'I know what it makes me feel when I'm at a fiddle festival and I hear someone play 'Turkey in the Straw,' ' Blount says. And festivals have been a way to keep them alive.īut some of the songs made Blount feel uncomfortable, like 'Turkey In the Straw.' White fiddlers in blackface used to play the tune in minstrel shows, and it's been recorded with racist lyrics. The most popular ones like sea shanties and folk songs date back to the 19th century. Traditional music is a broad term for songs that were passed down. 'I've been involved in Black Lives Matter and in that work for as long as I've been involved in traditional music,' he says, 'and often have felt that my friends who are also working on that and I were sort of outliers.' 'When the Black Lives Matter movement started kicking into full force, particularly right after Trayvon Martin was killed, I remember going upstairs into the attic of my grandparents house in Maine and reading through these books of old spirituals and songs, kind of trying to figure out what my ancestors were thinking and feeling and how they would have coped with this sort of violence,' Blount says. The link between his ancestral past and music just kept unfolding along with the events he saw happening in real time. 'The banjo is descended from a number of different African instruments, but when it came to the United States, the first place it found a real home was the slaves in the Chesapeake Bay region, who were my ancestors,' he says. For Jake Blount, one musician leading that effort, his love for traditional music started with the banjo. The confederate flag and other monuments from that era have been disappearing from public spaces - both by force and legislation.īut what about the stereotypes and racist imagery in America's musical legacy? The traditional music community is reckoning with some of the songs from its past that are kept alive today through festivals and concerts. The symbols of America's racist past have been under intense scrutiny since the protests against police brutality erupted nationwide. Jake Blount, a 24-year-old banjoist and fiddler, is one of the people in the traditional music community working to educate others on the genre's Black roots.

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