More Book Talk

I’m sure I’ve mentioned how much I hate self-promotion. It’s one of the things that are part of the job, though. Can’t sell a book if no one knows that the book exists. Can’t get folks excited about the next one if they don’t know about the first one.

So in the spirit of advertising the goods, I had a few appearances in support of Soul-Folk recently. The first, was for the Popular Music Books in Process series in December. I was terrified. Not because I don’t feel confident about the book (I mean, I don’t, but that’s a different story), but because I was talking to a group of people who are so smart about music, about writing. People I’ve looked up to and read and admired. It was shocking to think that I’d be there presenting to them. But it went well, I think. And on Zoom, no one can see your flop-sweat-soaked armpits. Many thanks to my amazing conversation partner, Emily Lordi!

And in January, Charles Hughes, from the amazing No Fences Review, interviewed me and I sounded pretty smart. Or at least not dumb. Three cheers to me.

A bit of our convo is below:

AJ: There’s something I mention in the early pages of the book about “making a way out of no way,” which, for me and many other Black people throughout history, has been the standard operating procedure. You do what you can with what you are given. It’s part of why Black culture is so great. We have created beautiful things out of scraps— things that have endured and will endure for generations. When it comes to folk music, I think that a lot of the artists I covered were feeling pushed out of “traditional” folk and created their own traditions. There was no real reason not to include jazz or blues or spirituals when that’s part of your tradition.

CH: Yes, the question of “tradition” animates this book, both in terms of musical legacies and how that idea possesses such complex cultural meaning. What does the soul-folk story teach us about musical tradition and how it works (or doesn’t)?

AJ: I think one of the issues I have as a listener when it comes to a lot of traditional folk is that I often don’t feel it. So much of this book, and trying to figure out what belonged in the category of soul-folk, was about how it felt to me. Could I hear the places where it was pushing against genre boundaries? It goes back to that idea of who “the people” are. Even though I don’t expect every piece of art I encounter to speak directly to me or my experiences, it’s nice when it does. I could follow the lines of this music and hear the language it was speaking. It really showed me that although we sometimes speak about a shared American tradition, we should really be talking about traditions. There are places where these traditions cross, but there are places where they diverge, sometimes taking pieces from where they met to create something new from it.

Soul-folk is about multiple traditions all existing at once, but becoming something else. It’s such a great metaphor for being a Black American (or more accurately, being Black wherever, and trying to stay rooted in your traditions, whatever they may be, while also taking in the world around you. Not all of the artists I covered are American)