With the bib of his overalls firmly affixed atop a thick button-down shirt and a 150-year-old fretless banjo almost always in hand, Jerron Paxton might have been pulled straight out of an antique store tintype. But he’s very much alive.
Paxton plays what he calls “Black folk music,” an amalgam of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century styles originating in and around the fertile swath of farmland that crosses Alabama and Mississippi, so named the “Black Belt” because of its dark, rich soil.
“We didn’t get to where we’re at by ourselves,” Paxton says. “So it’s important to learn the means of how we survived this far so we can figure out how to go further.” In his music, Paxton establishes that means of cultural survival—a tether between past and present and a form of expression that’s helped him forge a deeper sense of self and family.
Things Done Changed, Paxton’s debut album for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, finds him breathing this outlook into twelve original compositions, inviting his audience to listen and feel deeply and to use these songs to gain a little perspective, solace, even a good laugh.
“You know, home ain’t necessarily where the ground is, and it’s certainly changed for my family,” Paxton says early in our conversation. His grandmother’s family moved between three different Louisiana plantations during her childhood, before she finally made her way to California in the 1950s as part of the Great Migration. Traditions became home, and what otherwise might have been left behind in the muggy air of northwestern Louisiana, Paxton found under his grandmother’s roof in South Central Los Angeles. “I didn’t have to cross too many oceans to find my culture,” he says. “My grandmother was my connection to things that went back as far as we could imagine in my family.”
Paxton spent much of his childhood at his grandmother’s hip, soaking in as much of his culture as he could, from tending the okra and mustard greens lining her garden beds to cooking smothered hamburgers for family supper. The thing that captured Paxton’s attention most, though, was music—but only after he found the right kind.
“I remember being a very young kid thinking that I didn’t like music. It’s funny, I just hadn’t found the music I cared about,” Paxton remembers with a laugh. “But when I heard that real old blues, Bukka White and Scott Dunbar recordings, around age eight, it really set the hook in—I think because it felt like something I could kind of wrap my head around. I thought that if one person with a guitar made all this music, then there ain’t nothing missing.”
For an only child who was used to doing things alone, this method of creation just clicked. He saw in the blues a way to “create a whole and complete art” with only what was inside himself.
Paxton quickly found his own method of satisfying his appetite for music. He would collect blank VHS tapes and train his eyes and ears for old blues on Music Choice, a cable TV network that would broadcast radio programs, and when something interesting came on he would hit record. He would do the same thing with the radio, using cassettes to record songs as they played through his speakers so he could listen back dozens of times, trying to understand the music.
Formal training followed, with fiddle lessons starting at age twelve and banjo at fourteen. All the while, his music education continued to flourish through connections with his family and community. His grandmother loved to sing and play old blues, country, and religious songs of her youth. She made this music a fixture of his upbringing, and so it never felt to him like something totally of the past or of a particular circumstance. It just was. In all this music, Paxton heard the sounds of home—those of his own home in South Central and that of generations before him.
Speaking with journalist and author Lynell George, Paxton remembered, “[My grandmother would] give me these one-line pieces of songs, some of them without melodies, and, you know, she would always say: ‘Baby, you’re smart. You gonna have to get the rest.’” It created this sense of give and take, bringing Paxton directly into this living tradition of music—“finding the A part to go with the B part.”
At thirty-five, Paxton is now a renowned multi-instrumentalist who can pick out countless traditional songs after hearing just a bar or two. Though the blues might be what he’s best known for playing, Paxton says he’s a “songster,” not limited to or by a particular genre. “I try not to compartmentalize the music and just look at the broad scope of the thing,” Paxton tells me. “Then I realize whose shoulders I’m standing on.”
For Paxton, finding his own place within these living musical traditions means studying, immersing himself, and truly understanding their history. He dislikes the encroachment of academia into folk music—“it’s like mixing oil and water,” he quips—yet Paxton is a scholar in the original sense of the word, both a holder of knowledge and one who continuously gathers it.
“I think you have to study music before you start writing it, just like I think you should study medicine before you start cutting on people.” Paxton laughs at his joke. “I think after all these years, I’ve got a license to operate these instruments without causing significant hurt, harm, or danger to anybody.”
When I ask Paxton if he can explain what drives him to be so comprehensive and caring in his musicianship, his answer is simple: “It’s just a love of the craft that leads to another love, and then another.”
For him, it’s a way of tending to heritage and working in service of those pieces of his culture he latched onto growing up and his way of staying in touch with who he is.
“Some of these rags I’m trying to learn on the banjo can take a month to learn and I’ll say, ‘Do I really want to dedicate that much of my life to something that’s going to last only about two and a half, three minutes?’” Paxton explains. “You know, sometimes it sounds so good, you say, ‘Yes.’ I think it’s beautiful, and I think it’s understudied, and I think if I did it in front of people, they might find it just as beautiful, too, and wonder where it’s been.”
And for almost as long as he’s been playing music, that idea of performing it for others has been essential. It started out as playing for anybody who would listen—his grandmother in particular. But as he matured and made his own way in the world, moving from Los Angeles to Queens in New York City, his audiences grew, and so did the opportunity for connection—to the audience, but also to himself and the music he plays.
Armed with a chair and cadre of instruments, no setlist, Paxton feels out his audience. His performances tend to unfold freely. This can mean playing specific tunes over others or playing songs in specific ways—slowing them down or giving them a bit of a kick, playing them hot. This freedom, coupled with Paxton’s peppering of jokes and wry observations throughout his sets, creates an intimacy with his audience.
