Nathan Salsburg on Folk Music and Jewish Inspiration
Guitarist and composer Nathan Salsburg has left an indelible mark on the folk music scene: He’s collaborated with renowned artists like Joan Shelley, James Elkington, and Shirley Collins, and dedicates his other time to preserving musical heritage– Salsburg works as a curator of the Lomax Digital Archive.
Nathan Salsburg’s NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, 2012
In this candid and introspective interview, Salsburg delves into the intricate relationship between his Jewish background and his musical journey. He reflects on his evolving connection with Judaism, and shares how it transitioned from a deeply personal construct during his youth to a source of creative dialogue in his adulthood. While shedding light on his creative process, Salsburg discusses his thoughtful approach to adapting traditional Jewish music for modern audiences, navigating challenges, and shares his hopes for diversifying the collective Jewish experience. In this conversation, Nathan Salsburg intertwines his musical journey with his Jewish heritage –a path that can sometimes transcend time and space.
Leah Dunn: How has your relationship with Judaism changed over time, and what role does music play?
Nathan Salsburg: It’s been extremely variable. As a younger person, say 13-20, I felt deeply committed to Jewishness, having gone through the crucible of religious school, summer camp, and youth group, though that commitment was primarily a solipsistic framework for self-conception and self-construction; a means of thinking of myself beyond the bounds of my quotidian experience. (I’m sure this will be familiar to many young American Jews.) I had ideas of becoming a rabbi, mostly out of a desire for immersion in the textual tradition, but that itch was scratched by studying literature in college with a minor in Jewish Studies. For the next 15 or so years, my relationship was tenuous at best. I had listened to Jewish music all that time, but it was Jewish music from places in space and time to which I had no connection—in space, the music of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews; in time, cantorial and klezmer recordings from the 78-rpm era. The practices that took shape as the “Psalms” record, and the later Landwerk series, were both attempts to cobble together a vital connection to Jewishness on my own terms, through idioms that felt like my own.
LD: What is the Jewish community like in Louisville? How do the broader Louisville and Kentucky cultures influence the Jewish community?
NS: I’m ill-equipped to speak to this, at least in the present, as I’m unaffiliated here, with very little interaction with the community (although this is likely to change soon when our two-year-old daughter starts preschool at a synagogue). 30 years ago, Jewishness in Louisville—at least in the Reform congregation where I grew up—seemed to me to be based on unconditional, unexamined love for Israel and for college basketball, the latter being the best illustration of the regional influence you refer to. I fell in love with Kentucky’s traditional music, particularly the mountain music of the Eastern part of the state, in my late teenage, but it seemed fully at odds with Jewishness, until I discovered the urban Jews of the folk-revival years (1950s and ‘60s) who played central roles documenting, presenting, and promoting performers like Roscoe Holcomb and Buell Kazee, along with many, many other artists and traditions from across the Southeast U.S.
Photo by Mickie Winters, Pitchfork
LD: How has your understanding of Jewish history and tradition influenced your music-making process?
NS: My first serious foray into specifically Jewish music-making was in 2017, when I started working on the arrangements of psalms that were ultimately released in the record “Psalms” in 2021. Understanding Jewish tradition to be essentially—fundamentally—dialectical, I felt like it wouldn’t be taking too much of a liberty to place myself in constructive conversation with it. I don’t go to minyan or Torah study; I wasn’t, nor am I now, involved with any chavurah that could offer the kind of rigor, intellectual or spiritual or artistic, that I was craving, and this was the motivation behind the project: engendering some kind of ongoing creative engagement with traditional texts. The process of building the arrangements involved culling what resonated with me and jettisoning what didn’t, which every non-fundamentalist Jewish community has done as it has adapted or developed the liturgy to suit its needs. Not that I’m a community unto myself—nor am I remotely enough of a scholar to confidently defend my editorial choices from any other angle besides an emotional one—but the process ultimately imparted a pleasant feeling of playing a part in an adaptive tradition.
LD: How do you approach the process of adapting traditional Jewish music for modern audiences, and what are some of the challenges involved in that process?
