When I’m Called

Not so long ago, Jake Xerxes Fussell was in a hurry. The son of Southern folklorists, Fussell took his family inheritance—that is, an invaluable intimacy with customs and cultures far beyond the mainstream of his ’90s youth—and immortalized it with his earliest records. Fussell played spirited and relatively faithful versions of rather obscure old songs. Sometimes, he sped through them, though, as if he were some folk-festival stenographer, putting down what he’d heard in his own hand before it was all lost to the future’s sweep.

But near the last decade’s end, on his third album, 2019’s Out of Sight, that seeming impatience began to erode, replaced by the desire to transform that inheritance into something truer to his own life and time. With his rhythmically idiosyncratic guitar and his golden mean of a folk singer’s voice, as inviting as a Sunday picnic, Fussell stitched together bits of those old tunes in ingenious shapes. It was as though Fussell finally realized just how much of his source material had made it online, ostensibly digitized forever; that work done, he could now tell his own story by using that source material in his own way and his own time, as slowly as he’d like.

Fussell has never been as patient—or, for that matter, as graceful or compelling, curious or inclusive—as he is on When I’m Called, his fifth and best album. Produced by kindred spirit James Elkington and played by a cast that includes Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, and Joe Westerlund, When I’m Called foregrounds Fussell’s ability to take songs moldering in university archives or reissue label stacks and locate another meaning within them, to imagine some new way to interpret that inheritance.

Fussell’s field of play is broad here, from a 1994 cassette by Maestro Gaxiola, who turned his life into a sort of anti-industry piece of performance art, to an English nursery rhyme about animals that dates at least to 1744 and may be an allegory for a half-dozen historic events. In conversation with what has come before, Fussell creates a space where our own modern malaises, whether loneliness and anxiety or political instability and social suspicion, feel less like our burdens than those of humanity at large. Fussell finds mostly forgotten songs to sing, less now to preserve them than to connect to a past we still share.

Much of When I’m Called is a survey of indecision, or at least of not knowing what is supposed to come next. Most obvious is “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going,” a century-old Georgia lament about needing to part from home to get some work. (Another of Fussell’s folklore mentors, the late Art Rosenbaum, captured it for Folkways 40 years ago.) Framed by gentle acoustic guitar that trickles like a country creek and horns that sound like soul-baring sighs, Fussell’s tragic rendition is an existential wrestling match in slow motion. Why does pursuing what we need so often cost us what we love, like “Alabama water that tastes like cherry wine”?

“Gone to Hilo,” meanwhile, sees the forlorn world from the other perspective—the lover whose Johnny has set sail for yet another foreign port to make his wage. That’s just life, but Fussell’s tender phrasing and measured pace feel interminably sad, as if this were the end of a line and a love. A touring musician with his own young family in North Carolina, Fussell seems to step out of his own body and brain here, imagining how it must feel to watch himself leave for adventures that are also just his job. Not good at all, he reckons. The great Robin Holcomb, another Georgia singer who has long mined the past for her own present, softly echoes Fussell, linking this conundrum across generations.

Someone is almost always on the move during When I’m Called. That’s Fussell contemplating his own responsibility and, ultimately, mortality amid the title track’s gentle and brilliant electric ripple. He’s waiting whatever turn is his. There’s the meet-cute of “Feeing Day,” a 19th-century ballad in which a gentleman extends his umbrella to a woman stranded in a rainstorm. They share some drinks, fall in love, and, in the classic version, quickly get married. Fussell omits that last bit here, closing instead on a fanfare of languid horns. They curl like a question mark, an ending shrouded in uncertainty.

It’s hard not to hear the closer, “Going to Georgia,” as the answer: “They’ll hug you, they’ll kiss you/They’ll tell you more lies,” Fussell sings of men at large, his voice deep and warm, like a father offering advice distilled from his own misdeeds. “And the crossties in the railway are the stars in the skies.” (He inveighs against cads with some of the same lines earlier in the album during “One Morning in May”; if it sounds playful there, it sounds like a real warning here.) Betrayal and selfishness are ancient arts, cosmic even. The best we can do is to canter on, then, just as Fussell and his band do through a final corona of wispy strings.

If you spend long enough diving into online repositories, you can find something about most every song Fussell invokes or interprets or recombines here—the complete lyrics of what was then called “Feeing Time,” the bouncy Maestro Gaxiola tape where he lampoons Andy Warhol, even a wobbly file of Virgil Anderson singing that perfect bit about Alabama water, Alabama women, and cherry wine. The sources, then, are mostly safe, so he doesn’t have to be in a hurry to immortalize them anymore. But unless you know what you’re looking for, those antiques are bits of folklorist flotsam locked in an endless data heap, viewed only by the most obsessive and diligent. Reverent and imaginative, Fussell does the work of pulling them out of the pile and making them ring again. No other American singer is repurposing our old folk scripts with so much authority or ingenuity; When I’m Called proclaims—softly, gently, and slowly, with a sly grin and a Southern ease—that what these songs have to say isn’t old at all.

Jake Xerxes Fussell: When I’m Called

$27 at Rough Trade