Brandi Waller-Pace: So my first question is just: How are you? All over the country people are confronting the killings of Black people, systemic racism, and anti blackness in general. How have you been throughout all of this?

Jake Blount: I think I've been pretty scared by the government response and the level of militarism and authoritarianism that we're witnessing on the part of the police and elected officials, but I don't know. As sad as it is, I feel like I've been protesting with Black Lives Matter for my whole adult life, and I feel like after a certain point I ran through a lot of the emotional distress that I had about the situation. I feel a different set of things right now, because so many people who have been passive before are all of a sudden speaking up about it, and people who have even been actively against the movement in the past are all of a sudden on our side, and I think that's a lot for me to take in. But yeah, I don't know- I don't expect better than this from this country. So it doesn't upset me as acutely. 

BWP: You speak of people who have come around to “our side,” and I know that's more figurative language, but something that a lot of Black and Brown and Indigenous peers and I have talked about is people thinking, “Now I get it. I'm awake, I'm ready to go,” and still not have any understanding of what it takes to disrupt and to rebuild systems and to not do harm. So, what are your expectations, in terms of all these people who are “newly awakened?”

JB: I would just say don't let it stop here-that this not be a flash in the pan thing, and that people continue to be involved. I think part of the hesitation or mistrust I feel toward people who just cropped up all of a sudden being willing to help out is rooted in the fact that I've seen them mistreat people before. I would like to see on the part of people who have not been receptive to this in the past- who have shut down people of color who have tried to bring up these issues, or spoken poorly of them- reach out and actively make amends for that. 

It's not enough to all of a sudden write a two-page screed about how you feel; there's more work that you need to do. To say not just, “I was asleep and now I'm awake,” but, “I was part of the problem and now I'm awake.” I really want to see people hold themselves accountable in this moment as well as holding the system accountable, over an extended period of time.

BWP: There are parallels between that and talks we are having in music education. On the one hand a lot of people have had important realizations, on the other people saying, “We're just here to make music; all this race stuff, all this political stuff has nothing to do with my role as a music teacher.” Have you seen any parallels within the traditional music community? 

JB: Yes, definitely, I think that's happened. Online in different groups we have seen people be like, “I don't want to go there in this group, this group is for music. We need a place that's just for music, no politics,” lacking the understanding that obviously, there is no music without politics. There is only a choice of whether or not you address the existing politics within the music. So it's not that you're not choosing to send a message, it’s that you're only amplifying what's there already. And in the case of folk music from the American South, there's going to be some problematic stuff  that you probably don't want to amplify, and that needs to be part of the conversation.

I've been really heartened by seeing especially how many banjo makers have come out and made strong statements about the worth of Black lives, etc.. I was surprised and happy to see that happen because you know, they're white people building a Black instrument and I think that they should be owning up to that and making gestures of support at least. 

BWP: What do you remember about grade school music? Do you have a recollection of whether or not you felt reflected in formal music, or as if your culture was part of your formal music experiences?

JB: I felt that it was intermittently. I don't think I came to understand that representation was important to me until later and I always liked music because I always wanted to be good at music. I was not- I was definitely a late bloomer. I mean I liked to sing and stuff.  I did have a lot of fun doing almost more music research stuff. We had a unit that was patriotic songs where we just had a chapter in our music book that was like, 18 different songs, and I refused to sing them. I didn't participate in that unit! I don't remember how old I was-I don't think we would have been doing that in middle school- so probably grade six or below- somewhere in there. I was like, “I don't believe this portrayal because America has never been this for me or my family,” and my teacher, to his credit, did not force it and my school got it. So that was good. 

Thinking back on it, if I was a music teacher right now, I would want to be more flexible about mandating that all the kids learn to read sheet music, or things like that. Partially because music theory didn't make any sense to me until I was playing music at a level that required me to actually employ it, you know. It was not a useful thing for me to learn. I can read what sheet music says now, but I'm devastatingly slow at reading it onto an instrument because I never have to do it- it's not a useful skill to me. 

I think we're very dead-set sometimes in music pedagogy of training people up from a classical mindset in some ways or, even if we're not training people to be classical musicians, we give those tools to people first. I think my teacher did a really good job, actually, of mixing in other ways of learning, of having us learn by ear and use our melodic memory to remember how a song went. But to me, I've almost felt like even more than seeing my culture’s music reflected in the curriculum, [I noticed] the way we went about learning music, and I don't know that music was represented in a global way all the time. At the time I was really into rock and metal and stuff, which of course came out of Black culture, but I wasn't represented in the artists that were big in those genres, and I didn't perceive it as being Black music. I also was like a multiracial kid going to an all-white school- I didn't really think of myself as a Black person yet. I didn't get it yet. So, I don't think it really bothered me that much. I think it would now. 

BLP: At what point did your concept of your own Blackness develop? And how?

