The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas spoke with Jake Xerxes Fussell, acclaimed folksinger and guitarist. His excellent new album, When I’m Called, was released in July on Fat Possum Records.
Jimmy Cajoleas: What have you been reading lately?
Jake Xerxes Fussell: I recently read Donald Barthelme’s collection Forty Stories, which I liked very much. My friend Chris Sullivan, who is a poet in New Orleans, recommended the story “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and that’s what led me into the book. I don’t know much about Barthelme. Sometimes I listen to that Bookworm podcast with that guy Michael Silverblatt from KCRW, and he talks about Donald Barthelme a lot. I think they were buddies in Buffalo.
JC: I love those stories because they manage to do all the postmodern tricks but they really break your heart. They’re so beautiful and strange.
JXF: I went into that collection cold and really liked it a lot. I haven’t been reading a ton of fiction in the last couple of years, but this book might bring me back.
You know the poet Mark Strand? He wrote a book about Edward Hopper called Hopper that I really love. It’s a very short book of essays on different Edward Hopper paintings, almost an analysis of several of his paintings, but it’s not real academic or anything. You could read this book in an hour. It seems very apparent that Mark Strand is a huge Edward Hopper fan and he wanted to write this book because he liked thinking about Hopper’s paintings.
JC: Did you ever read that Charles Simic book on Joseph Cornell, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell? It’s a similar thing. You get a poet who really wants to talk about an artist and it’s wonderful. Simic writes a lot of poems trying to evoke Joseph Cornell’s art, gives a little biography, things like that. They aren’t academic studies, but they’re deep appreciations and explorations of the work.
JXF: It’s so cool because in the beginning of Hopper, Mark Strand basically says, “I’m not an art guy, but I like Edward Hopper.” He analyzes the paintings visually, without a lot of historical context. It’s very technical stuff about the paintings themselves, very material. I love that.
JC: You mean it’s actually about the art?
JXF: Yes, he’s talking about the paintings! How rare is that? He’s serving a real function here.
Here’s another weird one. It’s a small book. The artist Howard Finster self-published this book called Vision of 1982 that I’ve had for a long time. I imagine this came from my dad, who probably bought it off Howard Finster in the ’80s. It’s got the greatest look, just pages and pages of Howard talking about God and visions of the future. It’s pretty wild. Some of it is handwritten, mimeographed, in black and white, with drawings. Maybe Howard xeroxed it. I’ve had it for a long time, but recently my friend Kevin McNamee-Tweed, who did the drawing on the cover of my forthcoming album, and I were talking about Finster. I told him I had this book that Finster self-published, and then I couldn’t find it, and I got real nervous because it was my dad’s. I worried I’d loaned it to somebody and forgotten, and then I’d have to buy it off eBay or something for like five hundred dollars. Then I was in my storage unit looking for something else and found it. So I’ve been thumbing back through it again. That’s been fun.
I recently read Terri Thal’s memoir, My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me, about her managing a very young Bob Dylan and living with Dave Van Ronk. There is some great Dylan stuff in there. I mean, there’s so much writing about Dylan, especially in those early days, but Terri’s viewpoint as someone who is very smart and deep in the scene is really savvy and funny. So much of it is about Dylan’s early years, before he was famous and as he was becoming famous, before they lost touch. There’s some point many years later where Terry’s still living in the same apartment, though she and Dave Van Ronk have split up, and Dylan comes to visit her. He gives her a hat that he had when he was young, which I think is really funny. And then he comes back a few months later and asks about the hat. She tells him she still has it, and he’s like, “Okay, good.” And that’s the last she ever saw him.
JC: I’m glad he didn’t ask for it back.
JXF: I guess it was a hat he wore in the old days, and he perceived it to be emblematic in some way. Maybe it was like the hat he was wearing on the cover of his first album, what do you call those? The Newsies hats?
JC: Could’ve been a ten-gallon cowboy hat.
