Photo: Bill Steber Minstrel Tension

He may be one of the best young American roots artists you’ve ever heard. But Jerron ‘Blind Boy’ Paxton doesn’t make it easy, finds Devon Leger.

J

erron Paxton is a difficult man to pin down. He’s hard to reach, hard to interview, and an artist whose motivation is hard to parse. There are some who insist that he’s not blind – he is definitely visually impaired – though his performing name is Blind Boy Paxton. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles in an area so Southern that he speaks with a Southern accent, though there are also those who believe his accent is inauthentic. He’s Jewish and identifies with his family’s Sephardic roots, and though some people see him as the only “bluesman with a yarmulke”, they’re for- getting about his friend and fellow blues artist Andy Cohen.

He has only one published CD to his name (reviewed last issue), though he’s been on the scene for some years and is

well-known in underground folk, blues, and old-time circles as well as having fea- tured in several TV documentaries. Some people whisper of 78s that he’s recorded and released, but I’ve never been able to track these down. Like his friend and fre- quent collaborator, Frank Fairfield, he sometimes sounds like he’s stepped out of an old 78, though he’s as much a child of our digital times as anyone else. He’s a man of opposites, an artist perfectly content to be whomever you’d like him to be, without needing to actually change his music or his persona to do this.

During our time on the phone together for this piece, as he speaks from his apart- ment in Queens, he vacillates between an ‘aw shucks’ kind of attitude that shrugs off any of my claims that what he’s doing is spe- cial, and a kind of bitter persona that speaks openly about the absurdity of being one of

the few current black performers in tradi- tions that were historically black.

Our interview does not go well. I think part of the problem is that he wants to move at his own pace, to speak in his own manner about the music he cares about. I’m moving a bit quicker, looking to get this wrapped up and to get the specific soundbites that I’m looking for. That’s my fault, and I think it’s all of our faults for painting Paxton into corners of our own making. He is all of the things we say about him and more (he’s a blues man, a country singer, an old-time banjo player, a barrelhouse pianist, a raconteur, a song- ster, a rabble-rouser), and even when these are contradictory, it doesn’t change the music he makes or the songs he sings. He sees these as inviolate, and doesn’t trouble himself with what people think or say about what he does.