Benefit Concert to Explore Black Roots Music with Jake Blount

The W. E. B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy and Dewey Hall are pleased to present Exploring Black Roots Music with Jake Blount on October 20 at 7pm at Dewey Memorial Hall in Sheffield. The concert is a benefit for the Du Bois Freedom Center, an African American cultural heritage center being developed at the former Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church in Great Barrington.

An acclaimed musician and scholar of traditional Black folk music, Blount speaks ardently about the African roots of the banjo and the subtle, yet profound ways African Americans have shaped and defined the amorphous categories of roots music and Americana. His 2020 album Spider Tales — named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, and recipient of a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian — highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes.

“I’ve seen that music performed in a way that makes it very palatable for white audiences and keeps it from deeply engaging with any of the difficult thorny issues that people were reckoning with when the music was taking shape,” Blount told the Boston Globe recently. “That’s never felt honest to me.”

For his latest album, Blount said he found inspiration by “digging deeper into the full repertoire of the Black folk tradition and how Black people have always made music in dire circumstances.” 

Titled The New Faith, the album tells an Afrofuturist story set in a future world devastated by climate change. Conceived, written and recorded during the darkest months of Covid lockdown and just after the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, The New Faith invokes age-old spirituals, familiar in their content but extraordinary in their presentation. 

“It hits you like a fiery mountaintop sermon,” wrote the Globe of the album released last month by Smithsonian Folkways. While it depicts what Blount calls “the traditional Black music of the future,” he notes it is “grounded in the oldest traditional material I’ve yet worked with.”   

Doors for the concert will open at 6:30pm. There is a suggested donation of $25 (more if you can, less if you can’t). Refreshments will be available. Dewey Memorial Hall is wheelchair accessible.