JAKE BLOUNT
The New Faith
SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS
Ambitious Afrofuturist concept work from roots music’s latest rising star. By Rob Hughes
OCTAVIA BUTLER’S 1993 sci-fi novel, Parable Of The Sower, traces the plight of a young black woman in a post-apocalyptic world, gathering companions on a journey to form a new community in Northern California. The contributing factors are made depressingly clear – climate change, the fall of society, corporate shithousery – leading her to set up an entirely new religion, Earthseed. An early example of Afrofuturism, the story has now inspired a direct corollary in Jake Blount’s remarkable The New Faith.
A multi-instrumentalist and singer from Washington DC, Blount’s recorded CV is still pretty slim. He self-released an EP in 2017, cut an old-time folk album as part of The Moose Whisperers a year later, then followed up with a similar effort (alongside fiddler Libby Weitnauer) as Tui. But it was 2020’s solo, that brought him wider notice. A scintillating set of repurposed old tunes, centred around banjo and fiddle, the album sought to uncover the hidden codes of American roots music, reframing them from a black and queer perspective.
