The first blues I remember seeing live was electrified with drums and a full band - the shuffling 12-bar party music that lit up the bars of Chicago and filled the grooves of Chess and Alligator Records. But about the same time, I heard records of the solo acoustic bluesmen, like Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, and Son House. About that time, Columbia Records released the iconic Robert Johnson Complete Recordings CD box set in 1990, arriving like a biblical revelation. A new fan was likely to think, as I did for a while, that the all-acoustic, fundamentalist blues only came from the elderly and the dead. It didn’t seem like a young man’s field, and for years it wasn’t. That’s changed, thanks to artists like Jerron Paxton.
He’s 35 years old - a native of the Watts section of Los Angeles who has based his musical life and living in Brooklyn since the 2010s. His grandparents moved west from Louisiana in the 50s, and like so many African Americans who migrated out of the south to big cities across the country, they brought their music with them. And in some cases they found their music waiting for them on specialty radio shows. Jerron was transfixed as a little boy by the historic recordings coming over the airwaves from greats like Bukka White and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Soon he was playing fiddle, banjo and guitar. To see him perform today feels like an intimate journey into the mind of a contemporary American raconteur who happens to be a devoted student of roots music.
“I get on the road with two banjos, a fiddle and a guitar, some harmonicas and bones,” Paxton says in Episode 305. “They're the best way I know to keep the audience interested for an entire solo set, especially if it's 90 minutes or so. You know, there's only so much solo guitar you can listen to. There's truly only so much solo fiddle you can listen to! So yeah, it makes it a lot easier to depend less on one instrument and keep the variety of the show going. Also, you don't know what each audience will enjoy. You know, I've gone to shows and one particular instrument will get the crowd going, and you can never tell what it is.”
Paxton has performed prolifically across the US and Europe since moving to New York City in the early 2010s, including a pivotal set at a Leadbelly tribute night at Carnegie Hall in 2016 that bolstered his stature as a new avatar of the old acoustic blues. His recording career has been more selective. He self-released a debut LP in 2015. Brooklyn’s boutique folk label Jalopy Records put out a seven-inch EP. So 2024 brought a big step with a debut album on Smithsonian Folkways, where many of his heroes released canonical recordings back in the day.
The album Things Done Changed further demonstrates Paxton’s versatility, with guitar rags, contemplative banjo ruminations, and a graceful touch on piano. The songs, for the first time in his career, are all original, rolling from a breakup number (the opening, title cut) to a mysterious bit of existentialism in the closing “Tombstone Disposition.” His sound may be vintage, but his outlook is timely, with songs like “So Much Weed,” about the fashionable proliferation on the streets of New York of an inebriant that led to mass incarceration of Black Americans not so many years ago. “Mississippi Bottom” sounds like a song that’s always been with us. My favorite I think is the one piano-based song, “Oxtail Blues,” about the gentrification of everything, including cuts of meat that used to be inexpensive staples of soul food.
In conversation, Paxton comes across as someone who’s given these subjects, these instruments, his family history, and folklore itself a load of thought, though he disavows any suggestion that he’s a scholar. (“I’m a different kind of nerd,” is all he’ll concede.) Early on, I ask him about something he wrote in the liner notes of his album - that folk music is “necessary” for a culture.
“If you don't have your folk music, what do you have?” he says. “It's important because I think it’s what we need as human cultures, frankly. You've got to get very familiar with what your people have produced. You've got to get familiar with the food and music and dance of your grandparents to know from which you come, and to figure out what you're contributing to this great human art form, which is music. And I think the further you get away from that, the less good music you produce.”
Paxton picks up his new year with a string of February dates in France followed by a tour of Scandinavia in April.
