PBS’s “America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston” Watch Party

Jerron Paxton plays black folk music from nearly all the idioms that entails. From the jazz of stride piano and banjo from New Orleans to New York to the deepest of the blues played on guitar and harmonica of which he has been a noted figure since his teenage years, from the rural music that reaches the beginnings of black arrival in America played on fiddle, banjo, and bones to ragtime and other turn-of-the-century music that gives the full breadth of black music before World War II in a package that doesn’t lecture, but invites you to enjoy that music as it was given to him. Mr. Paxton has been known to give his audiences a sense of being transported not to a time, but a state of mind and understanding that allows audiences to enjoy black folk music and have it become a part of them as has been the American experience from the beginning.