NS: The primary audience I have in mind with this music are Jews like myself, who might feel as though there is no contemporary Jewish music speaking in an argot familiar to or resonant for them. I grew up in a mainstream UAHC/URJ congregation and went to a similarly affiliated summer camp, so the Jewish music I heard was the aggressively strummed and vigorously sung anthemic stuff (which has a name, American nusach, as I learned just a couple years ago). That was fine as far as it went—and let it be said that I cut my teeth as a pre-teen guitar player playing it—but it’s not the sort of thing that I could carry into adulthood. My tastes changed, deepened, expanded, and I was no longer interested in music that wore its heart (or its unexamined identity politics) on its sleeve. I started to make music that satisfied my new aesthetic universe, and, Judaically speaking, there weren’t a lot of guideposts available.
LD: How do you stay connected with the wider Jewish music scene, and do you see any emerging trends or movements that you find particularly exciting?
NS: I’m totally unconnected to any Jewish music scene. I don’t say that proudly at all—I’d love to be connected to one, or to many—but, with a few exceptions, the Jewish music I hold most dear primarily exists in other dimensions in time and space. I love old cantorial and klezmer records, but they reflect traditions, locales, and ways of life and observance that, if they haven’t been annihilated by genocide or modernity or both, I don’t share or can’t access. The most exciting Jewish music I’ve heard in the past 10-15 years is Black Ox Orkestar’s Everything Returns, which came out last year. It’s an utterly brilliant example of artists refracting a venerable collective tradition—or a couple of them: klezmer and, what, cabaret?—through their particularly sensitive contemporary lens. I had to take a long break from that album; I was listening nearly on repeat for weeks.
LD: What advice would you give to young musicians who are interested in exploring their Jewish heritage through music?
NS: I don’t feel like I’m in a position to offer advice, and if I did I doubt it would have much practical value, but I’d just encourage folks to undertake such exploration. It can only deepen the individual Jewish experience and diversify the collective one, and that’s profoundly valuable in the face of mainstream American institutional Jewishness (I’m thinking of what’s peddled by the Conference of Presidents, and local Foundations everywhere) and its lowest-common-denominator presumptions of what Jewish practice, identity, and belonging should look—and sound—like.
LD: Where did you find the Yiddish and klezmer 78’s that the Landwerk albums are built off?
NS: All the Landwerk samples were lifted from records in my collection. Many of those records I picked up over the years I spent on tour (pre-Covid; pre-fatherhood). I’d schlep them along in the van or the car, finally get them home, stick them in a pile to be cleaned and listened to and shelved, and often those piles would just grow larger and larger without me ever getting around to giving individual records the attention they deserved. Landwerk really grew out of my desire to be a closer listener to those neglected records. Strangely, just listening to them didn’t quite feel adequate, and I was moved to interact with them in the peculiar way that I did. (This interaction became a real boon during Covid, when collaboration with my contemporaries—besides my partner—was off the table.)
LD: Why did you choose to work in archiving in curation, alongside your music career?
NS: I fell into the Alan Lomax Archive as an administrative assistant in the fall of 2000, making coffee, doing post office runs, calling in courier pick-ups. I was a huge fan of the music, but had no technical or academic bona fides. (That was half my life ago now and I’m still involved, although I’ve never had an assistant to make me coffee or do my post office runs.) Like many devoted music listeners of my generation, I was a committed teenage mix-tape maker. There was nothing I applied more devotion, seriousness, and exactitude to, and I was thrilled by the opportunity to reapply those energies to albums, radio programs, and exhibits on behalf of the Archive. That thrill has never worn off.
LD: Do you have any favorite Jewish artists, musical or not, you’d like to share with our readers?
NS: Next to the Black Ox Orkestar record, the most affecting contemporary Jewish music I’ve come across is a record called “DARKCHO”, made by Jonathan Harkham and David Brook in 2004. Will Oldham gave me a burned copy (I don’t know if it was ever issued on a physical CD) in 2007; handwritten on the disc was “Jewish Jams.” As I understand it, Harkham and Brook were both raised Orthodox and were at the time still deeply observant (although neither stayed that way). The album was my first experience with Jewish music being made in a manner that I would choose for myself, as a musician and as a listener. The songs are all liturgical pieces, sung to traditional Hasidic melodies, with extremely minimal instrumentation: acoustic and electric guitar, trumpet, harmonica, and accordion. It was everything the Jewish devotional music of my youth (American nusach) was not—it was tender, vulnerable, nuanced; it sought more than it found. It remains an absolute desert-island disc for me. Both it and Black Ox’s Everything Returns are on Bandcamp.
