Jake Blount

folk · bluegrass · roots

Jake Blount is an American banjoist, fiddler, singer and scholar based in Providence, Rhode Island. He holds a master's degree in musicology and ethnomusicology and a second in anthropology from Brown University, where he is a doctoral candidate, and his research and his performing both center on Black and Indigenous traditions in American mountain music and on the African origins of the banjo. He has taken two first-place ribbons at the Clifftop Appalachian String Band Music Festival, received the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, held a 2020 Strathmore artist residency, and has been nominated twice at the International Folk Music Awards. His full-length debut, Spider Tales, appeared on Free Dirt Records in 2020 and was named among the year's best by NPR and The New Yorker; it followed the Reparations EP, recorded with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. He then moved to Smithsonian Folkways for The New Faith (2022), an Afrofuturist song cycle set among Black climate refugees that recasts spirituals and features the rapper Demeanor, and for symbiont (2024), a collaboration with Abenaki bassist and composer Mali Obomsawin built from banjo, synthesizers and drum machines and framed as a document of Black and Indigenous futurism. Blount describes his approach as genrequeer, moving between acoustic string-band playing and electric and electronic textures and drawing on shape-note hymnody, spirituals, blues and Caribbean banjo traditions. He also performs with the string band New Dangerfield and has played with Tui and The Moose Whisperers, worked with the Kronos Quartet, and opened for Rhiannon Giddens, Molly Tuttle and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. In 2025 he served as a music consultant on Ryan Coogler's film Sinners and contributed to Ken Burns's documentary The American Revolution alongside Giddens. He writes on music history and industry issues for Rolling Stone, NPR, Paste and No Depression. Live, he moves between solo and small-ensemble traditional repertoire and the electronic material of his recent albums.

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