“Gone to Hilo,” meanwhile, sees the forlorn world from the other perspective—the lover whose Johnny has set sail for yet another foreign port to make his wage. That’s just life, but Fussell’s tender phrasing and measured pace feel interminably sad, as if this were the end of a line and a love. A touring musician with his own young family in North Carolina, Fussell seems to step out of his own body and brain here, imagining how it must feel to watch himself leave for adventures that are also just his job. Not good at all, he reckons. The great Robin Holcomb, another Georgia singer who has long mined the past for her own present, softly echoes Fussell, linking this conundrum across generations.
Someone is almost always on the move during When I’m Called. That’s Fussell contemplating his own responsibility and, ultimately, mortality amid the title track’s gentle and brilliant electric ripple. He’s waiting whatever turn is his. There’s the meet-cute of “Feeing Day,” a 19th-century ballad in which a gentleman extends his umbrella to a woman stranded in a rainstorm. They share some drinks, fall in love, and, in the classic version, quickly get married. Fussell omits that last bit here, closing instead on a fanfare of languid horns. They curl like a question mark, an ending shrouded in uncertainty.
It’s hard not to hear the closer, “Going to Georgia,” as the answer: “They’ll hug you, they’ll kiss you/They’ll tell you more lies,” Fussell sings of men at large, his voice deep and warm, like a father offering advice distilled from his own misdeeds. “And the crossties in the railway are the stars in the skies.” (He inveighs against cads with some of the same lines earlier in the album during “One Morning in May”; if it sounds playful there, it sounds like a real warning here.) Betrayal and selfishness are ancient arts, cosmic even. The best we can do is to canter on, then, just as Fussell and his band do through a final corona of wispy strings.
If you spend long enough diving into online repositories, you can find something about most every song Fussell invokes or interprets or recombines here—the complete lyrics of what was then called “Feeing Time,” the bouncy Maestro Gaxiola tape where he lampoons Andy Warhol, even a wobbly file of Virgil Anderson singing that perfect bit about Alabama water, Alabama women, and cherry wine. The sources, then, are mostly safe, so he doesn’t have to be in a hurry to immortalize them anymore. But unless you know what you’re looking for, those antiques are bits of folklorist flotsam locked in an endless data heap, viewed only by the most obsessive and diligent. Reverent and imaginative, Fussell does the work of pulling them out of the pile and making them ring again. No other American singer is repurposing our old folk scripts with so much authority or ingenuity; When I’m Called proclaims—softly, gently, and slowly, with a sly grin and a Southern ease—that what these songs have to say isn’t old at all.
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