a trickster album which brings Black Lives Matter in conversation with the African American past archived in old-time, then I will explain the difficulties encountered by Blount in bringing those covert messages to the surface in relation with the demographic makeup of the contemporary old-time audience.

• 33 It is also a clear signal that Blount does not consider “urban” and “rural” styles as legitimate ca (...)
• 34 This is not to say that double meanings can only be encoded into words—sounds and rhythms carry mar (...)

25This way, Blount lures the old-time listener into what would seem to most ears, at first listen, a fairly conventional, mostly instrumental old-time album, until one reaches the last track: “Mad Mama’s Blues.” Initially an urban blues, it is obviously not part of the “Black and Indigenous mountain music” from which most tracks on the album originate (“Spider Tales”). Its main function33 is to invite listeners to turn back and realize that every single track on the recording was a “spider tale” hiding a chronicle of the “grief, powerlessness and fury” of previous generations (liner notes). While Black and Native American resistance and feelings of outrage and anger have mostly been recorded in the historical archive indirectly, either as illegal or deviant acts (Hartman, 2021 xvi), these songs have passed them down from generation to generation, inside the communities where they originated. To Blount, they constitute a precious Black and Indigenous archive: “these songs are the oldest texts that we have: they come out of a time and a place where people were legally not permitted to learn to read and write, much less encouraged to honestly convey their thoughts” (“How Jake Blount Is Transforming Black Folk Music”). From this point of view, Spider Tales embeds at least three trickster devices: the encoding of covert meanings into the five non-instrumental34 songs on the album during slavery and Jim Crow, Blount’s decoding of these texts and compiling them as historical records in the context of BLM, and the turnaround which awaits the listener in the last track.

• 35 Blount acknowledges having first learned the song from this recording (“Going live from Heartwood S (...)
• 36 Lead Belly sung other songs about lynching, for example “Hangman’s Blues” and “Gallis (Gallows) Pol (...)

26The first vocal song, Lead Belly’s “When Did You Sleep Last Night” (track 3)—also known as “In the Pines”—might be the most striking of the selection, as it is a well-known song, not just to the old-time audience but to the general public as well, since it was popularized by Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged show in 1993.35 While it is generally understood to recount a conversation between a man and his unfaithful female lover, such an interpretation cannot account for the reference to the “driver’s wheel” in the third verse: “Her husband was a hard-working man / Just about a mile from here / His head was found in a driving wheel / But his body never was found.” In interviews and live performances, Blount has presented the song as being about a lynching (Ahad), an interpretation which matches more encompassing analyses of Lead Belly’s repertoire36 and life (Gussow 42) as well as another, lesser-known alternative title for the song, “Black Girl” (“Jake Blount Transforms American Roots Music”). To Blount, the song has been miscast as a story of “love gone wrong” precisely because its trajectory in the mainstream as well as in folk circles has divorced it from its historical context and the community in which it originated: “the people who would have understood that subtext have been written out of the history and denied a place in the tradition” (Ahad). Even when old-time songs are credited to Black originators like Lead Belly, decontextualized readings—sometimes reinforced by the interfering influence of more popular (white) versions—restrict what meanings carry over to the present.

• 37 The song starts with stomping (the liner notes list banjo, fiddle and feet as the three instruments (...)

27The four other songs with lyrics on the album also display dual meanings related to their originators’ need for covert communication. The shout song “Move, Daniel” (track 5) belongs to the African American and Indigenous Gullah/Geechee nation of the southern East coast, a Black ethnic group originating from an area spanning from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida (Gullah/Geechee Nation website). In the online listening party for Spider Tales, Blount explained that his motivation for including the song on the album was its repurposing of religious references37:

• 38 Jarrell (1901-1985), who was recorded saying the N-word, is still a celebrated figure in the old-ti (...)

