We turn to music during times of intense stress, looking for solace, comfort; words and melodies to help us cope. For banjo player and fiddler Jake Blount, he turned to music on hearing the news of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012. “I remember going into my bedroom,” he says, “and pulling out these old spirituals, digging through the music of black people and slaves to figure out what our coping mechanism was.” This started him on the path of looking to his ancestors’ past for a guide to the present, gravitating to the banjo after learning that the slaves of the Chesapeake Bay were among the first to bring the instrument from Africa to America. For fiddler Libby Weitnauer, she first turned to the fiddle and banjo music from her home region of Maryville, Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains after a particularly hard bout of homesickness. “I moved to Chicago to get my degree in violin performance,” she explains, “and I got homesick and had a reframing of my upbringing. Growing up, you’re supposed to feel shame about growing up in that area. Once I moved away, it became more a feeling of pride, so playing fiddle music was an expression of that.” Together, these two young artists found each other and found a way to explore their own pasts and heritages through a new outlet. Under the name Tui, named for a unique bird they saw on their first tour together in New Zealand, they’ve recorded some of their favorite old-time melodies and songs, drawn from deep archival sources across the United States. Their debut album, Pretty Little Mister, to be released June 28, 2019, features stringband music selected with an ear to highlight the rich diversity that’s always been a hallmark of American folk music.

As one of the few African-American fiddlers today in the world of Appalachian old-time stringband music, Jake Blount has been pushing to find sources, mostly drawn from archival and field recordings, that testify to the lost black and indigenous voices in the music. The surprise is that these voices have always been key to the music, though they rarely get much credit. Seminal white musicians like Dock Boggs, an inspiration to multiple generations of Americana and bluegrass artists, learned directly from black musicians. They were open not only the music of the day, but the music all around them, and sought out black artists to learn from directly, melding the Scots-Irish fiddle traditions around the fretless banjo, bringing two traditions together. 

Part of a new generation reclaiming stringband music, Tui draws from a global community of musicians passing around digital copies of field recordings and archival recordings and trading information on the most obscure artists, many forced into obscurity because they didn’t fit the stereotype of conservative, white Appalachia. To build this debut album, Blount and Weitnauer searched for tunes and melodies to challenge their mastery of the traditions, but also to touch on the worlds beyond the usual. Missouri fiddler Lyman Enloe’s sublime tune “Crazy Horse” seems otherworldly, a masterpiece of melodic restraint that borders on psychic. The song “Went Up on the Mountain” aches with a strange sense of loss, sourced by Weitnauer from a recording made her in hometown of Maryville and relating to the history of local families forced off the land by the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. “Twin Sisters,” from two Cherokee brothers who learned from a black fiddler, pulses with a kind of sad insistence, pushing back on the decades that kept these two brothers lost to our ears. 

Set to the delicate and intricate interplay between Blount’s fretless banjo and Weitnauer’s smooth fiddling, these songs and melodies are our American stories, the truth behind the lie that American country music was built by male, white artists alone. For Jake Blount and Libby Weitnauer - Tui - they’re a well of inspiration, a way to understand their own roots in America.