This splendidly named songwriter from Durham, North Carolina has had an itinerant life, previously living in Georgia and Mississippi, as well as joining his historian father on research trips across the American south as a child. He has toured with Wilco and plays for gospel group the Como Mamas, and this album came out of informal sessions with other local musicians, covering Curtis Mayfield, doo-wop groups and fiddle tunes. The sense of someone soaked in music and place comes through strongly as Fussell arranges and performs his own versions of traditional folk songs – partly culled via YouTube – that hail from North America, Ireland, the UK and, in the case of the deckhand’s song Oh Captain, the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s fascinating to consider how they might have seeped into our respective cultures, even subliminally, through an ever-spreading word-of-mouth network: the hollers of a fish vendor that Fussell turns into The River St Johns are more than a little reminiscent of the opening lines of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come; the languid waltz of The Rainbow Willow evokes Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing while not actually resembling it.
Anyhow, Fussell makes them all his own. The informative salesman’s pitch on The River St Johns is slowed into something sensual, while The Rainbow Willow turns out to be an ultra-violent adaptation of the sometimes less murderous folk song Locks and Bolts, about a man who kills the disapproving family of the woman he loves. For Michael Is Hearty, the wryly funny tale of a man who regrets picking a rich wife instead of a beautiful one, he adapts the free-flowing a capella of Traveller singer Thomas McCarthy into a sturdy bluegrass waltz while retaining something tangibly Irish in its chord changes. Jubilee is also slowed down, from Jean Ritchie’s peppy original, to better lay out its mantra for letting go: “Swing and turn, jubilee, live and learn, jubilee.” Fussell makes the good-natured workplace bitching on Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues feel both particular and timeless. These are exceptional songs, performed exceptionally well.
