Today’s “New Year, New Music” spotlighted NC musician is Jake Xerxes Fussell (@jxfussell). For over ten years now, the D...

Today’s “New Year, New Music” spotlighted NC musician is Jake Xerxes Fussell (@jxfussell). For over ten years now, the Durham picker has been insouciantly revitalizing the folk and blues tradition. A fluid electric guitar player with a keen sense of melody, it's not so much that Fussell is modernizing the old songs as getting in touch with the beauty, strangeness, and humor they’ve possessed since the beginning. Raised in Columbus, GA by a folklorist father and textile artist mother, Fussell early on found himself listening to and playing music with friends/mentors like Art Rosenbaum, George Mitchell, and Precious Bryant. After a sojourn to Mississippi for grad school, Fussell moved to NC around the time of his first LP (2015) for Carrboro label Paradise of Bachelors (@paradiseofbachelors). He’s been in the state ever since. His four critically acclaimed LPs on PoB and the new one on Fat Possum, entitled WHEN I’M CALLED, show that folk music is alive and well despite occasional rumors of its demise. A listen to a Jake Fussell record is not much a journey through the past as an invitation to re-see the present with the estranging eyes of that past. Image 1: photo of Jake Xerxes Fussell, by Tom Rankin (@tom.rankin) Image 2: Album cover for Jake Xerxes Fussell, WHEN I’M CALLED Alt. text - Image 1: photograph of Jake Fussell in a hat, open dress shirt, and tee, standing in front of foliage Alt. text - Image 2: album cover for WHEN I'M CALLED, featuring blue background and black line drawing of a man riding a horse away from the viewer, with rider’s head uncannily turned 180 degrees to face viewer