After working with Sufjan Stevens and Rafter Roberts on her first two full-length albums, Virginia native Liz Janes takes on a collection of dramatically re-arranged public domain songs with Los Angeles based free jazz collective, Create(!).

A lo-fi lullaby of century old blues, folk songs and prayer music Liz Janes & Create(!) adds new wrinkles to well ironed standards. Jump-up jigs have been repurposed as plaintive banjo-led ballads while Biblical slave songs are smashed and stretched into full shack stomp and boogie. Here the work of Charlie Patton, Pete Seeger and the Carter Family are imbued with the spirits of John Coltrane, John Fahey and Nina Simone.

Recorded and produced by Create(!)’s Chris Schlarb in a one room shack without the use of any electric instruments, Liz Janes & Create(!) features some of Janes’ most inspired singing. Her voice slithers out from acoustic guitar drones of “All The Pretty Horses” and scrapes its rocky bottom on “Be My Husband.”

With nary a trace of irony, Liz Janes & Create (!) open the American songbook and write up their own chapter.