Jake Blount

An award-winning scholar and performer of Black folk music.

Jake Blount is an award-winning scholar and performer of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician, Blount has charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course on his pilgrimage through sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar, and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. From transfixing solo sets to full-band festival appearances complete with crowd-surfing and ecstatic chants, Blount’s performances--like his recent Smithsonian Folkways releases, symbiont (2024) and The New Faith (2022)--seamlessly merge centuries-old traditional songs with the trappings and techniques of modern Black genres. This “genrequeer” approach to the traditions has earned his music a place in the very same archives from which he extracts his repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories, and linear time, Blount fashions an “Afrofuturist folklore” that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.

Balancing his taste for arcane source material with his desire to reach diverse audiences, Blount has shared his music at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Newport Folk Festival, the Library of Congress, and NPR’s Tiny Desk. His knowledge and skill have deepened over the course of his still-young career, and his vision has grown more ambitious, but his music has only grown in popular appeal. Starting with his full-length debut, Spider Tales (2020), each of Blount’s records has appeared on “best of year” lists from outlets including Bandcamp, The New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone. With the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, two International Folk Music Awards nominations, and two first-place ribbons from Clifftop already under his belt, Blount’s star continues to rise.

Blount’s thoughtful musicianship has made him a sought-after collaborator. He has contributed to recordings by Adia Victoria, Dave Hause, Adeem The Artist, and others, opened for Grammy winners Rhiannon Giddens, Molly Tuttle, and the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and traveled the world as a member of the string bands New Dangerfield, Tui, and The Moose Whisperers. He regularly shares the stage with skilled contemporaries such as Mali Obomsawin, George Jackson, and Nic Gareiss, and collaborated with the Kronos Quartet on their sold-out 50th Anniversary performance at Carnegie Hall. Blount also served as a music consultant on Ryan Coogler’s 2025 film Sinners and contributed music to Ken Burns’s The American Revolution (2025) alongside Giddens.

In addition to his public-facing achievements, Blount has an impressive industry track record. He has performed as an official showcase artist at Folk Alliance International, SXSW, AmericanaFest, and the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) World of Bluegrass. He was a 2020 Strathmore Artist in Residence and participated in the IBMA’s Leadership Bluegrass program in the same year. An emeritus board member of Bluegrass Pride, Blount is known as a strong advocate for progressive causes within the music industry and appears regularly on conference panels on social and environmental justice. His writings on music and issues facing the industry have appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, NPR, Paste Magazine, and No Depression.

Blount is also a skilled educator, and his engagements frequently include lectures and presentations about both his original research and the history of Black string band music. He has shared this work at Yale University, Berklee College of Music, the Smithsonian Institution, and elsewhere. He also makes regular appearances at music camps, most notably the Earful of Fiddle Music & Dance Camp, where he offers hands-on instruction in fiddle and banjo. Blount holds an A.M. in Musicology and Ethnomusicology from Brown University, where he is working toward a Ph.D. in the same field, as well as an A.M. in Anthropology.

Blount performs on a five-string fiddle made by Nathaniel Rowan, and banjos from Seeders Instruments and Pete Ross Banjos.

“Blount is a virtuosic multi-instrumentalist... with a hauntingly gorgeous voice and a bottomless, scholarly knowledge of American musical history.” --Katherine Proctor, Los Angeles Times

“Blount sings and speaks from the eye of the musical storm he’s cultivated with a keen and collected alertness that’s riveting… To follow his voice and vision is mightily clarifying.” --NPR “Tiny Desk”

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This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.

This project is made possible with funds from the Tier Three Project Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of the County Executive and administered by CNY Arts.

  ~ This project is also made possible through the support and generosity of our Folkus members. ~