29The same playful irony appears in “Boll Weevil,” the twelfth track on Spider Tales: in the liner notes, Blount mentions the white singer who popularized the tune, Tommy Jarrell, but not without exposing his not ever having credited the Black woman he learned the song from.38 Restoring the Black origin of this tune invites the listener to reconsider its meaning. While “Boll Weevil” is most commonly categorized as a “disaster song” referring to the recurrent devastation of cotton crops in the South starting in the 1890s (Blackman), this song personifies the pest and presents it in conversation with a farmer, taunting him. Blount’s recontextualizing of the song within the Black sharecropping community allows him to reframe it as a trickster song and to invite alternative readings which connect it to other early twentieth-century tunes in which the narrator identifies with the bug. Ayana Smith notes that while many variants in this song group vilify the pest (for example Ma Rainey's 1923 “Bo-Weevil Blues”), it is also portrayed as a folk hero exemplifying “the tenacity of African Americans” (181). For example, Charley Patton's 1929 “Mississippi Bo Weevil Blues” invites a comparison between the traveling pest and “the itinerant lifestyle of the migrant farm worker, […] one of the most prominent themes of early blues song literature” (Smith 181-182). In addition, it portrays the bug as a role model for the narrator, who “identifies with the power of the insect that destroys the financial well-being of the landowner, and in this way expresses subliminally his own frustration and lack of power” (182). Smith categorizes Boll Weevil as a form of “badman trickster,” a later variation on the trickster figure exhibiting more violent traits than Bre’er Rabbit, prone to “extreme alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, violence and murder,” who “must be avoided, feared and contained in order to preserve the sanctity of societal constructs and moral values” (182). To Smith and John Roberts before her, the ramping up of the violence and of the anti-social character of the trickster “may represent continued sublimation of African American frustration, which received little outlet during this period” (Smith 182; see also Roberts 184-215).

• 39 At this moment in the official video by Abbey Pechman, the cross morphs into a guillotine (Blount, (...)
• 40 For a thorough analysis of the violence in “Crazy Blues” see Gussow 159-194.

30The last two vocal songs of the album are those in which the violence is the least lyrically covert, while their instrumentation gives them a veneer of familiarity. “The Angels Done Bowed Down” is a banjo and fiddle arrangement of a spiritual collected by John Wesley Work III, a Black scholar of African American folklore. It was included in his 1930 master’s thesis, published in 1940 under the title American Negro Songs. The biblical references in this spiritual contain masked allusions to slavery and Jim Crow—the references to Jesus “hanging” from the Cross and to angels “hanging their harps on the willow trees” transform the Crucifixion into a lynching scene. But while the imagery can be considered a decoy, the anger is explicit: with lyrics such as “Come back, angels, bolt the door / The time that’s been, will be no more,” it is a plea for God to cleanse the earth of injustice. In spite of the reference to the New Testament, the God referenced here as wielding “Jehovah’s sword” is an embodiment of the wrathful divinity of the Old Testament, coming to avenge his son’s death while the angels “blow out the Sun” and “turn the moon into blood.”39 In contrast, the intertwining fiddles only hint at dissonance—if one does not pay attention to the lyrics, they might miss the point. In a similar manner, while “Mad Mama Blues” can be considered as covering a desire for social justice under the guise of madness, it explicitly declares that the narrator “wants to set the world on fire” and to “see blood running through the streets.” The mad(wo)man trope was commonly used as decoy in early-twentieth-century blues. Just like in Mamie Smith’s 1920 buoyant “Crazy Blues,” where a similar desire to cause harm is professed, the images of destruction and murder in “Mad Mama’s Blues” remain a fantasy and can be understood as the narrator’s traumatic response to her lover’s own violent behavior (“you can try to bring me down / beat me black and blue / but these bones are gonna rise again / I’m coming back for you”).40 From this point of view, the female Black classic blues singers of the 1920s also belong to the trickster tradition. On this last track, Blount’s all-string instrumentation (fiddle, guitar, and bass) dramatically shifts one minute before the end. At 2:38 the pace suddenly picks up and the relaxed and sassy blues turn into a frantic bluegrass jam, as if the veil was finally lifted on the emotions which originated the song. The track fades out, evading resolution.

• 41 Descended from early anthropological uses in Lévi-Strauss (31), “homology” is used in Popular Music (...)

