Fantastic Negrito returns to his roots on Grammy-winning album

Fantastic Negrito will tell you that sometimes the underdog wins. After years of being kicked around and neglected and left for creative death, in February the artist (born Xavier Dphrepaulezz) was the surprise recipient of the 2017 Grammy for best contemporary blues album for his gut-wrenching roots collection, “The Last Days of Oakland.”

“Three years ago, I was playing in the streets, without a record label, and so to go to the pinnacle of accolades — I felt very proud in that moment,” he says. “Not for myself but for the thousands of artists that sometimes have no voice.”

Dphrepaulezz has in fact played both sides. In the ‘90s, he was wrapped up in the label hustle. Known simply by his first name, the then 26-year-old Xavier was a promising pop-funk-soul artist with a debut album, “The X Factor,” out on Interscope Records and opening for bands like De La Soul. But changing tides in the music industry and a near-fatal car wreck that mangled the guitarist’s playing hand quickly put his career in limbo. He was dropped by his label and he subsequently dropped out of music, selling all of his instruments and moving back home to Oakland, California.

“At that time I didn’t have anything to say anymore [in my music],” says the songwriter, whose latest confessionals like the organ-guitar hymnal “Working Poor” are so hard-hitting they even caught the attention of Bernie Sanders while on the campaign trail. “And if I didn’t have anything to say now I would leave it again. Because music is something that’s so powerful and means so much to me. It’s the one time when I’m not full of s—.”

In Oakland, Dphrepaulezz settled down, tending to a farm and selling marijuana to make ends meet before welcoming a son, the life moment he says, “that is what brought me back.” He can vividly recall trying to put the baby to sleep one night by picking up the sole guitar he had left (“It was so cheap I couldn’t get any money for it”) and was moved by his son’s reaction. “It was so real. He couldn’t even speak yet, but his reaction said so much to what music was,” recalls Dphrepaulezz. “That began a slow walk back to playing again.”

He began by performing in streets of Oakland, a place where he lived from the age of 12 after running away from a strict home where his orthodox Somali-Caribbean Muslim father reared 14 kids under a watchful eye.

“The streets spoke to me in a way that religion didn’t,” Dphrepaulezz says, admitting he still tries to sneak away and play in San Francisco subway stations late at night. “There’s this connection that happens with myself and the people that makes me think more about contributing than taking. Instead of looking for something — for fame or a hit record — I thought my job is to make an honest and genuine contribution to the human family.”

Many of the songs on his Grammy-making “The Last Days of Oakland” (which also won him the NPR Tiny Desk competition) were germinated in the safe space of the streets and, through Depression-era Delta blues and roots music, speak to the ethos of the working class. Earlier this month, he re-released the album with two new songs that “needed to be contributed to the conversation the whole country is having right now,” says Dphrepaulezz, including the hand-clapping slowburner “Push Back” that talks of being the “the innocent living in the prison of stress, anxiety, fear.”

“Push back is the word, that’s what we gotta do against ignorance. I see so much of it and it’s dangerous,” he continues. “It’s so important for artists right now to speak up. As artists we are the last line of defense.”

Dphrepaulezz is also protective of fellow musicians. Being blessed with his own “silent mentor,” the late Chris Cornell who invited Fantastic Negrito to open countless solo tours and the first and only Temple of the Dog tour (“I started calling him Christmas Cornell for all the gifts he kept giving me”), Dphrepaulezz, too, pays it forward. He co-created the Blackball Universe collective to help fellow struggling black artists along with good friend Malcolm Spellman, creator of the show “Empire.” Fantastic Negrito appeared in an episode in 2016.

After his latest jaunt, opening for Sturgill Simpson, Dphrepaulezz is ready to head back to the studio and work on a new record. “There’s more I have to contribute,” he says, reinvigorated again with the process of being a working musician. “It’s amazing when you are challenged with less, sometimes you can produce more.”

Selena Fragassi is a local freelance writer.