JB: Definitely early high school, I think because that was the first time I actually had close Black friends. I think my school, for a private school, did a pretty good job of maintaining some semblance of diversity. It was the first integrated school in DC. So, they've always been pretty gung-ho about maintaining “decent numbers.”

For whatever reason- my parents were always very clear like, “You are biracial,” like, “You are these two things,” but I think the way that I experienced that from them and other people sometimes felt more like, “Okay, you don't fit in with any of these groups,” or like, “You just have to do your own thing.”

When you're a kid, obviously the easy thing to do in that case is to just go along with the mainstream. So you learn to act like a white kid, and you wind up essentially coming up through the school with that mindset. I think when I got to high school and I had Black friends who talked about being Black and you know, used African American vernacular,and cracked jokes the way that we do I was like, “Wow,” like, “This is us?” Then I started to become more aware of the ways I saw that manifest in my dad and other members of our family and it didn't feel alien at any point, also because I grew up in DC- no matter what neighborhood you live in DC, it's pretty hard to not know black people. So, it never felt like it wasn't me. But I think it just took being involved in some kind of community to feel close to it. And then when Black Lives Matter started was really the point in time when I felt connected to a communal struggle and the cause. 

And I think that has a lot to do with the way blackness is represented, particularly in music- since that's always been the main way I've engaged with culture generally, is through playing- and overwhelmingly the message that you get is that Black music is rap music. I grew up listening to a ton of like Earth, Wind, and Fire and Parliament Funkadelic and George Clinton and all that, so I knew there had been other stuff- it wasn't like I didn't listen to any of it- but I gravitate toward music that has organic instruments in it or is modeled off of organic instrument sounds and a lot of what I heard was not that. So I didn't feel connected on a personal level and it took until later for me. It took time for me to understand my positionality to a community. I always understood intellectually level, you know, maybe I'm both of these things but I always felt like I was being told I was neither, not both, and it took a long time for me to kind of have that paradigm shift and realize it was all open to me and I belong.

BWP: How would you describe the music you make? 

JB: I usually just say banjo and Fiddle music from black and Indigenous communities and the southeastern United States. [I] just give a sentence- I don't try to have a term. 

BWP: So, what led you to the music?

JB: So, not when Trayvon Martin was killed, but when George Zimmerman got let off the hook for it- when the grand jury decided they would not indict him- I was at my mom's parents house in Maine. I went up into the attic and downloaded these books of slave songs and spirituals on my Kindle and decided I was going to look through them and see how my ancestors were dealing with it. I’d grown up not really thinking of myself as a person of color, and even for me existing in the space that I was, racism was like a very petty thing- not a life-threatening thing- and also something that everyone agreed was bad. Then all of a sudden someone got killed over it and it was more complicated than racism being bad. I was like, “Okay, I need to see how people have dealt with this historically.” So I went to those songs and wound up [with] just a whole lot of, “When I die things will be fine,” which was not really what I was going for. So I did a little bit more digging and found my way to banjo and fiddle music and it got closer to me the more I read about it and the way that it functions, and also the fact that the banjo first made its home in this country amongst the slaves in the Chesapeake Bay Region, who were my ancestors. So immediately I had this direct familial tie to it, rather than it being a thing Black people did at some point. 

BWP: What led you to study music in college, and how did you feel about the structure of the university and curriculum content within your program?

JB: I went to college expecting to be the psychology major, passionate about mental health- I’m still passionate about mental health. It's important but I am very bad at science. I wound up in a class for seniors in the communications department. It was a fascinating class and we wound up doing this “choose your topic” assignment, focused on picking a marketing campaign for a product and how it influenced who bought it and things like that. I did Victorian-era banjo and talked about these makers who were inventing new models of banjo and slapping every piece of metal they could on it so that they could make it appeal to the white middle class. And then, of course, you have the minstrel shows happening at the same time and I loved digging into it. I read like, four or five books just for this one paper, which I've never done before. I was learning banjo at the same time and I’d gotten a few lessons from the professor who would become my advisor and then I was mostly working on my own and that's how I learned. I showed her the paper and she was like, “You put a ton of time into this, come be in the senior seminar an American folk revivals next semester.” 

The more I studied and especially the more I played I was like, “I'm either going to make college about music or I'm going to drop out of college to play music, so I should probably put my eggs in one basket, instead of throwing out the basket.” It was super hard, in that to graduate I had to complete a bunch of requirements that I don't think necessarily were super helpful to what I wanted to be doing. I had to take an extra level of music theory that has never applied to anything I've done- I'm not upset that I know how counterpoint works, there's worse things than having too much knowledge- but there is a way music departments can be structured so that you can study things without the emphasis being on classical or jazz theory, and those were the two things that I had open to me. My college is great in that it lets you develop your own course of study- I mixed music, American studies, anthropology, and literature to make my major, under the guidance of my advisor and with the approval of each department head. I did manage to make that all run, but I definitely ran into kind of snobbish attitudes. I had one professor in a class tell me that I couldn't do my final paper on Black spirituals because there wasn't enough depth in them to write a whole paper about. I had another professor essentially tell me that my work didn't matter unless I was performing original music. I'd love to make original music one day, but that's not where I am right now. I don't feel the need to be doing it and it felt kind of devaluing of the role of traditional music. 

