Television Reviews : ‘That Rhythm’ on PBS Watchable but Limited

It looked like the right combination: that always thoughtful, often brave, generally excellent new PBS weekly series, “The American Experience,” and that fascinating, integrally American musical form rhythm & blues.

Offering a history of the music’s formative period in the ‘40s and ‘50s and featuring two somewhat obscure yet noteworthy R&B; artists, “That Rhythm, Those Blues” (starting after an 8:30 pledge break tonight on Channel 28) should have had the joint a-jumpin’. Unfortunately, it simply jumps around without much effect.

Though the show ostensibly puts the spotlight on singers Charles Brown and Ruth Brown, there’s far too little of Charles, an incredibly influential yet often overlooked pioneer of the melancholy male blues style in the ‘40s. He seems shy and politely taciturn in these interview excerpts. That leaves much of the hour--too much--to Ruth Brown’s enjoyable but unexceptional singing and her reminiscences and those of a few deejays and producers.

Between these segments, producer-director George T. Nierenberg weaves strands of the music’s history, but the picture remains unnecessarily sketchy. Oddly, except for brief glimpses of Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, the documentary doesn’t show performers and songs that would have expressed the music’s richness and variety.

To make things worse, the interview excerpts are often ill-chosen; some of the producers and deejays go on too long and too confusingly about some of the less interesting aspects of the period. Also, when it discusses the entry of whites into R&B;, the film seems to imply it was all for the bad, lumping together “cover artists” such as Pat Boone and important promoters such as Alan Freed.

Watchable and well-intentioned but unexceptional and poorly balanced, “That Rhythm, Those Blues” fails to capture the spirit and breadth of its subject.

But if it gains the marvelous Charles Brown greater attention--however late--that’s reason enough for its airing.