JXF: What if it was one of those hats with the little propeller on the top? Bob’s like, “You still have it right? My little hat?” But there’s been such a flood in recent years of Dylan stuff—there’s too much Dylan content in general—that the only ones I’m interested in are the ones from weird angles. Memoirs of people who knew him are fun because they all have their odd take on him. I hope his current manager will eventually write a memoir about working with that guy. What in the hell is that like? What are the projects he had in mind that didn’t come to fruition?
You’ve heard that interview with that guy Larry Charles, who was a writer on Seinfeld and produced a bunch of movies? He directed Masked and Anonymous, that movie Dylan was in sometime in the early 2000s that was crazy. There’s an interview with him before that happened, where he first got contacted by Dylan, who wanted to do a slapstick-comedy variety hour for HBO. Apparently he was watching lots of Jerry Lewis movies at the time. HBO took the pitch and said yes, and immediately Bob was like, “I don’t want to do it. It’s too slapsticky.” So they made Masked and Anonymous instead. Personally, I’d rather see the slapstick thing.
JC: Any other music books you’ve been reading lately?
JXF: With the exception of the ones I just mentioned, I don’t really read that many music books or books about musicians. But I did read one a couple of years ago by this guy Tim Lawrence called Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor: 1980–1983. He’s the same guy who wrote what I think is seen as the disco book, called Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, and this is kind of the follow-up to that book. He talks about the AIDS epidemic and its effect on the scene in New York. I think he also wrote a book about Arthur Russell [Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992], and Arthur Russell appears throughout this book in various ways, which are really interesting.
I don’t know a ton about disco music and the nightclub scene in New York. It’s not my bailiwick at all, as you can imagine. But when I was working at Carolina Soul Records a few years ago, they have a big eBay presence, so they auction off all these rare disco records. One job I had there was to make sound clips of rare records for eBay auctions. Sometimes I’d hear fifty seconds of some rare 12” release from, like, Philadelphia in 1980. And I would be like, “Oh my God, that is gorgeous! What is this?” And it would be a ton of stuff that I’d never heard of, so I’d just be writing down names. Then this book came out, and I realized it was some of that stuff that I was hearing.
Another cool thing about Life and Death is Tim Lawrence interviews all these DJs from this period and has them write down set lists of stuff that they really liked or played a lot. It’s really interesting because there’s a lot of genre mixing going on.
JC: Any books you go back to regularly?
JXF: I’ve lost track of how many John McPhee books I have. You see them everywhere, and they’re pretty common, but I always like picking them up, just to have. Sometimes I forget which ones I’ve read and haven’t read, because there’s just so many of them. I really appreciate competent nonfiction people like that. Though I don’t get real deep into his geology books or whatever. Not that those are bad, they just aren’t as interesting to me. There other subjects of his that he writes about and I’m like, Damn, that’s good. Like that Oranges book is pretty great. I like this essay he wrote about black bears in New Jersey, “Direct Eye Contact.” That one’s really good.
I really love this collection of short stories by Annie Proulx called Close Range. That one’s most well known now because it’s the book that contains “Brokeback Mountain.” I think she wrote three collections of those Wyoming stories, and that was the first one. There’s another collection called Fine Just the Way It Is. I think that’s the one that contains a story called “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and maybe “Tits-Up in a Ditch” also. But she’s a really powerful writer to me. I always go back to her. There’s something about her that I really love. She’s somebody who writes about music very convincingly. I have to think she must know a lot about traditional music, that it must be a real interest of hers. When a lot of fiction writers write about that stuff, it feels performative, and they’re kind of clunky in the way they write about it. Annie Proulx writes about music as being a part of people’s lives in this very real way. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, and I don’t quite know how she does it, but it’s very convincing to me. I like her a lot.