It was a complicated thing. I took a lot of classes that were really thrilling to me, did some independent studies that showed me the basics of mixing and self-recording. I think I wound up leaving with a really diverse and useful skill set. There are certain things that were baked into the program, theory and sight-reading and lessons, even though the college didn't employ anyone who taught the instruments I was learning. I got lucky and found a violin teacher there named Waldo Dontevalli. He was super flexible and I basically went in like, “Just so you know, I don't want to play classical violin at all. I just really want to work on my technique so that I can work on my fiddle playing.” And he was like, “Okay- that's going to be an adventure for both of us.” I had all of my bowing breakthroughs in that room during that time period; that was really the way I found my way into it from a technical perspective. But had they put me with the different violin teacher, I would have just gotten stuck playing music I didn't care about and quit after a while.

BLP: How do you feel about traditional (American) music making it into formal higher education settings? 

JB: I think for me it boils down to educators actually having links to people who are involved in the cultures and employing them to come do their thing.They bring in guest artists but, from my perspective, it's like who are you hiring onto the faculty? I would like to see more colleges, if they're going to have someone teaching music from a particular tradition, go hire a faculty member that is from that place or from that culture who can speak to do it because they're out there, you know? There is no shortage of folks from Appalachia with PhDs who can go teach about that music. I also think at a certain point, colleges are going to have to reconsider whether PhDs are the be-all and end-all if you're talking about folk music traditions, because those don't normally thrive in places where people have easy access to higher education. This degree that we see as a mandatory minimum for getting a job in an institution where music is taught obviously isn't accessible to a lot of people from a financial perspective. But also, why would you need it? Getting a PhD in ethnomusicology wouldn't make me better at fiddle or banjo. It might make me better at talking about them, but I can read all the same books. Going through a formal grad school process isn't always the best way to learn about something. I think we need to be more respectful of people who are coming from outside of academia with a greater expertise in the field than academia could give them.

BWP: One thing that I've liked about your work is that you speak to counter narrative-telling the story of people whose experiences are not often told- and I've seen you do that from a place of being a multiracial Black person, and a queer person speaking to queerness and gayness. I want to get your thoughts on marginalization and erasure of Blackness and gayness in our musical culture.

JB: Black people created every major musical export this country has ever had; literally all of it comes back to us. And the way that music is portrayed, you will only see the white faces that co-opt it most of the time. That's changing now- I love that we have Nicki Minaj and Lizzo, and Janelle Monae and all these chart-topping awesome Black women who are like owning [the rights to] the things that they've created. But I think we need to go back and recognize that the Beatles worship is a problem. The Rolling Stones worship is a problem. A lot of the musicians of that generation would agree that it's a problem. We remember the white performers of Black music most of the time rather than the Black ones. There's not the same amount of respect and there's not the same longevity of memory for Black artists- I think that holds true pretty much across the board. 

When it comes to queer musicians you end up in this weird situation where, prior to the past 40 years, no one was out. So there are queer musicians all over the place, but we don't know who they are. That's part of the reason why I put a song from one of the 1920s blues queens on my album- because they were openly queer, a lot of them. So, there's that element the rest of the time-there are people who everyone knows [is queer], but they never were open about it, or everyone knew- but it's a weird situation where people can sort of capitalize off of their queerness in a really big way without ever owning it publicly. So then it's not officially part of the narrative. 

People managed to persuade themselves that queer artists’ sexuality is not relevant to the material if they're not singing about a same-sex love interest. But also there's this perception that queerness is a sex thing and that if you're not talking about sex or romance, it wouldn't come up or wouldn't influence what you're doing, but I don't think that that's always true. I don't even think that's mostly true, and that needs to be made part of the story, even when we're going back and teaching about the works of early composers, because there are a lot of [earlier] composers who were queer and we know that now. We should talk about that. When we talk about Cage, we should talk about Cunningham and the relationships that existed between those people that informed the evolution of the music.

