On October 18th, 2024, the acclaimed blues singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jerron Paxton will release his next album, Things Done Changed, on Smithsonian Folkways. Once described by The Wall Street Journal as "virtually the only music-maker of his generation—playing guitar, banjo, piano, and violin, among other implements—to fully assimilate the blues idiom of the 1920s and '30s," the thirty-five-year-old’s latest collection is his first of all original songs.
Paxton’s lived-in voice and California drawl underpin a stripped-down concoction of blues, ragtime, folk, and old-time Black music styles that originated nearly a century ago. Each track on the album invites listeners to experience the world as Paxton sees it. As Hugo Award finalist and former LA Times staff writer Lynell George puts it in the liner notes: “Etched within Jerron Paxton’s voice you can hear the wind, feel the hot prickle of the high-noon sun, smell the exhaust from an automobile on its last-gasp miles. It’s all there … [in his songs] you’ll discover context and background: the history of people and place and the come-what-may gamble of life-altering journeys.” In Jerron’s own words, “I write and sing about the culture I come from. It seems a bit neglected.”
On Things Done Changed, Paxton preserves and revitalizes those historical sounds, using his deeply personal and sharp-witted storytelling to reflect the ongoing experiences of Black people in America. His music, rooted in community traditions, resonates with timeless observations that bring the past vividly into the present, continuing these legacies. Listen to the first single “What's Gonna Become of Me” to feel the album's transportive sound HERE.
Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Paxton creates music that is steeped in the rich cultural heritage of the Great Migration. His family’s journey from Shreveport, Louisiana, to the Athens neighborhood of South LA in the 1950s laid the foundation for his appreciation of Southern Black culture. As an only child, he spent much of his upbringing absorbing the culture his family had taken with them to California from the South. Paxton grew up very close with his grandmother, often shadowing her mannerisms and adopting them as his own. While Futurama or King of the Hill was on the family TV, he’d find himself sitting down with her, practicing banjo chords he’d heard on her favorite records. Since relocating from Los Angeles to New York City in 2007, Paxton has found a welcoming audience within the city's diverse cultural communities and vibrant music scene. He discovered that New Yorkers are sensitive to the kind of authenticity in storytelling that he was exposed to as a child.
Paxton’s previous work has drawn comparisons to blues legends like Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, and Mississippi John Hurt, yet his approach is distinctly his own. On songs like “Baby Days Blues” and “What’s Gonna Become of Me,” Paxton revisits early influences like DeFord Bailey, Sippie Wallace, and Stephen Foster, and makes use of traditional melody lines and throwback playing styles, such as the 12-bar blues structure and “hopping” fingerpicking technique. Lyrically, other songs on the album are drawn from his personal, everyday experiences, exploring the evolving mindsets within contemporary society while using the past to make sense of it. Of the song “So Much Weed,” for example, Jerron explains: “[It’s] an observation on the changing attitudes toward an herb that caused many a person, in my baby days as well as into my adulthood, to lose their liberty. The juxtaposition of the attitudes of today with those of 20 or even 10 years ago has some ironies and paradoxes that the blues is one of the best art forms to express.”
“Things Done Changed is my way of honoring the culture I come from,” says Paxton. “I grew up playing for the last generation of folks who grew up listening to Black banjo players … Born from the lives of the people who raised me, I hope these songs resonate with listeners as a continuation of our shared history.”
In celebration of the upcoming album, Jerron Paxton and The Down Hill Strugglers will play the Jalopy Theater in NYC on September 21st, 2024. You can find more details about the show HERE and watch this space for more to come from Jerron Paxton.
About Smithsonian Folkways
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the "National Museum of Sound," makes available close to 60,000 tracks in physical and digital format as the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian, with a reach of 80 million people per year. A division of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the non-profit label is dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among people through the documentation, preservation, production, and dissemination of sound. Its mission is the legacy of Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document "people's music" from around the world. For more information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, visit folkways.si.edu.
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