Annie Proulx’s such a good historian, too. She writes about the American West and how it’s a big fucking violent tragedy. Of course, she’s not the only person to do that, but so many people write about American history as progress narratives and things like that, and she goes against that in a real, active way. Her last novel was this gargantuan thing called Barkskins. Did you read that? I think it was the kind of thing that should have been three or four books instead of one. It spanned five hundred years or something. But man, there were a couple of moments in there that were amazing. There was one really great sequence about a timber baron who has recently made lots of money, he’s a new-money Frenchman in Canada who goes to Paris for the first time in the 1700s. And he’s walking down the street and he has to go into the store to buy a fancy frock coat and some high-heeled boots and a powdered wig. And there’s some nearby street kids who are making fun of him. And he’s walking down the street in these really uncomfortable, expensive boots. Annie Proulx has a lot of fun making fun of him. She’s sort of sadistic in how much she makes this guy look like an ass. I think eventually he gets an infection in his foot and dies. And then, many generations later, there are some kids, his descendants, in an attic in a farmhouse in Quebec who find this old wig and take turns throwing it back and forth in the yard and pissing on it. They leave it in the yard and it gets rained on and birds take it away to make a nest. And it’s that guy’s powdered wig from Paris in the 1700s. It’s this whole sequence where I’m like, Damn, Annie Proulx rules.
There’s stuff I think about a lot, like Carson McCullers, who was from my hometown of Columbus, Georgia. I grew up a block from where she grew up. I think about her descriptions of my hometown. I don’t read her much. I don’t read a lot of Southern lit the way that I used to.
I do also like this guy George Lipsitz who wrote a book called Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music. There’s a really good essay in it about banda music, Mexican American tuba-driven brass music that flourished in East L.A. in the early ’90s. It went back to Mexico and now it’s everywhere, and it’s a big part of Sinaloa and northwestern Mexico. He also wrote an article [with Richard Leppert] about Hank Williams called “Everybody’s Lonesome for Somebody” that I liked.
JC: Anything else you’d like to mention?
JXF: I’m currently working with Ashley Melzer, who is a filmmaker in Chapel Hill, and she’s a former student of the folklorist Bill Ferris. Bill made this film back in the mid-’80s called Ray Lum: Mule Trader. He was this character that Bill documented for many years. There’s this book Bill did about him in addition to the film, called Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men. Ashley’s using Bill’s footage to make another documentary about Bill and Ray’s relationship. Which is very interesting because Bill grew up knowing this guy from childhood and it shaped his whole way that he saw the world and the world of folklore and was a big part of him getting into that world. So I’ve been going back and rereading Mule Trader, which Bill sent me when I signed on to the do the soundtrack for this documentary. Lum’s a wheeler-dealer storyteller near Vicksburg, and a real character. It’s a lot of wild stories about trading horses and mules and going out to Texas, stories of cattle drivers and all kinds of stuff having to do with that. It’s pretty interesting.
The only other book I have here is David Sibley’s second edition of The Sibley Guide to Birds, because I’m kind of a bird guy. I like having it around because I have some feeders in the backyard, and it’s nice to be able to ID those fellas.
JC: Every time I go anywhere traveling, the bird watchers are always the happiest people.
JXF: Oh yeah man, it’s a real thing, isn’t it. I don’t know a ton about birds, but I like having the book around because you wind up seeing the same dozen or so types of birds in your yard. And then every now and then you’ll see one and think, What the hell is that? That happened to me a couple of years ago. I was looking at this bird I’d been seeing for the past three days that I thought was a cardinal, just the most-bright red bird I’d ever seen, and then I realized, That’s not a damn cardinal. Turns out it was a summer tanager. That’s how they suck you into that whole bird thing. You’re like, I’m just seeing a bird, but if you look a little closer, you’re actually staring at something rare you’ve never seen before in your life. 
Over the last decade, North Carolina’s Jake Xerxes Fussell has established himself as a devoted listener and contemplative interpreter of a vast array of lovingly sourced folk songs. His second album, What in the Natural World, was named one of the ten best albums of 2017 by Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker. On his just-released fifth album, When I’m Called, Fussell returns to a well of music that contemplates the passage of time and the procession of life’s unexpected offerings.
Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.
Photo: Graham Tolbert.