There's on one level the erasure of the individuals, in the pretending that the Black people and the queer people weren't there. Even beyond that we've now gotten to a place where we can talk about the people, but we can't talk about the identity or choose not to talk about it. I think we're all getting to a point where we understand that colorblindness is not the answer to racism, but people feel paralyzed to talk about queerness with kids, partially because in a lot of school districts that can get you fired, but also because people feel like they're talking about sex with kids rather than talking about culture, but we have all our own stuff. We have a different way of living, it's a different world over here, and that needs to be part of the conversation. It needs to be brought up because it's really important for queer kids to see that there have been people like them in every field. I think growing up I felt that probably more keenly than I felt an issue of racial representation because I'd, even just in my family, seen Black people do all kinds of awesome stuff-I didn't feel like there was stuff I couldn't do. But I did not see queer men specifically represented except on like, Project Runway, in American Idol- and the American Idol contestants couldn't even be out yet. 

I got lucky in that I had openly queer teachers, and your teachers can be people you look up to, but they're not icons in the same way. I think showing kids that there is a continuum there and there is a common thread is really important to instilling a sense of [belonging]. It took feeling attached to Black individuals for me to feel attached to my Black identity and to Black Culture and Black community-I think that the same thing is true of queer kids. My parents have had LGBT friends throughout my whole life. So I never felt like there was any like hostility toward queer people. but also no straight person gets queer culture. It took a really long time for me to understand what I was a part of, because I'd never had it explained to me that there was this history, and there were all these people that I wasn't being told about. So I think getting to a place where we are willing to study a person's music not only in terms of the intervals and the chords and the rhythms involved, but also in terms of the cultural perspectives and the individual perspectives they brought to the table as a person, we would learn so much more and our analysis of music would be so much deeper and more satisfying. We have to get past the idea that it's not appropriate to talk to kids about all of that because they're going to internalize something about all of those things one way or the other, and it's really important to give those kids a chance to formulate their own idea ideas about who they are and who they can be. 

BWP: We've talked a lot about Black contribution to early American music, string band traditions, reclamation all of that, but you also make sure to speak to Indigenous influence, which is talked about much less frequently. Can you speak a little more to that? 

JB: Yeah. I think part of the reason Indigenous influence is discussed less frequently is because it's less well understood. I think people are actually really ready to accessorize or tokenize Native American fiddle fiddle players in the Southeast. 

I see putting Native music and Black music from the Southeast next to each other as an acknowledgement of the fact that our peoples were living alongside one another. Part of what I've been trying to do, especially on Spider Tales- in bringing the Gullah Geechee stuff and bluesy jazzy stuff into the picture- is to really reinforce the idea that all of these came out of the same cultural mix. Putting the music all together in one place, even if it's not all the same stuff, encourages a dialogue about the ways those things are related, because that isn't widely understood or acknowledged. 

I want people to understand, and I want to see in our community, that string band music existed in all of these communities. That there was not white string band music and Black string band music and Native string band music, that there was string band music all over the place. There's still tons of Native fiddlers in the Northwest, on the plains, in the American West- Oklahoma, Texas, farther north. I play music from the Southeast because that's where my family's from and that's the music that I connect to, but I think we're going to have to start understanding that we're part of a bigger picture at some point and stop pretending that we live on an island.

BWP: So can you talk about the concept of your latest release Spider Tales, and what it has meant to create it?

JB: I think the best summary of why I put it together in the way that I did is in the liner notes: 

Anansesem (Spider Tales): Stories of Anansi the Spider, a trickster who dwells in the interstices between the Akan people’s folklore and religion. Anansi is best known for his wit and wisdom—and his aptitude for weaponizing them against oppressors more powerful than himself. The Spider Tales survived the Middle Passage, and persisted amongst enslaved Africans and their descendants in the American colonies for centuries. The telling of Spider Tales was (and is) not only a pastime, but an act of cultural rebellion. We feel their innate significance as vestiges of our ancestors that live on in us: their stolen progeny.

The pieces included here are Spider Tales in their own right, passed down largely amongst the same people, in the same ways and for the same reasons. Though the form is different, the function is the same. In this new decade, we will face escalating patterns of violence and ecological crises that threaten the survival of our species. We must remember that we are not the first to fear the loss of our loved ones, the erasure of our legacies or the destruction of what we have made. Attend the words and works of forebears who felt the same grief, powerlessness, and fury—and, whether by spurning or embracing those emotions, found the strength to survive.

I could not have timed it better, to come out minutes after protesters burned down a police precinct in Minneapolis, because the main message of the album was to tell people this was coming. This has been in the music the whole time and you haven't been listening. You've been hearing it, you've been playing it- but you haven't been listening to it. The big part of putting the album out is really making clear the narratives of Black anger and resentment and resistance that have existed in the music. I wanted to address what I saw as a reductive perspective on Black music that it was chipper and happy and that the anger was a recent thing. 

That was where it was coming from, and feeling like we needed to be aware that this was there, so that [with] something like what's happening, we would have a lens through which to understand it. And so that as things continue, we would have an understanding of where we were coming from and maybe where we were ready to go.

"Spider Tales" is Jake Blount's debut album on Free Dirt Records. Learn more about Jake and his work at https://jakeblount.com/.