On almost every track of Jake Xerxes Fussell’s fifth studio album When I’m Called, there is a stringent and plangent tone which is reminiscent of Van Morrison and the Astral Weeks closer ‘Slim Slow Slider’, a song about a sad departure, two trains passing in the night or drifting into the looming spectre of the vast beyond.
That sort of sensibility, an astringency which permeates his folk reckonings and cuts through the waves of patient and softly-strummed guitar, is felt especially on the opening song ‘Andy’, which is by Gerry Gaxiola from the documentary on the self-styled ‘Maestro’ by Les Blank, and finds Gaxiola elaborating his one-sided feud with Andy Warhol in the form a twelve-bar blues which is redolent of ‘She Belongs To Me’ by Bob Dylan, moving with the same genteel shimmy and a similar though sublimated caustic snap. It is also present in the opening moments of ‘Cuckoo!’ by the composer Benjamin Britten and poet Jane Taylor, which brings a full ensemble headed by James Elkington into view, and on the plaintive ‘Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going’ which slips further into waltz time and is the first of several tracks on the record to offer a piecemeal evocation of Art Rosenbaum, the artist and musician, professor and longstanding folklorist.
A fellow Georgia native, Rosenbaum was a source of education and encouragement as the young Fussell was learning his chops, with ‘Feeing Day’ from a set of hitherto unreleased field recordings which Rosenbaum made in the north of Scotland, burnished at the end by Anna Jacobson on the French horn, while ‘One Morning In May’ is one of two songs to interpolate lyrics from the chintzy and oft-parodied Appalachian ballad ‘On Top of Old Smokey’, with Fussell attributing the freewheeling tenor of his rendition of the English folk tune to a Rosenbaum recording of the Bean Blossom, Indiana bluegrass couple Shorty and Juanita Sheehan. On these songs the road looms large and sometimes the alehouse too, even if curbside or railside the singer clasps more fondly to his bosom that old blues staple, a bottle of sweet cherry wine, withĀ Fussell reflecting on the narrative threads and tangents of his album before describing When I’m Called as ‘sort of an Art Rosenbaum record’.
Rosenbaum is still one voice among many as Fussell continues his practice of reworking continent-spanning traditionals and closer to home, distinctly American takes on the folk repertoire. ‘Gone to Hilo’ is another case in point, a sea shanty stranded somewhere between Hawaii and the copper mines of the port city of Ilo in southern Peru, which Fussell relates by way of the folk revivalist and early Dylan mentor Paul Clayton, whose brief and ill-fated stint in Greenwich Village was preceded by his discovery of the Piedmont blues guitarist Etta Baker among other older-timers and blues stalwarts. Over a shifting bed of percussion, Fussell’s dolorous sighs of ‘Johnny’s gone’ and ‘What shall I do?’ on ‘Gone to Hilo’ are accompanied by swirling strings, twangs of guitar and the babbling voice of the avant-garde singer and Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz collaborator Robin Holcomb.
Yet as Fussell pores over the past and pulls equally from broadsides and field recordings, the centrepiece and title track of When I’m Called stems from a more contemporary scrap. Probably the most striking piece on the album, the lyrics for the song were committed to memory by his friend Chris Sullivan, an artist with a penchant for found poetry who once published a zine called The Journal of the Public Domain. Culled from a gallery exhibit or some other collection, Fussell remembered his friend’s ditty, which originally went ‘I will come when I am called, I will not breakdance in the hall, I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name’, and began to use it as a placeholder as he worked up a song with the title ‘Look Up, Look Down That Lonesome Road’, the lines standing in during live performances for what Fussell thought would eventually emerge as a first verse.
Instead the singer grew accustomed to the lyrics, which deepened the more that he sang, making ‘When I’m Called’ a strangely resonant hybrid, where a schoolhouse pledge which seems to echo with a certain shame and wistfulness gives way to the countryfied evocation of a ‘long lonesome road’ and a mournful denouement. But the song is plenty more than nostalgic or forlorn, playing out like a cosmic balm even as it bristles with a whole world of sensation.
Themes and references come to a head on the album closer, another piece which Fussell first learned from Rosenbaum, who died in the autumn of 2022 at the age of 83 years old. Interpolating more lines from ‘On Top of Old Smokey’, carrying both the breadth of the British folk song ‘The Water Is Wide’ or ‘Waly, Waly’ and the swing of Gladys Knight’s companionly ‘Midnight Train’, on ‘Going to Georgia’ words of warning over the deceits and infidelities of men – with that wonderful simile about the telling of ‘more lies than the crossties in the railway’, and whose irresoluteness is compared to that of a ‘green growing tree’ – segue into a gesture of resolution, for all of that wandering and meandering or toing and froing at least circling, like sparks and embers spitting about a hearth, around the idea of a place to call home.
