This is SideDor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Lizzie Peabody.

Okay, imagine for a moment a future world.

In this version of the future, the Earth's changing climate has caused crop failures.

Food shortages and lack of clean water lead to civil unrest.

Then nuclear conflict, eventually global civilization collapses.

And after the dust settles, people have to migrate either north or south, depending on your

hemisphere, getting closer to the poles.

In this dystopian vision of the future, artist Jake Blunt imagines that black Americans

have migrated from the American south, up the coast, to Maine.

So they migrated up there, they got kind of detained on this island off the coast there,

and kind of built their own way of life.

On an island, once populated by wealthy vacationers, these refugees make a new life for themselves.

You can imagine what it might look like.

Make shift plumbing to capture rainwater, golf courses, tilled into farms.

Jake Blunt says he's most interested in what this future might sound like.

Take me to the water, take me to the water, take me to the water to be baptized.

So who do we hear singing?

So you hear the descendants of the people that migrated up there, and the songs that they

carried up with them from the south.

Jake Blunt is a musician and scholar of black American music, and his album The New Faith

is like a sonic postcard from a future world.

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