Tapping the Roots
When “The Blues” production crew rolled into town, the workers must have smacked their hands together. They didn’t need to scrape the paint off any houses. They didn’t need to pull down any fences. They didn’t have to sprinkle idle old men along the road. All was there. Vicksburg was behaving beautifully.
Here in one of the city’s most unchanging neighborhoods was a bona-fide blues scene aching to be filmed. At a busted-window joint called Slippers, the sound of an art form being revived leaked through a screen door.
“Mama said I was goin’ to be in a movie, yeah, Mama said I was goin’ to be a star,” one man sang in the slanting doorway. “And she shooooo’ was right!”
“Dancers! Dancers!” one of the assistants yelled past him. “Come on, let’s get this shoot done!”
“The Blues” is a gutsy PBS series in the works, dreamed up by Martin Scorsese, that strives to deposit a little grit on the screen and, in a way, spice up drama with real life.
Part documentary, part not, it’s six separate films, each crafted by a different director, tracing the evolution of the blues and how the music has helped express--and shape--the black experience. Scorsese is directing one installment, as are Wim Wenders and Mike Figgis, among others. The series is scheduled to air in fall 2003.
“We made a conscious decision early on that this was not going to be an encyclopedic approach to the blues,” said series producer Alex Gibney, whose credits include the documentaries “The Fifties” and “The Pacific Century.” “Our films are going to be personal and impressionistic. We thought this would be the best agent provocateur to turn people on to the music.”
No, this won’t be like Ken Burns’ “Jazz” odyssey, the 10-episode musical examination that was scrupulously researched but criticized as a little dry in places. “The Blues” is conceived as a raw, experiential rendering of the music’s history, as frank and unvarnished as the musicians’ sooty lives--but with dramatic accents. Each segment features a mix of standard documentary elements such as archival footage, performances and interviews, along with dramatic reenactments. The twist is that the final product will be a set of one-hour films, all with a deliberately indie feel and not connected in any conventional miniseries fashion.
Blues experts say it’s about time someone stepped inside the real blues, the dirty blues, the folksy beats of such places as Slippers.
“You got to get that camera into these honky-tonks and juke joints and show people having a good time,” said Albert Murray, the celebrated author of numerous essays and books on black culture, including “Stomping the Blues.” “People like to hear Negroes lamenting, but they don’t get it. I never met a blues musician who wasn’t looking for a good time, a bottle of whiskey, and a woman and a guitar or a piano. You gonna tell me that after working hard all day in the fields, people wanted to go to a juke joint and hear sad music? No way!”
Scorsese, the executive producer and a blues aficionado, said this project evolved from an Eric Clapton documentary he was involved with. He encouraged each director to shoot as much on location as possible and explore his relationship to the music. The only parameters were to keep it to 60 minutes.
“The idea for the series is to do something a little different than what’s been done with other music documentaries,” said Scorsese. “I sought out directors with a love for the music and experience, in both features and documentaries, who would make films that communicate their passion for and their personal connection to the music.”
Scorsese’s own connection to music is deep rooted. He who was an editor on “Woodstock” and directed the Band’s swan song, “The Last Waltz.”
“I came to a deeper appreciation of the blues by way of rock ‘n roll,” said the director. “And when I did, I realized that it had been the foundation for so much of what I had been listening to.”
Musician Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore), who has been a leading practitioner of acoustic blues traditions in recent years, has clear notions of what kind of message he’d want a series of this sort to impart--and, surprisingly, he wouldn’t want to see much emphasis on the very traditions he honors.
“For God’s sake, give it a blood transfusion,” he says. “Don’t give it a bringing-back-a-dead-corpse-type attitude. Let’s look at the great-great-grandchildren, not overdo it with the dead great-grandfathers. That’s pertinent. You have to look at that.
“But tie it to current R&B; artists--the India.Aries, the D’Angelos. Talk to musicians that you wouldn’t expect. Don’t look to me, for example. I’m 50 years old. Show how it’s really alive. Go to the churches. There will be some people who really know the blues there--blues and gospel are so connected to Southern culture, black and white.”
“The Blues” is a “passion project” (read: low budget), and the financing comes from Clear Blue Sky Productions, known for the documentary series “Me & Isaac Newton,” and Wenders’ Road Movies. Each episode is estimated to cost $1 million.
The series opens on the banks of the Niger river in the west African country of Mali. Spike Lee had signed on to film the first episode but pulled out because of a scheduling conflict. Scorsese then agreed to step in, even though he had to miss the shooting in Africa because he’d been engrossed in the final stages of his film “Gangs of New York.”
Lee’s withdrawal was a disappointment for many reasons, Gibney said, not in the least because it left the production with only one black director: Charles Burnett.
“And that’s not something we overlooked,” Gibney said. “We reached out to a number of black filmmakers. Unfortunately, there were scheduling issues that kept them from working with us.”
The first episode, “From Mali to Mississippi,” traces the roots of blues music and the cross-currents between black Africa and the baleful songs born on the cotton fields of the Deep South. Many of west Africa’s top musicians, such as Ali Farka Toure and Salif Keita, say they were influenced by Delta blues, which in the formative days were shaped by rhythms slaves learned in their motherland of Africa.
