Folkstreams.net: A national preserve of documentary films about American roots cultures
26 May 2007Heard about the site from npr, which contains lot of interesting documentary films about American folk or roots culture. More about folkstreams.net can be found here. The following are some blues-related videos:
Sonny Terry: Shoutin’ the blues [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
SHOUTIN’ THE BLUES is a one shot, one story and one song short film of harmonica great, Sonny Terry . Seated in a motel room on Broadway in Oakland, California where we filmed him while he was on tour with Brownie McGhee, Sonny, with one small harmonica in his hand, creates a complex and soulful blues solo out of his whooping and hollering, after telling us the story of the context that gave birth to that solo. Filmed in 1969. More material from this same session is in SONNY TERRY: WHOOPIN’ THE BLUES
Sonny Terry: Whoopin the blues [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
Sonny Terry started playing harp in his teens, as a blind street musician in North Carolina. After a stint with a medicine show, he hooked up with the popular ragtime singer/guitarist Blind Boy Fuller. After Fuller’s death in 1940, Terry teamed up with Brownie McGhee and the two began a long lived musical partnership. It took them from the socially conscious New York folk music scene of the forties, where they lived, worked and recorded with people like Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, to the concert halls of Europe as premier blues artists of the sixties.
WHOOPIN’ THE BLUES (1969) is the longer, two-camera version of SHOUTIN’ THE BLUES (1979) with different material. A 14-minute portrait of blues harmonica great, Sonny Terry, the film contains several songs and stories. Catching Sonny on tour in his Oakland motel room, filmmaker Yasha Aginsky made this solo portrait of him and then took it to New York in 1970 where it was broadcast by WNET on the National Educational Television network.
African-American work songs in a texas prison [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream] [Video II-mpeg4] [Video II-Real surestream] [Transcript]
Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit.
Worksongs helped African American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. With mechanization and integration, worksongs like these died out shortly after this film was made.
Born for hard luck: Peg Leg Sam [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
A portrait of Arthur “Peg Leg Sam” Jackson –black harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living “busking” on the street and performing in patent-medicine shows touring southern towns. Footage includes excerpts from one of his last medicine shows, videotaped at a county fair in 1972, and material filmed near his home in South Carolina in 1975. The performance includes harmonica solos, songs, a parody of a chanted sermon, folktales and reminiscences, and three buck dances.
The land where the blues began [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream] [Transcript]
A self-described “song-hunter,” the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and 40s, sometimes in the company of black folklorists like John W. Work III, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta’s music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.
In the late 1970s Lomax returned with filmmaker John Bishop and black folklorist Worth Long and made the film The Land Where the Blues Began. Shot on video tape, the film is narrated by Lomax and includes remarkable performances and stories by J.T. Tucker, William S. Hart, Bill Gordon, Belton Sutherland, Reverend Caeser Smith, James Hall, Johnny Brooks, Clyde Maxwell, Bud Spires, Jack Owens, Beatrice Maxwell, Walter Brown, Wilbert Puckett, and Othar Turner (see Gravel Springs Fife and Drum also on www.folkstreams.net).
Alan Lomax’s book by the same title won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for nonfiction.
Dreams and songs of the noble old [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
An examination of the talents and wisdom of elderly musicians, singers, and story-tellers, who perform not for fame or fortune but to preserve and share their culture. Stories told by Janie Hunter (80 years old) of Johns Island, S.C.; ballads sung by ex-coal miner and union organizer Nimrod Workman (91), of Chatteroy, W.V.; fiddle tunes and tales of moonshining and feuds from Tommy Jarrell (83) of Toast, N.C.; Blues by Jack Owens and Sam Chatman of Mississippi, footage from the Alabama Sacred Harp Convention in Fyffe, Alabama, in which people of all ages gather to sing old-time shape-note hymn, and Jazz performed in Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Give my poor heart ease: Mississippi Delta bluesmen [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream] [Transcript]
An account of the blues experience through the recollections and performances of B.B. King, Son Thomas, inmates from Parchman prison, a barber from Clarkesdale, a salesman from Beale Street, and others.
Give My Poor Heart Ease is one of a series of films made in Mississippi in the mid 1970s by William Ferris and the Center for Southern Folklore and produced in association with Howard Sayre Weaver.
Gravel Springs fife and drum [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
A compelling and award-winning portrait of Othar Turner, his music and their role in the Gravel Springs community. The film not only demonstrates how to make a cane fife, but also gets to the heart of both Turner and his fife and drum music as he’s shown performing at an annual Fourth of July picnic. Quick cuts between dancing band members and the rhythmic movements of Turner’s family going about their daily chores capture the mounting excitement and provide a rare, revealing glimpse of the work and play that characterize this traditional rural Mississippi society.
Sonny Ford, Delta artist [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream]
Black and White 16mm documentary film based on fieldwork Bill Ferris conducted with Leland, Mississippi, bluesman and folk artist James “Son” Thomas. Included is footage of Thomas performing at juke houses, his wife preparing dinner, and Thomas making skulls out of clay. The film was made before the advent of 16mm cameras that could take syncronized sound.
Les blues de Balfa [Video-mpeg4] [Video-Real surestream] [Transcript]
A portait of Southwestern Louisana’s Balfa Brothers, ambassadors of traditional Cajun music to the world. Filmed in Louisiana between 1978 and 1981, the film focuses on the surviving brother fiddler Dewey Balfa and his efforts to continue playing and performing his family’s traditional music after the sudden death of his brothers and bandmembers in a traffic accident.
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