Blackalachia

Abstract

In his lengthy Pitchfork review of Moses Sumney's first album, Aromanticism (2017), Jason King does not attempt to contain his enthusiasm for the “art-soul singer-songwriter” (2017). In the first three paragraphs, King compares Sumney with the literary figures Langston Hughes, Bartleby, Nietzsche, and James Baldwin, on the one hand, and with Arthur Russell, Gilbert Gil, India.Arie, and Tina Turner (among other musicians) on the other (2017). Sumney's sound also warrants a rapturous, complicated treatment; King (2017) notes its “drifty, slo-mo songcraft and ambient production” and its “austere guitar arrangements and performances” while also noting its kinship with “Brazilian jazz . . . neo-jazz [and] neo-soul,” concluding that his “idiosyncratic sound borrows from the musical style of every decade since the 1970s, but doesn't seem beholden to any specific one.” Sumney's music remains rooted in accessible experimentation, and the singer's voice (his mid-range is very good, and his falsetto is extraordinary) since 2017 has grown less austere through the subsequent releases of the double album græ (2020) and now Blackalachia, an audacious project rooted in the Ghanaian American performer's current home in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. Here, Sumney filmed himself and his band in concert, without audience, in a mountain meadow.Sumney's Bandcamp page describes him as a “singer, writer and multidisciplinary artist” (2022). For once, “multidisciplinary” may understate an artist's talents and ambition. In live performance and music video, Sumney incorporates sophisticated moves from film, dance, theater, couture, and other arts into an indie rock Gesamtkunstwerk that, in aspiration and breadth, recalls projects by such multifaceted artists as Janelle Monáe, Trent Reznor, and David Bowie, for whom the term “musician” is convenient but limiting. The concert film thrills not only musically, but cinematically as well. Sumney is a gifted director exploiting the possibilities of setting (a hilltop meadow in the Blue Ridge); cinematography (close-ups; wide shots; overhead tracking; and lighting that, in scenes filmed at night, turns Sumney's dark skin blue); set design (the concert occurs on meadow and mountain, on a stage that is relatively spartan but for strikingly organic displays of vegetation); and costume (which includes nudity—Sumney's body, an integral element of the nature photograph illustrating the cover of græ, is deployed for its sculptural drama here as well).Like so much art of the last two years, Blackalachia is born of and reflects on isolation, a leitmotif in Sumney's work. Isolation also motivated his artistically revelatory migration to Asheville from his erstwhile home in southern California where he had early on mastered a “hip Los Angeles take on navel-gazing boho blackness” (King 2017). Sumney “found, back in L.A., that the din of the city wasn't conducive to writing. He would make solo trips down to the Blue Ridge Mountains . . . where the isolation of the environment coaxed the lyrics to flow around . . . his philosophical interests: multiplicity, loneliness, self-denial, what it means to submit wholly to the force of emotion” (St. Félix 2022). While isolation and loneliness are integral to Sumney's art—he defines those states as positives, despite what dominant culture has to say about them—still, Blackalachia would not succeed as well as it does without the collaboration of other artists, many from western North Carolina; Sumney's longing for isolation, in fact, led to the potential of new communities.One of the first images we see in the film is of Sumney, costumed in fluttering black fabric, running along a dirt road. Earlier shots have established the setting—rolling hills, mountains in the near distance, a meadow with nondescript structures peeking out of hollows—but it is still pleasantly surprising when he reaches an outdoor stage and begins singing with four bandmates. (The song, “Insula,” reflects on the etymological associations between insula, or “island,” and isolation: in Asheville, Sumney is on a desert island of his own choosing.) “Like a blackbird,” writes Bryn Evans (2021), Sumney “flies up a hill, wings spread, and joins the band at its crest.” The scene, as she notes, invokes the joy of freedom, both as it is celebrated in the many kinds of art and, as it ideally should be, in an Appalachian “space of refuge, of wildness, and of freedom for Black folk” (Evans 2021). Evans (2021) quotes bell hooks's Appalachian Elegy: “I have walked to the top of the hill. . . . I have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things. This is the world I was born into: a world of wild things. In it the wilderness in me speaks. I am wild.” hooks's recollection of belonging in (and to) Appalachian wildness is not universal. J. Drew Lanham's experiences in upstate South Carolina (2016) and Latria Graham's (2020) experiences in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee argue that another interpretation is that the opening scene of Blackalachia represents a troubling ghost of Blue Ridge Mountain memory: a Black body in flight. Reflecting on his place in Appalachia, Sumney—artist of “multiplicity” and ambiguities—told Doreen St. Félix about “the generational trauma of Black people having been the caretakers of the land and then divorced from the land” but also about “[the] history of Black people in Appalachia . . . of Black music being the foundation of bluegrass and country . . . of migration into and out of Appalachia. I'm so deeply invested in a reintegration into nature” (quoted in St. Félix 2022).1 It is an apt description of this artist's place in his chosen home.