Documenting the Culture: A Blues Hall of Famer & Folklorist’s Mission to Preserve Black American Legacy
- Brown Natives
- May 3
- 8 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Lamont Jack Pearley is an applied folklorist, ethnographer, and African American traditional music historian and practitioner enrolled at Indiana University in the Ethnomusicology PhD program. He was inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame as Great Blues Historian and TV/Radio Producer (2017) and Great Blues Artist (2018).
We spoke with Lamont about his mission to document, preserve, and protect Black American cultural traditions. From his journey into blues music to his work as a folklorist, he breaks down how the art form is rooted not just in sound, but in people, patterns, and lived experience. We also explored the overlooked Black and Indigenous influences behind country, blues, and American music at large, the importance of cultural documentation, and the critical role of education and scholarship in reclaiming our narratives.
What does it mean to be a folklorist?
Folklorists study, pay attention to, research, and document patterns in tradition, patterns, groups, and agreed-upon behaviors. So what does that mean? A vernacular, maybe a way that a group of people tells stories, or it could also be how a group of folks use particular words and have their own meaning. It can also be tangible and not just intangible, right?
So if you go into a community and it's a group of houses, and they have a barn door and paintings on the barn door that's done a particular way—we pay attention to those things. And then we kind of inquire, research, have open-ended question interviews, and look to document and conserve these things—as well as try to help our communities and other organizations with sustainable programming.
So it's more than just a music genre. It's an art form, basically, would you say?
Yeah. It's way more than just a musical genre. When we say folk, we're not even at the music aspect yet. We're talking about the actual people, right? Then, when it comes to music, that is one of the many expressions disseminated by the people.
What got you into folk music and folk art?
So what got me into blues, which is folk music? I come out of another folk music, which is hip-hop. I was having writer's block and went down south, and came back after burying a couple of relatives in Louisiana. When I returned, I bought a guitar and banjo, and that kind of started my journey. I then began to apply the methods of a folklorist. My calling, if you will, is to perform the blues in its basic traditional form and document the blues people. That's where the folk art and folk music come from, for me.
In the blues genre, who would you say are your biggest influences?
Son House, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters. Son House, because he is the quintessential bluesman, but he's also the quintessential folk bluesman.
What would you say are some of your top career highlights that you're most proud of?
First and foremost, I recently earned a Master's in the Fine Arts of Folk Studies in the public sector track. So that's one of my biggest highlights, going back to the university. I also received a Blues Performance Hall of Fame induction in the New York Blues Hall of Fame. Career-wise, my biggest achievement is being married this long and having my children.
Being inducted into the New York Blues Hall of Fame: What was that like?
I was blessed to be able to do it with a couple of great friends, Piedmont Blues Acoustic Duo, and they're out of Queens, New York. The induction took place at B.B. King's in Times Square. When we got there, it was after the soundcheck, and I realized that I'm about to holler and play some blues at B.B. King's. That's when it kind of hit me, like this is quite a feat for me, you know?
You spent some time living in Kentucky before moving to Indiana. Is Blues music a big thing there?
Absolutely. Blues is a big thing everywhere. It's the basis. It's the ground. It's the foundation. Global music comes from American music, Black music. I played music, I performed music, but I also had other jobs, like the old bluesmen of the olden days.
Kentucky is a great place for blues. Bluegrass is kind of the staple in this region, but blues is neck and neck. Kentucky is right next to Nashville, so it's country as well. The irony is that both country and bluegrass kind of get its form by the early country blues style from the Delta, and the Piedmont blues style from the southeast.
Black musicians pioneered these genres—folk, blues, and country. Would you agree?
Absolutely, absolutely. Leslie Riddle is the gentleman who taught the Carter Family how to play these Black songs. Then they went on to become the prototype of country gospel. Arnold Schultz informed and taught the gentleman known as the father of bluegrass, Bill Monroe, how to play. Schultz is a Black man from Kentucky, now buried in Butler County.
So basically, hidden figures.
Yeah. It's like they had an unfair advantage due to the racism that permeated the music industry in general, propping White artists in the mainstream and undermining the Black artists who were the trendsetters through and through.
What are your thoughts on the resurgence of Black folk and country artists in the mainstream after years of them being pushed to the background?
