Jake Blount and The Folk of Black Souls—(Re)Activating the Chronopolitical Function of Traditional Music for the Black Lives Matter Generation

From his first self-released EP Reparations in 2017 to his latest solo album to date, The New Faith, in 2022, Jake Blount, a queer Black banjoist, fiddler, singer, and scholar from Providence, Rhode Island, has established a dialogue between past, present, and future, bringing out the subversive potential of traditional music. His curating Black and Indigenous contributions to the string-band tradition, old-time, and Bluegrass—among other traditional styles—hasn’t just challenged their historical construction as white styles, but has also unsettled their pastness and the nostalgic uses they are put to. This article considers the links between Blount’s music and Black Lives Matter as exemplifying the chronopolitics of folk. Through an analysis of Blount’s musical practice, and in particular his first album Spider Tales, released in the midst of the 2020 George Floyd protests, I explore how his curation and recontextualization of traditional music have echoed the movement’s aims and values. I conclude on the limitations of Blount’s cultural work at a time when folk circles remain largely ethnically homogeneous in the United States.