31Spider Tales’s tricksterism is based on a chronopolitical gesture: it attempts to subvert the pastness of old-time to bring it in conversation with the present and guide (or rather jolt) the listener into revising their understanding old-time songs. As such, Spider Tales constitutes a profound departure from mainstream understandings of old-time as a safe haven from the complications of modernity. As old-time audiences remain overwhelmingly white, it remains to be seen if such efforts can be fruitful as long as the racial homology41 which has obscured covert meanings isn’t broken.

• 42 For a study of John and Alan Lomax’s “failure to listen,” see Stone. Through their field recordings (...)

36This is compounded by the fact that, to Jake Blount, the music industry has purged Black expressions of their racial and radical contents—whether structurally (through the inherent decontextualization effected by the commodification of music, following Adornian critiques of the culture industry) or by intentionally obscuring their subversive nature to increase sales—a mechanism Nelson George identifies as “crossover mentality” (147). Such “defanging” (Blount’s word in Cholst) of Black music goes hand in hand with a policing of listening which Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the “listening ear”: not only are expressions of radicalism unlikely to be commercially distributed but, “through the listening ear’s surveillance, discipline, and interpretation,” they are also unlikely to be perceived as such by hegemonic listeners (Stoever 7-8). Building upon W.E.B. Du Bois’s conceptualization of the “color line” in The Souls of Black Folk (41), Stoever conceptualizes a “sonic color line” which she defines as “the process of racializing sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire, and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’” (7). The “listening ear” polices the sonic color line and explains why some meanings never make it across it (7). In a discussion of the passage in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass when Douglass recounts singing with fellow slaves, Stoever demonstrates how the author equates enslavement with “the isolation of being perpetually without a listener or interpretive community,” and how the “dehumanizing physical violence of Hester’s beatings” is present both “in the slave songs and in the deleterious interpretive violence performed by white listeners who ignore, misunderstand, dismiss, and/or (mis)interpret black cultural production for their own ends” (51). Those dynamics were then replicated in the field recordings which became essential sources for old-time musicians.42

• 43 Alicia Garza, one of the activists most invested in a Black futurist vision in the Movement of Blac (...)
• 44 Black History Month, an official month-long celebration which started in 1976, originated in Carl G (...)

37Therefore, bringing backstage onstage ultimately hinges on finding an audience who will listen critically across the sonic color line. This might explain why, for his next album, Blount decided to fast-forward to a time when traditional music has become the musical idiom of a fitting interpretive community with the capacity to reactivate its chronopolitical function. The New Faith (2022) consists in a fictitious field recording of a group of African American climate migrants who have little access to electricity and find solace, spiritual relief, and connection in the songs of their forebears. With this album Blount extended the link between past and present into the future, as his aesthetic endeavor became more overtly Afrofuturistic. In this fictitious future, traditional music allows for the re-membering of a community of BIPOC people with their ancestors, as the folk function of the music is restored in this reparative fable. This forward-looking vision echoes futuristic sensitivities in Black Lives Matter43 and the movement’s concern for climate justice (“Our mission”). This explains why, in 2015, M4BL reframed Black History Month as “Black Futures Month”44—an initiative Blount is aware of, as he wished his audience a “happy Black future month” at the beginning of his American Folklife Center show of February 2023 (“Jake Blount: African American Folk Music” 21:55).

• 45 Among these feature Angeline Morrison, Lil Nas X, Valerie June, Brittney Spencer, as well as collec (...)

39While chronopolitical music-making, an inherent feature of folk music, has occurred in earlier waves of protest against the precariousness of Black lives—e.g., in the aftermath of Katrina (Grassy, 2009)—it has found new relevance in the Black Lives Matter era. Blount is part of a new generation of BIPOC artists in the US and the UK who have increasingly questioned the inherently racial dimension of musical categories and challenged pre-existing homologies.45 Those efforts can be connected to a larger tradition of revisionist musical critiques (Schoop 10) which are oftentimes limited in their reach, both because they tend to dwell on the margins of popular culture and because they depend upon institutions that are loath to accept change. While Blount’s practice is contributing to the rising awareness that US folk music belongs to everyone, there’s still “a lot of work to do” (Giddens qtd. in Laird 241) towards changing the demographic makeup of old-time audiences.