- My name is Jake Blount and this is my take on Black folk music.

(light twangy music continues) Black folk music is important because it's the bedrock of every major American musical export.

If you don't have traditional Black folk music, you don't get blues, you don't get jazz, you don't get gospel, you don't get rock and roll, you don't get any of the things that came out of rock and roll, you don't get punk, you don't get disco, you don't get house.

We have a spotty historical record when it comes to Black folk musicians and their/our contribution to the canon and there's a lot of restoration of the historical narrative that we have to do.

♪ I'm a poor old railroad man ♪ - In the early 1900s, we start to see white record executives go down into the south and they began to market white musicians from the south as hillbilly musicians.

They made hillbilly records and that is what we would generally consider early country music, early folk music, stuff in that vein.

And Black musicians were recorded making race records and those tended to be early blues and jazz.

♪ Without a doubt, I have offended ♪ - And that meant that these genres, which had been all together fed into one another for so long, wound up splitting apart because there was a financial incentive for them to do so.

And they split apart, not across sonic lines, but across race lines.

You had to make a certain type of music or else nobody would record you.

Nobody would sell your stuff, you wouldn't be able to play gigs.

There are some prominent white artists from hillbilly records back in the day whose work we know now who learned a lot of what they did from Black musicians.

One example would be The Carter Family.

♪ Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving Black hair ♪ - And AP Carter, the father of that family, traveled around collecting songs with a disabled Black man named Lesley Riddle, who taught them a good deal of their repertoire, likely heavily influenced, if not completely taught Maybelle Carter her guitar style, he never got recorded until decades later and is playing some of the same music, but it gets categorized under blues and not country.

(bright violin music) I don't like the way that musicians and marketing people and scholars have represented the Black folk tradition as this like dead thing that exists in the past.

I like to incorporate traditional repertoire in the things that I'm doing now.

(upbeat music) My new album is called "The New Faith."

It's an afrofuturist concept album that explores what Black religious music might sound like in a post-climate crisis world.

So it's set a few hundred years in the future and uses music all the way from a few hundred years into the past.

♪ Once there was no sun ♪ ♪ Once there was no sun ♪ It feels like sitting down with somebody who I don't know and them sharing something that's really personal and there is a unifying feeling in that, that we're sharing something because we know it's important to pass on and we know it's important for the next person to have.

I don't know who I am without this music.

(bright violin music) For Black people, these songs are the oldest texts that we have.

They come out of a time and a place where people were legally not permitted to learn to read and write, much less encouraged to honestly convey their thoughts in a recorded medium.

The songs are the only thing that I have to tell me what my ancestors wanted from me and how I'm supposed to think about the world even as it exceeds the bounds of my influence.

(bright violin music) My name is Jake Blount and this was my take on Black folk music.

- That's our broadcast this evening.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Michelle San Miguel.