No music better reflects the times and lives of its pioneering artists, recently freed slaves facing the ugly world of Reconstruction.
The blues began as a music of pain--in its pure form, the music still is--of life in endless, hateful cotton fields and hotblooded violence and being lonely and broke and black.
Inspired by field hollers and spirituals, the blues developed a distinct call-and-response rhythm in which the singer belts out a line and the guitar answers it. Often, the first line is repeated. As one old ballad goes: “I’m going to leave baby, ain’t going to say goodbye, I’m going to leave baby, ain’t going to say goodbye. But I’ll write you and tell you the reason why.”
The blues is pure oral tradition, one of the best examples of unfiltered cultural expression, said Peter Aschoff, a University of Mississippi anthropologist and blues expert.
“I tell my students this music knows a great deal about being black,” Aschoff said, “and that they need to listen.”
W.C. Handy, a black composer, first heard these scratchy, folksy sounds in 1903 while waiting for a train in Tutwiler, Miss. When he put them down on paper, he marked the birth of popular blues music.
Director Burnett re-created this moment for the series’ second episode (“Warming by the Devil’s Fire”) on a storming late December day in Vicksburg. He and his crew were huddling under a caboose dripping with rain. The scene is a flashback in the story of a young boy’s first exposure to the blues.
As soon as Burnett saw a 50-car freight train steaming his way, he yelled: “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s get this!” and the crew scrambled to squeeze off one take of the Handy scene with the wet, clattering train in the background.
Burnett is telling a story, his story, about two warring uncles--one deeply religious, the other hooked on the blues.
“Growing up,” said Burnett, who was born in this Mississippi river town, “there was always this tension between gospel music, which is a big part of the Baptist tradition, and the blues, which has all these dark, suggestive lyrics.”
Burnett is something of a guerrilla filmmaker, a 57-year-old Mississippi transplant who has spent most of his life struggling to shoot films in South-Central Los Angeles, where he lives. His first project was a family drama set in Watts. “Killer of Sheep” (1977) took five years to make, partly because Burnett had promised a role to a friend in prison, and the friend kept missing parole. The film won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival, putting Burnett on the map in Hollywood, and in 1990 it was included in the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board.
For his next film, he wrote and directed “To Sleep With Anger” (1990), a subtle, tough story starring Danny Glover as an enigmatic man from the Deep South who brings trouble along when he visits his brother’s family. The movie, with its references to superstition and other folklore, is steeped in the blues.
The recent filming in Vicksburg was a homecoming of sorts for Burnett, who still has family there. The busted-up neighborhood hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years ago, he said.
“But what blows me away is the genius and depth and the poetry of these people,” he said. “You sit there and look at the environment they came from. It’s stunning.”
The third episode of “The Blues” (“Devil Got My Woman”) is basically a road trip with Wenders, the German feature director who recently explored the musical documentary genre in “Buena Vista Social Club.”
The next episodes trail the blues upriver, showing such cotton-country musicians as B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf making it in Memphis and Chicago and becoming commercial hits. Richard Pearce, who worked with D.A. Pennebaker on the 1967 Bob Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back,” and whose feature films have often explored racial themes, directs Episode 4, “Moaning at Midnight.” And Marc Levin, director of “Slam,” a gritty movie about urban poetry, is helming the fifth episode, “Godfathers and Sons.”
The sixth film is about British musicians reacquainting Americans with the blues during the ‘60s, when rock ‘n’ roll was taking off and the blues were fading into obscurity. Mike Figgis, director of “Leaving Las Vegas,” is filming this one.
Blues experts say this is an opportune time to film this project.
“We’re seeing the passing of the last great titans,” said Robert Santelli, one of Scorsese’s consultants and the director of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. He cited the recent deaths of Rufus Thomas and John Lee Hooker and the advanced state of other greats such as King, who’s 76.
Unlike country music, which succeeded in penetrating the mainstream and getting radio play, the blues have never been destined for Top 40.
“But it still has a loyal following, and people are buying the music,” said David Sanjek, director of BMI Archives, a performance licensing agency. “Though the pure form of the music is endangered, young musicians are carrying on the tradition, in their own ways.”
Today’s blues are spiced with funk and jazz and bits of country, and features more instrumental soloing inspired by rock, Sanjek said.
Aschoff, the anthropologist and blues expert, said he’d like to see “The Blues” capture this fluidity.
“You can’t just put blues music in a museum and freeze it in the 1940s,” he said. “The music today is different--but it’s equally relevant to the black experience.”
But to Robert Cray, one of the top figures in the current electric blues world, the most important message the filmmakers can convey is to be found in the history.
“Life was different [in the Delta of the ‘20s and ‘30s],” he says. “That part needs to be told in this series--how transient life was. People worked on the plantations or as sharecroppers. They were like today’s migrant workers, moving from area to area. That played a big part with the bluesmen, following the work and playing when they had the opportunity. It’s going to be great for more people to have the opportunity to learn about this.”
But this series, its makers insist, is not really about history, but about something more essential.
“The story of the blues has been told,” Santelli said. “But what hasn’t been told is the essence of the music and its power. It’s scary, scary music. And when this series comes out, some of this stuff is going to blow people away.”
Jeffrey Gettleman is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times.
Times researcher Edith Stanley and freelance writer Steve Hochman contributed to this report.