Every Wednesday afternoon, Jake Xerxes Fussell hosts a radio show with his pal Jefferson Currie II on WHUP FM, a community station in Hillsborough, North Carolina. They play songs from far and wide – a recent episode moved quite naturally from Bob Dylan’s “Hearts Of Fire” to Nigerian soul music to Swedish fiddle to June Tabor singing “Pork Pie Hat” – but they have a particular passion for songs of the American south, interpreted in the most expansive sense. Though they are both learned students of American folklore, they’re at pains to distance themselves from hidebound notions of authenticity and antiquity. “As much as we cherish our pre-war blues 78s and old-time fiddle tunes,” they insist, “we also love hip-hop, bounce, banda and norteña.”

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The title of the show, Fall Line Radio, is taken from a geological term for those areas where piedmont highlands meets the coastal plains (Jefferson has a day job in conservation as riverkeeper of the Lumber River). Fall lines are marked by rapids and waterfalls, powering mills and hydro-electrics power plants. They traditionally mark the limits of upstream travel, and they’re the place where different flora, fauna and cultures meet. “We’re intrigued by junctions of such seemingly incongruous elements and the wonderful, endless alluvium to which they give rise,” the pair note wryly, as though adjusting mock-professorial spectacles.

Over the past decade, Jake Xerxes Fussell has been patiently, diligently and beautifully charting his own particular fall line through American folk musics. Fussellania, if we might give a name to the territory, is rooted in Georgia’s Chattahoochee Valley where he grew up, the son of folklorists himself, but it expands wildly across borders of time and space, from Florida fishmongers to Irish rovers, from the North Carolina mills to the Mexico hills, from ancient highland ballads to singing schoolteachers from the Ozarks.

But the alluvium has never been quite so rich and strange as it on his fifth album, his first for Fat Possum, When I’m Called. It’s a record that begins way out on the west coast, with a lonesome but determined painter saddling up his pony, cantering right across the country to East 47th Street, Manhattan, and showing up like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy to bring Andy Warhol the news that there’s a new art sheriff in town.

The title track, meanwhile, adapted from lines found in a discarded schoolbook at the side of a Californian highway (“I will answer when I’m called / I will not breakdance in the hall / I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name”), is an eerie folk song that might be sung by Bart Simpson if he grew up to be the last of the high plains drifters.

Elsewhere, the album travels back in time to the Prestatyn classroom where Benjamin Britten composed “Cuckoo!” for schoolboys’ singing classes in the 1930s, back deeper into the dark green forest of English song with the traditional “Who Killed Poor Robin”, up to Milngavie to meet a couple of 18th century wastrels who prefer the alehouse to the job market, out to Alabama where “the water tastes like cherry wine”, and venturing even as far as Ilo, Peru on the sea shanty “Gone To Hilo”, before eventually touching down back home in Georgia.

That’s to say, there’s a new liberty and licence to Fussell’s musical freewheeling, but also a sense of longing for home after long nights roaming the highways and byways of song. Since his last record, 2022’s lush yet forlorn Good And Green Again, Fussell has become a father. As a result, there are dreamy flights of lullaby to some of the tunes here – the skylarking string arrangement on “Cuckoo”, the murder mystery of “Poor Robin” – as though he’s gently inducting a third generation of Fussells into the lore and mystery of the great traditional songbook. But there’s also a rueful reckoning with the temptations of the road (both “One Morning In May” and the closing “Going To Georgia” warn young maidens to “never place your affections on a green, growing tree”), and a sense of regret that professional obsessions can end up taking you far from the family home.

When I’m Called is the second album Fussell has made with James Elkington, the English home counties fingerpicker who has somehow, through his work with Wilco, Steve Gunn, Nathan Salsburg and Joan Shelley, established himself as a linchpin of modern Americana. If those early albums had a raggedy wildness to them, rowdy with the smell of pork and beans, the clang of the shipyards and the blare of the marketplace, on Good And Green Again Elkington brought a verdant, dappled orchestration to Fussell’s songworld. It’s like the polar opposite of field recording – these battered, barnacled, ancient songs ascending from the soil, river and rails to some lambent, reverbed Daniel Lanois dream realm.

On When I’m Called, the contrast is even more pronounced. Album opener “Andy” was composed by Gerald “The Maestro” Gaxiola, the aircraft mechanic who reinvented himself as the Bay Area’s answer to Vincent Van Gogh, a sharp-shooting outsider artist in rhinestone. Listen to the original, on the Maestro’s 1986 cassette Go’n To New York, and the Bontempi rhythms suggest a kind of jaunty, downhome John Shuttleworth auditioning for Canned Heat. Fussell’s stately fingerpicking interpretation renders it sadder and spookier; the line “You can tell Andy Warhol the ghost rider’s on his way” sounds ominous rather than funny.

The version of “Cuckoo” that follows is sublime, with Fussell’s plainspoken baritone gilded with Joan Shelley’s harmonies, his fingerpicking augmented by piano, horns and strings. There’s a curatorial genius in placing an off-kilter maverick like the Maestro next to the lionised establishment genius of Britten, but the question lingers, does introducing them to each other within the frame of a single album cause new sparks to fly, or simply gloss over what makes them distinctive, flatten out their differences into a kind of mellow tastefulness? Is Fussell the musical equivalent of one of those publishing imprints like NYRB Classics that reprints neglected, out-of-print volumes in handsome but uniform new editions?

In practice, it’s hard to quibble with such a gorgeous, deeply felt record. While Good And Green Again was distinguished by a trio of Fussell instrumentals, strictly speaking there are no originals this time around. But “When I’m Called” is the boldest in its interpretation, and perhaps tellingly the most compelling track here. It’s a very free adaptation of the venerable old folk blues “Long Lonesome Road”, so free that the playing sails off, unmoored from the anchor of song into a kind of enchanted reverie, woodwind rising like mist from a river, Elkington’s lead guitar sparking like the first scintillating rays of sun. The first verse of schoolboy penitence, the inexplicably touching detail of breakdancing in the hall, melts into the old chorus – “Look up, look down that long, lonesome road / Hang down your head and cry…” – and manages to compress an entire lifetime, its youthful mischief soured into midlife regret.

The miraculous, heartbreaking conjunction of found text and ancient lament, forged together in the alchemy of Elkington’s production, feels the most perfect realisation yet of Fussell’s project: tradition sparked back to life by unexpected everyday encounters. There’s magic and mystery still to be divined in those fall line currents, down amidst the detritus and the alluvium. At moments like this, Jake Xerxes Fussell remains our finest musical mudlarker.

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