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his is what we know for sure: Jerron ‘Blind Boy’ Paxton is a brilliant folk musician. I’ve seen him late at night at the Folk Alliance International conference playing a game where he asked the audience to call out random words, colours, or animals, and then he’d sing a song from pre-war American popular music that featured that word. He did this at least ten times without fail and all totally off-the-cuff. I’ve heard him sing an eight-minute ‘dozens’ from his Creole grand- mother that would curl your hair. And I’ve seen him perform on the piano, guitar, fiddle, and banjo, drawing from an impossibly wide wealth of traditions that have inspired him. Hell, on his only album, Recorded Music for Your Entertainment, the music ranges from Appalachian old-time fiddle and song (Pretty Saro), to a rousing version of Devil’s Dream on the banjo, a Stephen Foster classic (The Glendy Burk) paired with French-Canadian podorythmie, a Québé- cois fiddle tune (Lutin Reel), a rollicking version of Soldier’s Joy, and the sublime blues song Trying To Make A Hundred.
He starts the album off with Massa Am A Stingy Man, an old minstrel song that sets off all my white guilt alarms immediately, especially when I go searching online and pick up on white perform- ers happily recreating a minstrel show with this song, complete with cornpone jokes and racist dialects. It’s not Paxton’s fault that this music comes with such baggage and he seems happy to roll over anyone’s objections. I ask him how he deals with working with music that comes from such a rough history.
“I sing it like I’d sing it if it was my people. Except, you got to hold some of them back. Some people you can’t be too real with them, it’ll hurt their little feelings.” I ask him if people come back at him for singing songs like this, and he replies “Well no, they can’t, because it’s all true, and if they do then they’re a little dumb and I don’t worry about them.” “But a lot of artists drop those songs entirely,” I insist, “so why do you include them as well?” “Well, ain’t they good?” Paxton replies?
I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about this point, so I reply:
“Well, that’s the question, are they good?” “Hell, you bought the record, you tell me!” he exclaims! “Yeah,” I say, “I mean, I guess I find them interesting from a historical perspective and some of them are good songs, but you have to kind of wade through the bullshit of the time, right?” “You’ve got to do that now,” Paxton says. Damn, he’s got me there! “Hell,” he continues, “I play old-time music with- out a single black face on the instruments, that’s awkward…”
These are the kind of truth bombs that Paxton delights in drop-
ping, and he’s right. It’s not his responsibility to set the context behind everything, to tell the audience the history behind each song, to justify being one of the only black faces out there covering this music, and covering it with obvious joy and massive talent. I ask Paxton to elaborate on his statement about the awkwardness of being one of the only black artists making old-time music now and he relates a story.
“Well, I saw a video one time of a group of people playing Indi- an music, and it was beautiful. I didn’t know any better and you pan to the picture of them and it was a bunch of white dudes. This was in like 1975. There were one or two Indian fellas that were their teach- ers. As good as they sounded it was still awkward to see. That’s not the sound I associate with those faces, and likewise the same is true with my music.”
I ask him if he still finds it awkward. “Well, I’m used to it but it
still ain’t stopped being a little strange. Can’t say I mind it, you can’t mind nobody that keeps you employed, but you know, these are the songs from my culture, and the only way it would be awkward is for somebody not from my culture. So I guess to answer your question from earlier, it’s not me playing these tunes, it’s those people who feel awkward listening to them or having to confront them.”
In a world where the favourite Facebook game of the day seems to be white people confronting other white people about racism, Paxton’s statement cuts a little too deep, and here’s the edge in his music that makes it so much more than a recreation of old pre-war roots music. Paxton knows the history, he knows the culture, and he’s decided to just plough ahead and play the music that belongs to his heritage, and to try his hand at everything else that touches his fancy. It’s an honourable idea when you think about it.
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