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 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” by the Wall Street Journal, the thirty-five-year-old’s latest collection is his first of all original songs.
Pairing Paxton’s lived-in voice and California drawl underpins 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. // Continue to the full article