Jake Xerxes Fussell: What in the Natural World

Acknowledgments

Fussell has a deep respect and affinity for the Southern folk vernacular, though he also maintains his childlike awe for it. [What in the Natural World] marks a move into more existential questions … vignettes of Southern life, with an open-hearted groove that would please scholars and little kids alike—Fussell’s burly, winking voice is made for storytelling. “Have You Ever Seen Peaches” is a hair over six minutes long, but that drone could sustain it for hours … running unbroken and buoyant as a shoal of fish darting downriver, and counterbalancing his open-hearted picking.

– Laura Snapes, NPR Music

9/10 (Full-page Discovered review.) Achingly beautiful… a record that yields a procession of hidden treasures. There’s an almost carefree swing to much of Fussell’s music, the easy authority of his silvery guitar work matched by an invitingly cordial voice that makes these arcane songs shine. Like Ry Cooder, Fussell has an uncanny ability to illuminate the present by propping up a window against the past. Whatever the raw material’s vintage, the protagonist’s pursuit of abstract notion—freedom, empowerment, danger, fulfillment—is every inch as pertinent today.

– Rob Hughes, Uncut

While some have called Fussell’s music “atmospheric,” the descriptor misses his historical grounding; on the flipside, any implication of “root” overlooks the ease and freeness of his sound.The image of a river, featured on both of his albums’ covers, is well suited—the history of each song selection, like tributaries, flow into the main waterway, feeding a powerful current of evolution and exchange. And here is Jake Xerxes Fussell, floating down that river, strumming away. 

– Jack Rosenberg, The Oxford American

It’s difficult to imagine another contemporary interpreter delivering a tale of desperation and sadness with such tenderness, warmth, and grace. The room he leaves for the song to breathe allows it to flourish into its own fully-formed, nuanced world – one as familiar today as during the time of its origin. Here, Fussell taps into those roots and in turn carries the pathos across an entire century, creating something wholly his own. No small feat and just one of the many exhibits that display a truth as absolute as the suffering in this song: Jake Xerxes Fussell is a national treasure.

– Chad Depasquale, Aquarium Drunkard

#44 Album of 2017. At once scholarly and swinging, a roistering investigation of the traditions of the Southeastern states. Easygoing virtuosity—co-conspirators included Nathan Salsburg and Nathan Bowles—and an idiosyncratic character ensured, too, that everything felt much more like a party than an historical enactment.

– Uncut

The otherworldly guitar player has an innate ability to infuse traditional folk songs and older works with a revived sense of purpose, a freshly calibrated compass. It’s an album of lost and forgotten folk ballads revived and resuscitated with surgical touch and precision. 

– Will Schube, FLOOD Magazine

He has a lot of mountain in him. His creations float over the world like some kind of omniscient cloud, touching down long enough to share wonder and then floating off into the ozone on their own. There hasn’t been this kind of timeless delivery in a very long time. The beauty of Fussell’s recordings is they remain of this earth but also seem beamed in from another zone, all at the same time.

– Bill Bentley

4/5 stars. Here fellows have fangs, and devils are born without horns: a blurring of beasts that augurs for today. Assigned with the jaundiced spirit of a bar-propping raconteur such as Shane McGowan, Fussell interprets these folk tunes of plucky frontiersmen and rogue seamen like the great American writer Ambrose Bierce after a session sipping loopy juice. Fussell has the gift of the gab, born to tell his tales with a dark humor that raises these fabulous fables up to splendid life.

– Spencer Grady, Record Collector

A singular combination of pedigree, experience, education, and talent.

– The Oxford American (Georgia Music Issue)

Swinging Southern folk… blessed with killer technique and a depth of vernacular knowledge.

– Uncut

4/5. A sense of timelessness is a tough trick to pull off, but Fussell has somehow carved a path that detours around dusty Americana retroism and detached modernism to occupy a strange little niche of his own. Overall a more unsettling collection than his debut, Fussell still offers a unique experience and applies his distinctive take on Southern American music that is like no one else’s.

– All Music Guide

His big, distinctive voice can hold you via sheer volume and timbre even if you don’t listen to a word he says, and his robustly picked electric guitar is a band by itself.

– Bill Meyer, Dusted

8/10. The Georgia-bred Fussell has a calming force of a voice that draws you in, like a good storyteller should, and he treats the precious pieces of heritage he chooses to cover with the utmost respect. Mining obscure minstrel music, poetry and work songs, Fussell has a knack for curation, and that shines on What in the Natural World.

– Glide Magazine

9/10. It takes a lot of work to sound this relaxed. On his buoyant self-titled debut, North Carolina-based, Georgia-raised folksinger and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell wields guitar chops gleaned from years of apprenticeship and deep study to spin the most vibrant yarns. Although the songs are Fussell’s adaptations of traditional folk and blues material, in Fussell’s curatorial hands, they sound neither old nor self-consciously shiny and new; they simply make you want to dance. 

– Sarah Greene, Exclaim!

A lively and wholehearted gem of folk, country and bluegrass… not only gorgeous, but also a hell of a good time. Quietly, but unmistakably, the poignancy of this group’s paean to the vistas and spirits of their land take hold of you. And you don’t want it to let go.

– Chad Depasquale, Aquarium Drunkard

Beautiful and inspiring.

– The Green Man Review

A human jukebox, a raw and penetrating voice out of time, a genuine bluesman with the heart of a mystic. His debut, Jake Xerxes Fussell, just out from Paradise of Bachelors, is pretty damn perfect. This is the kind of record I feel like I was born to listen to. That voice. That guitar. Man.   

– William Boyle, No Depression

 

Artist Testimonials

Jake isn’t just a rare bird, he’s the professor you always wished you had, the friend you never get tired of epic hangs with, the human jukebox, the guitar player and singer who makes any band that he’s in better. He’s a southern scholar and gentleman in the tradition of Jim Dickinson, George Mitchell, and Les Blank. He’s a Dave Van Ronk for SEC country.

– William Tyler 

Jake is one helluva bluesman: my favorite of his generation, in fact; and, in my opinion, the best young traditional blues artist performing today.

– George Mitchell

Jake X. Fussell is certainly one of America’s finest young tradition-based songsters and guitar pickers. He had an ideal start: as a kid traveling the back roads of Georgia, Alabama, and even out to the Indian regions of Oklahoma with his folklorist dad, hearing and absorbing not only the vocal styles and guitar licks of such greats as Precious Bryant, but also developing a sure sense of the expressive core of Southern roots music. From Georgia’s Sea Islands and Chattahoochie Valley to the Mississippi Delta to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jake is still listening and learning, and coming up with music that takes us to a deep place in the American spirit.

– Art Rosenbaum

Jake Xerxes Fussell is one of my brothers in song. A finer guitar picker, and more heart-centered interpreter of American song you will rarely find.

– Jolie Holland

Jake Xerxes Fussell is a miracle worker, reviving old songs and revealing the continuing vitality of our intertwining musical traditions. This beautiful new record is another chapter in his journey through the hidden and forgotten corners of the American soundscape.

– Dr. Charles L. Hughes; Author, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South