It\u2019s an extraordinary act of preservation, but it is also a song about missing home and about a war that consumed everything in its path \u2013 even Napoleon in the end (\u201cBoney broke his heart and died \/ way in St Helena\u201d). <\/p>\n
That humanity is where Fussell finds the crucial connection. These songs, he says, are about all the big themes. \u201cI find that I relate to a lot of songs that are quite old.\u201d<\/p>\n
Napoleonic sea shanties are nobody\u2019s idea of mainstream entertainment but there turns out to be an enthusiastic audience for this kind of music, and critics have swooned over Fussell\u2019s sonic reclamation. Pitchfork has heralded his talent for finding \u201cingenious ways to pull old obscurities into the anxious present\u201d, while Spin has praised his \u201cknack for unexpectedly astute arrangements\u201d, saying, \u201cThe music of old, weird America has never sounded so spry\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fussell wears this praise lightly. He has the affable, ambling quality of someone who knows when to hurry and when to slow down. He\u2019ll be doing a bit of both this month as he crosses the Atlantic for a short Irish tour.<\/p>\n
It will be a homecoming, in a certain sense. The connection between Irish and American traditional music is long established, and Fussell has swapped notes with artists on this side of the ocean such as Lankum<\/a>, to whom he was introduced after a show at Bello Bar in Dublin. <\/p>\n His interest in Irish folk extends to the Traveller singer Thomas McCarthy<\/a>, through whom he discovered the ballad Michael Was Hearty, about a young man who marries for wealth rather than love and comes to rue his decision.<\/p>\n Fussell was introduced to the tune by Nathan Salsburg, curator of the archive<\/a> of the 20th-century ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax<\/a>, and instantly understood that he had to record his own take, which he did in 2019. He adds that he and McCarthy have yet to cross paths, but he would love for them to one day play together.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to meet him. At some point we were in contact, we wanted to do a show together. It just didn\u2019t pan out. I think we were going to do [it] and then Covid happened. <\/p>\n \u201cNathan Salsburg sent me a video of Thomas McCarthy singing that song. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I\u2019d ever seen. I had the melody kicking around in my head for a long time. <\/p>\n \u201cIrish music is such a thing. And I\u2019m not Irish. It wouldn\u2019t normally be something I\u2019d try to fool with that much, to re-create an Irish song. That one I couldn\u2019t get rid of. I\u2019ve played it in Ireland a few times, and it\u2019s been well received.\u201d<\/p>\n Folk music has a long history of activism; the question of whether politics and the arts should mix has acquired a fresh relevancy since Macklemore<\/a> was chucked off Ed Sheeran<\/a>\u2019s tour after speaking out about Gaza.<\/p>\n This interview takes place before that incident galvanised opinions, but, speaking more generally, Fussell has a nuanced take on folk and its affiliations. He is certainly versed in the history.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a big tradition of that going back at least until the 1930s and 1940s, if not earlier. There was a first big wave of protest singing with people like Woody Guthrie<\/a>, Pete Seeger<\/a> and The Almanac Singers, and that sort of early folk revival of the 1930s,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cThen there was sort of a revival of that revival in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in New York and Boston, which of course led to Bob Dylan<\/a>, Joan Baez<\/a> and those people. And singers like Phil Ochs<\/a>, who were deeply political, and then people like Dylan, who could skim along the surface of those sort of topical songs but weren\u2019t necessarily in their personal lives deeply political. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a long legacy of that. It\u2019s always been around. You see it crop up here and there with different singers. Certainly, there\u2019s an association there with the left wing for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n Does Fussell see himself in that tradition? \u201cI definitely relate to it, and at different times I have sung songs that have been topical in that way. I have mixed feelings about it, because I don\u2019t necessarily see music as having an immediate material application to geopolitical problems. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s something to be said for people having a big benefit concert, when they raise a bunch of money for a cause. That\u2019s a very material way of applying music or performance. Or at least giving attention to a cause.<\/p>\n \u201cI also see a lot of strength in songs that can bring attention or have a transformative effect on someone on an individual level; certain protest songs can do that.\u201d<\/p>\n He isn\u2019t sure whether music itself can change things, however. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily delve into that world too much, just because I feel like it isn\u2019t the best use of my time in music.\u201d<\/p>\n Fussell is looking forward to returning to Ireland; he sees an affinity between Irish people and those from the American South. Growing up in Georgia, close to the border with Alabama, he had an \u201cacute awareness\u201d of his southernness and the assumptions people would make about, for instance, racism. <\/p>\n \u201cEspecially when I travelled outside of the region, and people would comment on my accent a lot of the time. I never took that as an insult. It\u2019s more sometimes \u2018otherised\u2019, in a way. \u2018Oh, you have an accent.\u2019 When, in fact, everybody has an accent.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019ll bring a little bit of the south with him when he comes to Ireland, singing songs steeped in the American past but brought to life with a passion that locates them firmly in the here and now. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of the same basic stuff \u2013 about life and death and love and relationships and family, loss,\u201d he says. As he pauses to smile you can hear a bird twitter outside. \u201cIt\u2019s all sorts of things.\u201d<\/p>\n The Old Beloved Path is released on Bandcamp<\/a> and via Fat Possum Records<\/a>. Jake Xerxes Fussell<\/a> plays Cyprus Avenue<\/a>, Cork, on Thursday, October 8th; R\u00f3is\u00edn Dubh<\/a>, Galway, on Friday, October 9th; and Button Factory<\/a>, Dublin, on Saturday, October 10th <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every so often, when the mood takes him, Jake Xerxes Fussell will grab his guitar and travel backwards…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645347,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[274025,9002,274024,8720,61,60,182769,108732,153497,264671,43,124480,274026,154606],"class_list":["post-645346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-alan-lomax","tag-bob-dylan","tag-dire-straits","tag-ed-sheeran","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-joan-baez","tag-ken-burns","tag-lankum","tag-macklemore","tag-news","tag-pete-seeger","tag-phil-ochs","tag-woody-guthrie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Jake](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/AL6YRFPNAVGARGEBIJON7PCEZE.jpg\")
Jake Xerxes Fussell. Photograph: Paige Prather <\/p>\n