Inner-Directed Country Music: Jake Blount, Riggings Evoke a Mid-Century Social Critique

I had the good fortune to see Jake Blount at Symphony Space two weeks ago. At the close of Black History Month and I'm not even sure which particular horror unleashed by the Trump administration, it was a balm.

Blount's life's work is to highlight Black artists who have been concealed or ignored by the traditional music archive. His stunning albums – most recently symbiont, reviewed by Carla Frankenbach in Rainbow Rodeo – situates these songs of faith, suffering, and release within Afrofuturist frameworks that rescue them from the dusty provinces of specialty record labels and make them immediate and urgent.

At this show, however, Blount stuck to more traditional arrangements, transmitting songs as he learned them and making those tweaks and judgment calls that can only exist within an oral tradition of teaching and learning music – resisting the hegemony of recordings and Western notions of "right" and "wrong."

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To reinforce the messages of resistance in the songs, Blount presented himself on stage, chatting between songs, instrument changes, and tunings: about his complex relationship has a Black man who has won awards for the banjo, even though it's not his primary instrument; about the lynching of transgender man Sam Nordquist in upstate New York, where Blount himself had spent a lot of time at the start of his career; speaking out against the genocide in Gaza – a gutsy move in the Upper West Side of New York City, just a mile away from Columbia University.

To talk about these unpopular truths in a rather intimate theater, in a neighborhood that exemplifies liberal boomer complacency, is a courageous ac and I felt privileged to be a part of it. Blount, like other queer country artists, does not just "represent" the community on stage, but in revealing his vulnerability, acts as more than a role model but almost a totem of how we all can resist with dignity in courage even when we leave the theater. In another time, we might have called someone like Blount a prophet.

Riggings' new album The Subject Was Faggots: A Mixtape is completely on the other end of the queer country spectrum. (In fact, we have some special status in claiming Riggings.)

The Subject Was Faggots refuses to be categorized into any one genre. Riggings invokes influences as disparate as country, REM, the Pixies, synth trance, and garage rock into something wholly, uniquely, her own. Faggots delves into the ways devotion to a splendidly queer life creates pockets of belonging and alienation, and the endless search for moderation between the two.

"The Unicorn" pulses with warmth and a twist of sadness as Riggings expresses appreciation the magic of a long friendship, the ways changes and distance and tragedy mark the path, and appreciation for a bond that emerges the stronger for it – and the wonderment that comes when you realize that each person has managed to find their place.

"Wrote About Men,""Big Box Black Dress," and "Soft Body Under Glass" form a triptych to me about coming to terms with being queer and trans. Riggings situates her voice as somewhere impossibly distant in the mix – isolated amidst the keys and loops and sonic textures while delivering impossibly intimate lyrics: yearning for queer relationships before one even has the language for it; the satisfaction of transitioning while sticking it to the Man, and the frustrations and pleasures of holding onto a body that is so problematized by society.

Faggots is so unique, so intimate, so determined to communicate something that transcends words and sounds that only Amelia Riggings could have made it. It's wholly hers, and a remarkable album for it.

So why do these two disparate artists remind me of a sociological text from the 1950s?

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