"Soul-Folk": A conversation with Ashawnta Jackson

Charles talks to the author of a new book on the genre

It was a pleasure and privilege to talk with the great writer Ashawnta Jackson, whose insightful and compelling work has appeared in NPR, Wax Poetics, Vinyl Me Please and many others. Her new book, Soul-Folk, looks at the work of Black artists in the 1960s and 1970s as they remade and reimagined what folk music could sound (and look) like. Beyond her beautiful discussions of artists both well-known and unjustly obscure, Jackson draws together centuries of history and music to position soul-folk not just as a phenomenon of its moment but as a crucial link in the long legacy of Black cultural innovation. Here’s our conversation about the book and just some of those larger questions. (And don’t miss her “Listener Guide to Soul-Folk,” linked at the end!)

Charles Hughes: How did you come to soul-folk? What was it about this music, and the remarkable artists who make up your soul-folk “family tree,” that drew your attention?

Ashawnta Jackson: The short answer is Terry Callier. I heard his voice in a sample in the 90s, and immediately went to the liner notes to find out who I was hearing. His voice, even truncated, digitized, whatever they did to it, made such an impression on me that I had to hear more. I became a Terry Callier fan almost instantly, but I needed more.

Over the years, I started gravitating toward music that, to me, felt like it was hitting that same spot, but it was hard classifying what that music was. But I started finding more artists that fell into the Callier Zone, and I could hear their similarities. I could hear that there was a sort of very human storytelling that rested directly in the folk canon, but there was something else. There were political songs that spoke to not just American politics as a whole, but often delved into the very specific state of being a Black American. And along with that, came the sounds of Black America — jazz, blues, gospel, soul. I knew that it had to be part of something bigger. Something this beautiful had to be a part of a movement, or at least some savvy marketer had to have figured out how to bind these artists together.

I’m going to digress here, but it’ll all make sense in a bit.

When I really started to get into music, beyond just enjoying it, but wanting to understand it as an art and an artifact, I was spending a lot of my time at this big box store near me that had a huge music department (Borders? Media Play? Who knows? One of those stores that gives away your age when you wistfully reminisce about it). Anyway, they had a sign that was something like “a guide to getting into jazz.” It suggested reading the credits on albums and then finding others that featured some of those same players. Really like the bass playing on a particular album? Well, it turns out it's Ron Carter, so go look for more with him on it. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s how I started finding interesting rabbit holes. It was like live-action Wikipedia diving, I guess. Clicking all those links until you’ve suddenly found yourself listening to Wire when you started with Ella Fitzgerald.

Listening to artists who had that Callier quality I was looking for was a lot like that. (I told you I’d get us back on track). As much as I liked the diving and the searching, I wished that there was something more succinct that pulled all of these artists together. Fast forward a few decades, and I had impulsively decided to go to grad school. It was 2020. My other impulses were dipping various foods into cream cheese and constantly being afraid of/saddened by the state of the world. All things considered, it was probably my most rational choice of the year.

I was taking a class on race and music taught by the incredible Maureen Mahon, and for my final paper, I decided to really dig in on this genre. I found an article by Vernon Gibbs from 1975. Titled “Soul, Man: The New Black Folk,” Gibbs was doing the same thing that I was trying to do years in the future. Citing artists like Linda Lewis, Garland Jeffreys, and, of course, Terry Callier, Gibbs was trying to figure out this sound. This “Black folk.” New, but not. Modern, but ancestral. It did have a grouping, a genre, of sorts, but one that was still so resistant to categorization. I wanted to keep digging, to find a nexus, a time and a place where folk and soul met. I wanted to learn more about these artists, and figure out why this genre both is and isn’t. It’s here, it exists, we can hear it, but part of what makes it such a special thing is that it lives outside of genre. It brings in all of its influences and makes something new out of them. In learning more about these artists and their music, I found that it was their reluctance to be categorized that often hampered their career trajectories. So maybe some savvy marketer had figured it out, and was promptly told “no thank you.”

I have to admit that being part of a series called “Genres” was daunting as I began to understand that the impulse to put things into genres was the exact thing that hurt some of these careers. Often, we do not like what we can not name. But part of the essence of soul-folk is in its “unnameablity,” its resistance, its uniqueness that makes it hard to market. But I hope that I’ve made someone else’s journey into this music a little easier.

