Album Review: Jake Xerxes Fussell, The Old Beloved Path

Folk singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell takes old traditional folk songs and doesn’t so much reimagine them, as reinvent them, in a manner that’s almost like a meditation session.

Take lead single from this sixth/seventh long player, ‘Rock Island Line’, made famous by Leadbelly and since covered by everyone from Lonnie Donegan to Billy Bragg. Here it’s pretty much unrecognisable from the old spiritual, Fussell combining it with an old English nursery rhyme and slowing it down into something far more tender and tremulous.

Nothing outstays its welcome, from the ethereal calm of ‘Sandy Land’ to the tender folk of ‘Boll Weevil’, made famous by Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell. Animal lovers will shed a tear at ‘Every Time I Go To Town’, the short and not- so-sweet tale of dog cruelty, as covered by Dylan with The Band on The Basement Tapes.

‘Boney’, meanwhile, is an old maritime work-song (a short drag sea shanty, which would be sung while the sailors did some hauling work) about the storied life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which was supposedly written in the wake of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, here transformed into a quietly entrancing fugue.

Indeed, the entire album sounds like a 33-minute lullaby.

• Out now.