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‘Art is appropriation’: folklorist Jake Xerxes Fussell connects forgotten tunes to our times
Once hesitant to put his own stamp on archival music, the Georgia singer-guitarist found the freedom to reinterpret folk songs in his new album
For more than a decade, Jake Xerxes Fussell tried and failed to sing an old American folk song he had loved since he was a teenager. The tune, Rolling Mills Are Burning Down, combines an industrial accident with personal woe, resulting in a violent verse: “Oh, go get your revolver / And come on and blow out my brain / For I’d rather be dead and in my grave / Than to be in this trouble I’m in.”
Folk aficionado John Cohen captured Rolling Mills during a song-scouting foray into the ancient mountains of western North Carolina and south-west Virginia. He recorded banjoist George Landers singing it in a rail-thin voice, fingers pawing anxiously at his strings. It resonated with Fussell generations later, after an inferno ripped through Bibb Mill, a century-old textile plant that served as an economic engine of his home town, Columbus, west Georgia.
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