CH: As you note, this book is part of the “Genres” series from 33 1/3. As much as you’re interested in exploring soul-folk as a category, you’re simultaneously challenging readers to consider where genres come from and what work they’ve done through history. As someone who’s thought a lot about this, I’m always interested in what’s at stake when we talk about musical genres. What do they give us, do you think, and what do they potentially prevent us from doing?

AJ: As I mentioned in my answer above, genre, and our insistence on adhering to it, was one of things that frustrated many of the artists I covered. They wanted to be themselves, and to do music that reflected who they were as artists rather than the whims of the market. That’s not to say that they weren’t interested in making money from their art, but they wanted the money to come from producing work that spoke to who they were. But it’s impossible to talk about this genre and the reasons why it may not be as popular as it could or should be without talking about genres. Genre is not neutral.

I often tell a story about shopping for used CDs once, and finding 24-7 Spyz in the R&B section. For those who don’t know, the band is famously not R&B but also famously Black. So someone, without listening, researching, or considering, saw an album with four Black men on it, and confidently slotted it into R&B. And that is how you know genres aren’t neutral. They take pieces from all of our prejudices and preconceptions. If someone looks like what you think an R&B singer is supposed to look like, then why would you question assigning them that label? It’s why we’re in 2025 and still debating Black artistry as it relates to country music. You write in Country Soul about country and soul being seen as opposites, or one as a response to the other, and I couldn’t agree more. It’s a narrowing of what the music can be, of what it actually is. And as much as folk has historically tried to position itself as being for the people, I think the idea of who “the people” are has been pretty limited over its timeline.

I think that part of it is racism, obviously. Part of the nasty work of racism is imposing restrictions on people who are not like you. Racism polices, it puts boundaries where there shouldn’t be, and tells its perpetrators that there are places where “those” people belong and places they do not. For many people, racism is telling them that, despite what you may be hearing with your own ears, Black people don’t do this or that kind of music. But to be (maybe overly) generous, sometimes it just has to do with ignorance. There is a long history of Black people performing any and all kinds of music, and it’s just, for lack of a better phrase, hidden history. You don’t know what you don’t know. So there’s a long, rich history of Black musicians performing folk, country, rock, and it gets lost. Sometimes, that’s purposeful— genre has been used as a tool of segregation— but often it’s about money, who makes it, who’s spending it.

CH: One thing that I find so striking in your work is how you ground folk music – particularly when created by Black people – as the sound of experimentation and innovation, rather than being the unchanging sound of tradition. That’s such a crucial idea, I think, and one that retains its resonance. What do soul-folk artists help us understand about the category of “folk music” and how we should approach it

AJ: There’s something I mention in the early pages of the book about “making a way out of no way,” which, for me and many other Black people throughout history, has been the standard operating procedure. You do what you can with what you are given. It’s part of why Black culture is so great. We have created beautiful things out of scraps— things that have endured and will endure for generations. When it comes to folk music, I think that a lot of the artists I covered were feeling pushed out of “traditional” folk and created their own traditions. There was no real reason not to include jazz or blues or spirituals when that’s part of your tradition.

CH: Yes, the question of “tradition” animates this book, both in terms of musical legacies and how that idea possesses such complex cultural meaning. What does the soul-folk story teach us about musical tradition and how it works (or doesn’t)?

AJ: I think one of the issues I have as a listener when it comes to a lot of traditional folk is that I often don’t feel it. So much of this book, and trying to figure out what belonged in the category of soul-folk, was about how it felt to me. Could I hear the places where it was pushing against genre boundaries? It goes back to that idea of who “the people” are. Even though I don’t expect every piece of art I encounter to speak directly to me or my experiences, it’s nice when it does. I could follow the lines of this music and hear the language it was speaking. It really showed me that although we sometimes speak about a shared American tradition, we should really be talking about traditions. There are places where these traditions cross, but there are places where they diverge, sometimes taking pieces from where they met to create something new from it.

Soul-folk is about multiple traditions all existing at once, but becoming something else. It’s such a great metaphor for being a Black American (or more accurately, being Black wherever, and trying to stay rooted in your traditions, whatever they may be, while also taking in the world around you. Not all of the artists I covered are American)

CH: That actually leads to my last thematic question: you talk about the mythology of “Americana” and how it shaped the understandings of both Black and white musicians throughout the 20^th century. Given that “Americana” is such a recognizable category today, and some of the artists who you spotlight in the book might be considered “Americana” (or at least marketed that way), I’m wondering your thoughts on Americana as a genre classification in our current moment. Does it have value? Does it have limitations?