There are so many mixed feelings because you have people like Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons who have been playing this kind of music. You know, they were playing nothing else. On the one hand, the idea of a resurgence of something that's been going on. We thank Beyoncé for making the discourse so public, but I can name you about 20 Black folks that's been playing country and folk music their entire careers, which is about at least 20 years. So I don't know if it's a resurgence or if people are now just saying, they're being reintroduced to it in the mainstream. Emphasis on mainstream because we know that they've been at this for years and years. They just didn't receive the recognition and accolades the same as their White counterparts in the industry, which is unfair.
These days, would you say that having a formal education in this art form is necessary for pursuing a career in folk music?
There's this idea that being educated is not authentic. That is not the reality. I don't think any one of our great-great-grandparents who were not able to receive an education at a HBCU, or were not able to receive an education like W.E.B. Du Bois, wants us to be in the same predicament they were in. That is a non-Black perspective on what is called today BIPOC life, and I've done a livestream called Black Scholarship and Black Culture, which discusses this. So to answer your question, you do not have to have formal training.
But I will say this, and this is based on multiple ethnographic interviews I've conducted. Non-formal training teaches you how to do the thing. So think about coming out of the Black church, which we don't see that too much anymore. But back in the day, you saw all these great singers coming out to the Black church, and they knew how to do it.
The academy gives you the language for what you know how to do. Depending on what role or position you're taking, I encourage everybody, particularly those of our lineage, to go and make sure you get those papers. Although a lot of folks try to say it is not necessary, downplay it, and have all types of disparaging things, all those people got their papers. They also have the language to discuss your tradition. That's when you wonder why you're not getting scholarships, or you're not getting grants, or you're not getting funded, and all those other people are getting funded—because they went to the academy. There are some grants and funding you can't get without a PhD attached to it.
Are there any particular schools or programs that you would recommend?
I would even look into Afro-American Studies. As someone who has found that their bloodline starts in the Americas, it is imperative to understand where the narrative comes from, that we come from somewhere else. So my magazine is The African American Folklorist, and I usually tell people when I give lectures—or depending on who asks or inquires—that I use African-American for three reasons.
One, it is our default category. If you're melanated in America, you're automatically thrown into the box of African-American. Two, there are some who are actually African and American. And then there's three, those who identify as such because that's what they were told and that's what they know. So we're in a very unique space. And when I say we, I mean melanated people. In some cases, none of us can really tell where any one of us comes from. But there's a plethora of Black American narratives. That's what The African American Folklorist highlights and disseminates. It just uses that terminology because that is the default term. But anything that was considered Black American—good, bad, or indifferent—you're going to find it through African-American Studies programs.
How long have you been running The African American Folklorist?
The African American Folklorist comes from my organization, Jack Dappa Blues Heritage Preservation Foundation. If my memory serves me correctly, the very first issue was either 2019 or 2020. It started out in a newspaper, but it's been around for a minute.
Speaking of folk music: If you trace the music of the blues and listen to the lyrics, you'll find a lot of Indigenous—Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Indian Territory—songs or verbiage.
Can you give an example of a song, or a few songs?
There's a song by Memphis Minnie called "Chickasaw Train Blues." There's a song where Son House talks about the Indian woman that he was with. One of my favorite songs that I'm still rehearsing, and hopefully I can play publicly one day, is "Down the Dirt Road Blues" by Charlie Patton. In the song, he talks about leaving the South and going to a reservation in Illinois, if I'm not mistaken. So, it's there. We speak about how New York, California, and these really urban places are melting pots. But when you think about the Black South, or what's considered the Delta region—which, up until 1799, was Indian Territory—there are so many moving parts that come out of here that all of these melanated people practice.
There's Christianity. There's Black magic. There's hoodoo. So it's really difficult to pinpoint everything. And I'm only phrasing it this way because I've been called an African denier. I've been called all kinds of things. I think people get the wrong idea because there are a lot of race baiters on all sides of the field. Every Black person is not Indian. Every Black person is not African. Every Black person is not Filipino, and down the line. But at the same time, we also didn't all come from one continent. We were all over from the beginning.
But I think that the smoke is clearing on that narrative now, and people are starting to see things for what they are, thankfully. And I'm grateful for the folk art form, which gives us Indigenous folks an opportunity to tell our stories in our own way.
Comments