[2] As a teenager Jake began playing and studying with elder musicians in the Chattahoochee Valley, apprenticing with Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant, with whom he toured and recorded.

[3] He often leverages his knowledge of traditional American folk music in his own work, for example, by adapting the cry of a 19th Century fishmonger for his song "The River St.

In a review of his 2019 album Out of Sight, Pitchfork magazine noted, Musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell are nearly as rare nowadays as the material he performs.

“All songs are traditional & in the public domain,” reads the sole composition credit on Out of Sight, Fussell’s often-transcendent third album.

Put another way: Each of these nine songs survived the great folk-pop copyright round-up of the 1950s and ’60s (and beyond), when publishers hunted down and claimed untold numbers of “traditional” melodies as their own.