AJ: What’s funny is that while writing the book, I never considered Americana as a genre when using that word. I mean, I obviously knew it was a genre, but I wasn’t using it with the genre in mind. I thought of it more as a myth than a category. It’s only now that I’ve been talking about the book more that I realize that it’s being read in more than one way. I love it. Not because it presents as me shit-talking Americana the genre, because I don’t think I have strong enough feelings about it as a genre to enter into shit-talking territory, but because it makes me (and hopefully the readers) think about why we’ve turned a myth into a category.

I think I know what people are reaching for when they use this as a genre— a sort of old-timey sound, banjos, fiddles, riding ranges, a time before today. But all of those things have roots beyond America. The banjo is African, something fiddle-like has been seen all over the world for centuries, our wide-open ranges have been populated by indigenous people for thousands of years. So I think that they aren’t purely reacting to the sound, but the feeling of it. It feels like the America that we— if we’re over a certain age— were probably taught about in school. I think Americana, the genre label, might be a way of trying to hide the roots of the music? And yeah, some of those roots are ugly. It’s easier to say Americana than to say that you’re listening to music with roots in enslavement, for example. But maybe it shouldn’t be about what’s easy, maybe it should be about what’s true.

CH: Even though you focus primarily on music made in the 1960s and 1970s, you talk about a wide swath of history that begins before Emancipation. Why was it important to talk about the roots of soul-folk in early generations of Black artistry and activism?

AJ: Going back to the idea of myth, I think that there’s a myth around who and what a folk musician is and that came from somewhere. I wanted to find the place where we might have dreamt up this myth. And while I don’t know if I was successful in doing that, I’d like to think that by tracing the history back I was able to show how much of music is myth-making. Black people have been a part of folk’s history since the beginning and it was important for me to show that. To me, soul-folk is a reclaiming and so you have to know what was taken away to really understand it.

We’re surrounded by ghosts all of the time, and sometimes music lets us hear them. That’s part of why I love it so much. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was to let those voices of the past speak again.

CH: Your list of essential soul-folk recordings at the end of the book is so great and comes up to 2023. Is there anything you heard in 2024 that you’d add to the list, or reminds you of the music you chronicle in the book?

AJ: One thing I struggled with last year was that I was writing about music so much that it was hard to enjoy just listening. It felt like work, and I hated that. I wanted to just listen and discover for no reason. I’m getting better at that separation these days, but it was tough. What I did was pick an album a day, random genre, random year that I’ve never heard before and listen to it. If I didn’t do it every day, no big deal, but I heard so much music (I used 1954-2024 as dates) that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise, so I listened to a lot of music in 2024, but not so much from 2024.

I did hear some people that I wished I had included in the book, like Bonnie White. But as for new-ish music, I really enjoyed listening to Grey Reverend and listened to “A Hero’s Lie” on a loop for a while. Danielle Ponder is also great. I feel like I’ll be telling people something they already know if I gush over Brittany Howard, but I’m gonna do it anyway. Brittany. Howard. I’m always listening to Adrian Younge, so I was glad to see him release a new one in 2024. He’s not soul-folk, but I love how he has that genre-pushing spirit in his music.

CH: What’s something you’ve read recently – music-related or otherwise – that’s really exciting you or speaking to you in some way?

AJ: Not super recently, but Lynnée Denise’s book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, really gets into that idea of myth-making that I talked about earlier. She really got to the heart of why we need to create these big ideas that often leave the real people behind.

Michael Gonzales wrote a great piece for Oxford American on Jazze Pha and Cee-Lo’s lost album and the question of musical “what ifs.”

Someone I follow recently shared Alexander Chee’s Bibliomancy assignment on Bluesky, and I’ve been turning that around in my mind for a bit

I have a review copy of Dreaming in Ensemble by Lucy Caplan that I just started, and from what little I’ve read so far, I’m excited about it. It’s another of those “hidden in plain sight” kind of histories of Black music that I just love. We’ve always been here, doing amazing things, and there are so many stories to tell.

Check out Ashawnta Jackson’s full “Listener Guide to Soul-Folk,” along with accompanying Spotify playlist.

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