For more than a decade, Jake Xerxes Fussell tried and failed to sing an old American folk song he had loved since he was a teenager. The tune, Rolling Mills Are Burning Down, combines an industrial accident with personal woe, resulting in a violent verse: “Oh, go get your revolver / And come on and blow out my brain / For I’d rather be dead and in my grave / Than to be in this trouble I’m in.”

Folk aficionado John Cohen captured Rolling Mills during a song-scouting foray into the ancient mountains of western North Carolina and south-west Virginia. He recorded banjoist George Landers singing it in a rail-thin voice, fingers pawing anxiously at his strings. It resonated with Fussell generations later, after an inferno ripped through Bibb Mill, a century-old textile plant that served as an economic engine of his home town, Columbus, west Georgia.

Still, Fussell struggled with his own version this way and that, unable to sell its imagery. “There was no real spirit,” he says. But then he delivered it slowly, as if from under some great burden, with that violent bit recast as an ordinary argument between sad lovers.

“I once would have thought this is taking too much licence,” says Fussell, 40, who speaks with the same affable southern lilt with which he sings, strolling around his North Carolina backyard on a crisp January day. “But as I get older, I think it’s getting closer, because it feels truer to me. If I connect emotionally, that’s as important as any other element.”

Fussell, who has won admirers including Will Oldham, Wilco and Bill Callahan, is one of the great magpies of American song, collecting forgotten, tarnished gems with a folklorist’s zeal – on his exceptional 2019 album Out of Sight, these ranged from violent murder ballads to the lusty hollers of fishmongers. His renditions aren’t so much cover versions as composites, and Fussell’s sad-eyed take on Rolling Mills is the centrepiece of Good and Green Again, his fourth – and most poignant – album.

This flexibility came slowly for Fussell, whose parents met at a living-history museum in Georgia, where blacksmiths and dressmakers demonstrated traditions of yore. Fussell describes himself as an obsessive “folk music dork” in high school, shuffling through stacks of dusty blues compilations and field-recording compendiums in rear corners of record stores. He absorbed the archivist lessons of family friends, American folklorists Bill Ferris and Art Rosenbaum.

He wasn’t keen to share that side of his life with his peers, however. During his first paying gig, playing upright bass with local bluegrass standbys at a regional barbecue chain, some high-school pals shuffled in for dinner, and were stunned. “I was happy to have my social life and school be separate from my interests,” he says. “It was my thing, the stubbornness of my identity.”

But as he learned more, especially while earning his southern studies degrees at the University of Mississippi, he began to realise he had little to guard, because the musicians he respected never meant for their work to be sealed in amber. He recalled meeting members of the Skillet Lickers, a venerated Georgia string band formed in 1926, at a Georgia folk festival in the 90s and understanding they were more than a static stereotype. “They weren’t wearing string ties,” he laughs. “They were wearing windsuits and puffy Nikes. That’s what folk singers wear.”

On his first three albums, he mined decades of archival material for songs that felt relevant to his times, often recombining them with others or recontextualising them with updated arrangements. His 2019 take on Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, chronicled decades earlier by Pete Seeger, turned a raw lament of labour exploitation into a tragic country ballad that felt so contemporary it could be called Amazon Warehouse Blues.

There were times, however, he felt he was too hesitant to add anything new, as with his atmospheric take on Pinnacle Mountain Silver Mine, an exquisite tune about the endless quest for riches delivered in 1980 by Virginia singer Helen Cockram. “I almost regret recording it,” he says. “For people who are aware of her original, why wouldn’t you listen to that?”

Good and Green Again corrects that anxiety with a burgeoning confidence. Fussell, who became a father during the pandemic, bends tunes such as the wayward Georgia love song Carriebelle toward his own life, and includes a handful of originals for the first time. The album ends with Washington, a song Fussell built from boastful lines about the first American president – “noblest of men” – that he saw woven into an antique wool rug. His voice carries gentle scorn mirrored by the ragged bite of his guitar, making a sly eulogy for the myth of American exceptionalism.

Fussell lists every reference in his liner notes, intended as a breadcrumb trail and not some recitation of allegiances. “Appropriation is a heavy consideration in my work, and it’s hard to know where to draw the line,” he says. “Art is appropriation. But I don’t feel like I’m doing anybody any justice by trying to sound like anybody else.”

Still, the original material is always within view, glinting like a beacon to suggest how little anything really changes. “I don’t do this to push boundaries,” Fussell says. “I am finding connections in these songs to what’s going on now. They have to be there for me to want to sing them.”

• Good and Green Again is out now on Paradise of Bachelors