“Performing at different places has allowed me to look deeper into [the music] and find what different people connect to. And half the time I’m surprised, you know? And then other times it’s like, oh, man, you connect over the same thing—that’s wonderful. But there always is a connection.”
At the same time, performing provides a way for Paxton to dig deeper into songs and ideas he’s so familiar with, leading to fertile ground. In performing iterations, simply playing songs as he feels, Paxton says he’s able to dig deeper into what he finds meaningful about them. He can also allow audience reactions to push him further in considering why certain songs or ways of playing them might feel so enduring, or why they scratch that itch in just the right way. Crucially, digging deeper through performance encourages his own musical growth and change, as Paxton never feels constrained by a specific way of playing a song, or even by specific instruments or styles.
It’s that same nature of change, Paxton says, that made cutting a record like Things Done Changed feel necessary now. To a musician who has prioritized performance, making a record is a concrete way to mark time and evolution, to pinpoint who he is now, where he’s been, and where he’s going. At face, the album—Paxton’s first of entirely original compositions—stands as a statement of exactly that. While Delta and Piedmont blues make up a large part of the track listing, you hear everything from zydeco to ragtime, demonstrating Paxton’s love for and mastery of the roots and routes of Black folk music. You’ll also hear exactly how and where his love for the music crystallized, with his grandmother’s guidance and the sounds of his South Central upbringing ringing throughout the album.
The song “It’s All Over Now” is a celebration of Paxton’s maturation as a musician and tradition bearer. Written nearly twenty years ago at age sixteen, the song marks his learning of stroke style—the style African musicians originally used on the banjo and its ancestor instruments—from his grandmother. As he plucks each string at a frenetic pace, you can all but hear the percussion of hands clapping and feet stomping that accompanied this song when Paxton would play it for his family and friends in Los Angeles.
On “What’s Gonna Become of Me,” Paxton captures “finding the A part to go with the B part,” the lesson his grandmother taught him that set him on this path. The melody to the A section, Paxton writes in the album’s liner notes, “comes from sounds that seem the oldest in Black folk music as well as movement left over from the forefather of the banjo, the folk lute (Akonting) of the Jola people.” To complete the song, Paxton weaves in his own imitations of his grandmother’s moans, remembered from decades ago. In this way, Paxton draws a clear throughline, beginning with what he learned as a child and simultaneously reifying Black folk music as an evolving tradition, constantly moving forward by harking back.
As a contemporary contribution to this tradition, Things Done Changed also resonates within the exigencies of a twenty-first-century United States, where Paxton reminds us that the same twelve-bar blues and song structures popularized a century ago are expressions as potent and necessary as ever.
“The blues is a meditation. It doesn’t make you feel better. It helps you understand,” Paxton has remarked. “It allows you to take a close look at your situation and look at people who’ve had similar situations, and see how they deal with it or not.” So while “things done changed,” as he laments on the album’s title track, the means of understanding them don’t always have to.
“Oxtail Blues,” a composition inspired by early American rags, is a deftly crafted barb aimed straight at the heart of Queens, Los Angeles, and countless U.S. cities where gentrification breaks communities and cultural bonds. Once an inexpensive staple in Caribbean cuisine and soul food, oxtails have quickly become fixtures on higher-end menus across the country, pricing out those who have been cooking it for generations.
Similar sentiments stream out on “So Much Weed” where he growls, “my poor uncles use to/ have to run and hide/ now they sit on their/ front porch with pride.” Paxton provides a commentary on the changing relationship to a substance that, for decades due to illegal and irresponsible policing, saw Black Americans incarcerated at nearly four times the rate of white Americans. Cutting the elegiac undertone, though, is a humorous embrace of the new attitudes and freedom afforded it: “New York’s smell could/ curl your hair/ now it smell nice/ and fragrant everywhere.”
Toward the end of the album’s liner notes, nestled in a discussion of “Brown Bear Blues,” the penultimate track, Paxton ponders, “I mostly try to leave myself out of the subject matter because on stage I try to communicate culture more than personality.” Yet what makes Things Done Changed such a significant achievement is that Paxton himself is so present in every song. The album is a carefully crafted whole made up of a variety of “close songs,” as Paxton calls them—some that he’s been sitting with for nearly as long as he’s been making music.
“Some of these songs, I don’t really play for people,” he contemplates. “They are a little bit personal—I’m using them to get friends through hard times and relationships, and I understand those things myself—and, you know, there’s also things I thought were a little bit silly but made people laugh.”
The title track, “Things Done Changed,” is one such example: a song played mostly in private for loved ones needing “the musical therapy it offers.” Likewise, songs like “Baby Day Blues” and “Out in this World” are intimate portraits of Paxton’s own loneliness, nostalgia, and reminiscences of what was and can never be again.
At its core, Things Done Changed is an offering of these closely guarded experiences and feelings. There is vulnerability here, and love, and trust—trust that listeners will treat these songs with the same care Paxton has and thereby find some learning and understanding in them. As Paxton observes in the liner notes, “Black folk music has always been a tool to beat the bad, but the fruit of it is usually exported. The only way I know to make sure we eat is to feed the people and hope they have seed enough to grow their own.”
Tommy Gartman is a writer and cultural heritage professional living in Los Angeles and a former intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. As a kid, he dreamed of becoming William Miller from the movie Almost Famous.
