Afrofuturism & Folk: Jake Blount’s Journey Through Music and History

Rancho La Puerta is thrilled to welcome Jake Blount, the powerfully gifted musician, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar of Black American music, to the Rancho La Puerta Folk Festival, June 14-21. Blount, whose 2020 album Spider Tales earned accolades from NPR and The New Yorker, and whose The New Faith is a “towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism,” was interviewed by Carissa Stolting, Festival co-producer and host.

How does your work as both a scholar and writer influence your music-making? What is different about creative expression through the written word versus music? 

I consider my scholarship and music-making to be parts of a single process. Music-making is intuitive for me—I follow my gut and pursue ideas that seem exciting. I often only come to a full understanding of my music after it’s done, when I have to explain it in the press, in a paper or in a presentation and put it in conversation with history and similar works by other artists. We participate in “traditions” constantly and unconsciously, and I find that scholarship helps me become aware of the part I play. I think that, similarly, written work allows me to be explicit and specific in ways that music generally can’t be. I think that writing is maybe how I understand myself and make myself understood to others. Music gives vent to the things I can’t (yet) explain, or even necessarily understand myself.

What makes folk or roots music especially compelling to you (compared to other styles)? 

I think the initial draw for me was the connection to my family. I became invested in the banjo and in spirituals because I understood them to be crucial elements in my ancestors’ social lives. One of the many cruel facets of the slave trade is how it manages to reduce these people to (if I may borrow from a favorite theorist, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and her article Zombie Biopolitics) “bare labor” even in the eyes of history. I only know my forebears as nearly-anonymous and entirely interchangeable cogs in the plantation machine; although they had rich creative lives and built a new way of life together in those dire straits, they had to do so in secret. They hid these things from their literate masters and were not permitted to achieve literacy themselves—and so, most of what’s human about them is lost. The “old songs,” as my grandfather calls them, are the only text passed down to me by my ancestors. It’s the only record I have of how they saw the world, saw themselves in it, and how they envisioned life for descendants like me. It’s sacred, and it’s historical, and it grounds me because I know they would be happy to hear me singing it. At the same time, these songs are a record of my ancestors’ innovative practices—so I don’t see the need to wall them off from successor traditions that came later. It’s all marvelous.

Your music reaches far backward in time and equally far forward to an uncertain environmental future, while focusing on the through-line between systemic racial injustice and abuse of the land. Can you describe how Afrofuturist thought, and techniques have influenced or shaped the way time and themes move in your work?

My relationship to Afrofuturism has changed over the past months. Following a wonderful scholar named Jayna Brown and her book Black Utopias, I’d suggest that we move on from “futurism.” Talking about the “future” tends to evoke a timeline and direct our attention onto a specific part of it. Most Black speculative works (including but not limited to the Afrofuturist canon) have not treated time as a line. Rather, they collapse time into a singularity where the past, present, future, and overtly fictional all come into contact. I call these works “Black uchronias,” and they’re the subject of the master’s thesis I’m currently writing. They’re also the core of my creative practice. I see all my albums operating on this level, though the concept didn’t really reveal itself to me until I made it the center of my academic work.

At our artist retreat, we hope to offer a place of rest to artists working tirelessly to encourage a better existence through their work. What restorative or healing practices do you use to sustain yourself and protect your energy in daily life? What do you look forward to doing (or not doing!) at Rancho?

I mainly listen to audiobooks—I’m actually about to relisten to N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, which is one of my top two favorite series of all time. I had to restrict myself to listening once every five years so that it stayed new and sacred each listen! One thing I hope to do at Rancho is read actual books. It’s a favorite hobby of mine, but grad school doesn’t leave me much time for pleasure reading!

Experience the magic of the Rancho La Puerta Folk Festival with Jake Blount, Amber Rubarth, Chris Pierce, Larissa Maestro, and Jason Cupp, June 14-21.