#jerron paxton

[plexusnexus87]

Brilliant single from Jerron Paxton. Album drops Oct. 18th but pre-order is available.

[banjobaby]

Happy Black History Month!

February 6th’s black country artist is Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton. Deftly navigating through country, blues, jazz, ragtime, and even singing as The Highwayman in Over the Garden Wall, Paxton is so hard to nail down that I originally wasn’t going to add him to this series. Country, however, is also hard to nail down, so I suppose that Paxton fits right in in that regard. Paxton’s jack-of-all-trades approach to music also applies to the instruments that he plays, as he’s learned piano, harmonica, Cajun accordion, ukulele, guitar, and bones. The instruments he’s played longest, however, are the fiddle and the banjo, and it shows through with his quick finger work and effortless performances. 

Essential Album: Recorded Music for Your Entertainment. Paxton’s diverse music styles shine through on every track, going from blues to country with ease. The Devil’s Dream is a particularly notable track; Paxton plays the banjo in a way almost reminiscent of classical music, until it morphs into a jig about half-way through. Paxton’s wide net also catches some interesting lyrics; Paxton boldly starts off the album with the minstrel song Massa Am a Stingy Man, (Master is a Stingy Man), evoking questions of how and if minstrel songs, often written by white men as racist parodies of African Americans, could be reclaimed by black artists. 

Essential Song: No More the Moon Shines On Lorena, not recorded. “The blues is a meditation, you understand, and it’s been around for a long time. It don’t make you feel better, it makes you understand,” says Paxton at the beginning of this clip. It’s certainly a fair warning, you will not feel better at the end of the song. No More the Moon Shines On Lorena is an interesting song in its emotional rawness, Paxton implies here that the song was written by a black man. In my own research, however, I’ve seen multiple stories for its origins, the two most popular being that it was written by a white man as a minstrel song, or written by a white abolitionist to create sympathy for the plight of the enslaved. Regardless of the origin, Paxton truly makes the song his own, by changing or adding to the original lyrics. In this truly magnetic performance, his banjo strums ring between his clawhammer picking like thunder through rain.           

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

Jerron Paxton - Mississippi Bottom

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

Young bluesmen take up the torch for a musical tradition

For many young black musicians, especially those growing up in the South, learning about the blues came by accident and outside the home. Many in the older generation moved away from traditional blues because they considered it antiquated, or representing hardships endured by previous generations they’d prefer to forget.

“A lot of my white friends knew more about the blues than I did. Their parents educated them about it. But we didn’t listen to that type of music when I was growing up,” says Jarekus Singleton, 29, from Clinton, Miss. “I kind of feel bad for my generation because we didn’t have those people teaching us. But we have the responsibility now.”

Even in the cradle of the blues, the Mississippi Delta, the music has fallen in stature among millennial-aged African Americans: According to polling conducted last August by University of Mississippi doctoral candidate Nicholas Gorrell, when asked to name their favorite music, those aged 18 to 29 in the Delta said they most preferred R&B and hip-hop, with the blues a distant third.

The racial shift among blues audiences started decades ago, following the folk revival and, later, the British Invasion, when much of white America heard black music for the first time. At the same time, black audiences identified more with soul, funk and, eventually, hip-hop; up-and-coming black musicians, to stay commercially relevant, followed suit.

“Young black audiences no longer viewed the blues as pop music,” says Adam Gussow, a professor of Southern studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “Music of the now became soul music because it was about rebellion and it was about pride.”

Among blues purists, there was concern that blacks would abandon the music altogether, a scenario many thought might distort the very qualities that made it feel genuine.

Jim O’Neal, founder of Living Blues magazine, said the publication earned its name in 1970 “because people said [blues] was dead.” “We didn’t see any young black musicians coming up and we felt the old music was dying out,” he says. “But it continued.”For decades, stars such as guitarist Buddy Guy have carried the torch while complaining that the blues has been relegated to the back seat of the music industry as radio programmers, club operators and major record labels became less interested in supporting what they consider the foundation of black music.

“My children didn’t know who the hell I was until they turned 21 and could come to my club and see me play,” Guy says. “They grew up in the house with me and would say ‘cut it out playing the blues!’ At one point, I thought that maybe, lyrically, the blues was unfit to sing around kids. But then hip-hop stepped in.

”With second-generation blues artists such as Robert Cray, Billy Branch and Kenny Neal now playing elder-statesmen roles, the crop of younger black blues musicians who can take the tradition and transform it with their own identity is relatively slim. Besides Birchwood and Singleton, other emerging up-and-comers include Marquise Knox, 24, of St. Louis, Blind Boy Paxton, 25, of Los Angeles, and the Peterson Brothers, ages 15 and 17, of Austin.

Otis Clay, the soul music legend from Chicago who entered the Blues Hall of Fame last year, says that once radio segregated blues from other genres, “fans and the music suffered.”

“It’s understandable that young blacks are not getting the chance to hear blues,” he says. He worries that there will soon be a dearth of teachers who will be able to coach younger players in the music: “I learned from the older guys, but what about the other black guys who are out there that want to genuinely play the music? That says a lot about where the music is going to go.” [Read More]

[blackrockandrollmusic-blog]

Jerron Paxton - You May Leave (But This Will Bring You Back)

[musiconspotify]

Jerron Paxton - Things Done Changed (2024) … a league of his own …

[justwalkiingthedog]

[gimmigezz]