Jake Blount - “The Man Was Burning”
February 22, 2022 - single on Free Dirt Records

The new single from roots master Jake Blount troubles the waters. Known for his incisive perspective on Black American folk music and powerhouse musicianship, Blount has unearthed a rare fire-and-brimstone spiritual from the 1930s and reworked the lyrics to speak to our current era of ultra-wealth and privilege. With “The Man Was Burning,” coming February 22, 2022 on Free Dirt Records, Blounts moves easily along the spectrum of Black roots music, from field recordings in penitentiaries, to the electric guitar of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, all the way up to an updated modern sound that incorporates looped production from hip-hop.

Having spent part of the pandemic at his family farm in Virginia, “just up the road from the plantation where our ancestors were kept,” he says, his own family history in the South was foremost in his mind when sourcing and recording the song. Blount found the song on an old Smithsonian Folkways LP, Virginia Work Songs. The singer, Joe Lee, was 71 years old and incarcerated at Virginia’s Powhatan State Farm when John Lomax recorded him in 1936. “It’s a spiritual that echoes with burning hellfire,” Blount says. “All of these supernatural, plagues of Egypt-type things are happening to this person ostensibly as punishment for his gambling. I don’t really mind people gambling, so I changed the verses to be about somebody who’s hoarding money and thinking too much of what it can do for him and is punished. This is kind of my “Eat the Rich” moment.