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. His 2020 album Spider Tales (named one of the year’s best albums by NPR and The New Yorker, earned a perfect 5-star review from The Guardian) highlighted the Black and Indigenous histories of popular American folk tunes, as well as revived songs unjustly forgotten in the whitewashing of the canon. Jake Blount’s new album, The New Faith, is a towering achievement of dystopian Afrofuturism and his first album for Smithsonian Folkways (coming September 23, 2022). The New Faith is spiritual music, filled with hope for salvation and righteous anger in equal measure. The album manifests our worst fears on the shores of an island in Maine, where Blount enacts an imagined religious ceremony performed by Black refugees after the collapse of global civilization due to catastrophic climate change. Jake Blount’s music is rooted in care and confrontation. On stage, each song he and his band play is chosen for a reason - because it highlights important elements about the stories we tell ourselves of our shared history and our endlessly complicated present moment. The more we learn about where we’ve been, the better equipped we are to face the future.

"There could have been no better year for Spider Tales -- Jake Blount's exquisite exploration of Black and Indigenous Appalachia — than 2020, when everything seemed to go wrong and we were all sent home by the power of nature to think about what we've done."
-NPR Best Albums of 2020

"he mines a deep, underexplored vein of Black and indigenous roots music, presenting new, often haunted versions of field hollers, murder ballads, and more. Maybe start with the familiar “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” but don’t stop there."
-The New Yorker

"Blount enriches the canon by re-centering the contributions of those who were marginalized from history. We are all elevated for his efforts."
-Bandcamp

"Spider Tales is an achievement. Each track drips with history and transports to eras and locales that are seemingly otherwise only in folklore or dark fairy tales." 
— American Songwriter