Jake Blount

A powerfully gifted musician and a scholar of Black American music, Jake 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. Underlying his work is the realization that the more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future. The New Faith, his first album for Smithsonian Folkways, is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure, in which Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change.