Jake Xerxes Fussell: eight borrowed songs, one of his own
Jake Xerxes Fussell's sixth album hands eight traditional songs and one of his own to a small band and lets them move. It is his most traditional set in years.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 22 2026 · 3 min readThe Old Beloved Path is the sixth Jake Xerxes Fussell album, and it leaves him almost nothing to sign. Eight of its nine songs are credited as traditional, arrangements only. The opener, "No 1", is the one piece of writing with his name on it, and he does not sing a note of it. That could read as a retreat. It plays as a position: these songs, in the right hands and at the right tempo, need no author.
Fussell was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1981, the son of Fred C. Fussell, a folklorist, curator and photographer who shot the front cover of this record. He apprenticed with the Piedmont blues player Precious Bryant and toured and recorded with her, and he accompanied Etta Baker in concert. He played in a Phenix City, Alabama, country band whose members had learned from Jimmie Tarlton, and went into the field with the historian George Mitchell and the folklorist Art Rosenbaum to record Southern vernacular music before he made a record of his own. The self-titled debut arrived in 2015, produced by William Tyler and built entirely from adapted folk and blues. What in the Natural World followed in 2017, Out of Sight in 2019, Good and Green Again in 2022, produced by James Elkington, and When I'm Called in 2024, Elkington again, on Fat Possum. He has opened for Wilco, Bill Callahan and The Decemberists. That training is why he can take a fiddle tune apart without breaking it.
The Old Beloved Path came out on September 18, 2026, on Fat Possum. Ben Whiteley produced and mixed it, Alli Rogers recorded, Steve Fallone mastered. Whiteley plays upright and electric bass, Dominic Billett drums and percussion and the muted synth drones, Ken Whiteley bass harmonica, Isa Burke fiddle. Max Taeuschel designed the sleeve, Fred C. Fussell took the cover photograph, and Fussell arranged the material himself. It sticks closer to traditional ground than When I'm Called did. That record found room for a cover of a 1980s Warhol diss track by Maestro Gaxiola. This one reaches further back, to a Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers record called "Sal, Let Me Chaw Your Rosin Some", the source of "Rosin Some".
Fussell's guitar is the argument, and the record gives it room. "No 1" is electric guitar working a barbed line that keeps changing shape while the bass and drums stay out of its way. When the voice arrives on "Rock Island Line" it is hearty and supple at once, a singer who can push a line without shouting it. The arrangements are dense but never crowded, with an undertow moving under even the prettiest of them.
"Rock Island Line" takes a song built for bustle and disassembles it. The guitar figure is a clean arpeggio, closer to a seventies singer-songwriter record than to a work song, and Billett's bass drum puts a canter under it. The train turns into a horse. "Rosin Some" moves the other way, a fiddle hoedown slowed into a rumination on the burning of daylight, Ken Whiteley's bass harmonica murmuring beneath the tune. "Boll Weevil" drops the slyness of the old pest song: industrial agriculture made the insect irrelevant long ago, and what is left here is homier, a celebration of farm life. "Early Early in the Spring" is the lightest thing on the record, a nautical tune with Celtic bones, lifted by a bass that sounds fretless, wispy piano and a drone of muted synth that keeps it slightly unsettled.
This is for the listener who already keeps a shelf of folk records and wants the seams left visible: no festival gloss, no band-in-a-room politeness. Set against Fussell's own catalogue it sits closest to Good and Green Again, and its temperament is string band rather than singer-songwriter. If folk is a mood to you, a texture under dinner, this will not hold you. If the songs themselves are the draw, you will play it twice.
The one real flaw is the ending. "Of All the Beast-es in the World" is the shortest thing here, at 1:53, and it is gone before it makes its case, a curtain dropped on a record that had spent its whole runtime earning the room. The restraint works everywhere else. Here it reads as haste.
Everything before that holds. The arrangements move, the playing stays inventive, and the voice carries. The oldest songs on the record arrive sounding like they were written by someone still alive. A four, then: strong and earned, and the clearest statement yet of what Fussell has spent his life collecting.
