‘Blues’ out of rhythm

It’s oddly comforting to know that the voice of Blind Willie Johnson is drifting into deep space, bundled into the package of Earth data aboard Voyager I.

Johnson was a Texas blues singer with a spiritual bent and a fearsomely gruff voice, but his 1927 recording “Dark Was the Night -- Cold Was the Ground” is a slow, moaning, all but wordless meditation on mortality.

The story of that record’s interstellar destiny is perhaps the defining segment in the 10-plus hours of “The Blues,” the Martin Scorsese-produced series that premieres tonight on PBS.

The mystery and dread of Johnson’s performance embody the primal allure of this most vital, adaptable and resilient of American music forms. And its movement into the void is a vivid symbol of the blues’ ability to attain the highest spiritual dimension.

That’s just one reason the blues has cast a spell for nearly a century. From any number of angles, this subject is as rich for exploration as PBS’ other historical blockbusters -- on the Civil War, jazz, baseball.

Like them, it tells a story about America, forming a musical map whose regional distinctions and stylistic evolution trace the growth of African American society. It’s populated by colorful, larger-than-life characters and is packed with compelling tales.

The art itself could be endlessly examined. The musical structure is simple and familiar but subject to infinite variation and renewal, and its words have carried eloquent messages of both personal torment and social change. For many, it’s mythology and scripture, philosophical treatise and advice to the lovelorn.

Once an outcast music, it’s now a staple of mainstream culture. The blues has been institutionalized, dramatized, sampled, gentrified, anthologized, adapted, rediscovered and re-rediscovered, honored, analyzed and documented.

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi turned it into a lucrative comedy shtick, and others have built nightclub chains on its 12-bar foundation. And it’s not merely the province of cultists and blues societies. Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks threaded the music of Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker into her Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play “Topdog/Underdog.” And just last week the White Stripes, the band at the forefront of modern rock, delivered an energized take on House’s classic “Death Letter Blues” to packed houses at the Greek Theatre.

The blues is pervasive and ever-present, the musical counterpart of the backyard barbecue and a base ingredient of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. It has contributed iconic figures -- Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson -- to the nation’s cultural pantheon. Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads is as much a part of American lore as Babe Ruth’s fabled Called Shot home run in the ’32 World Series.

Given that potential, all the stars seemed aligned for “The Blues,” which comes as a crowning event in this congressionally decreed “Year of the Blues.” After all, despite its presence and the vast scholarship on the subject, this music has never been corralled in the epic, popular manner of Ken Burns’ landmark series on jazz.

Many viewers -- especially a PBS audience primed on Burns’ clear, linear expositions -- will likely be expecting “The Blues” to fill that void.

Those folks will be singing the blues.

In what is either a daring artistic gamble or a harebrained scheme, Scorsese constructed his series by commissioning seven directors (including himself) to create feature-length, blues- themed films. The results inevitably contain fascinating moments, simply, but overall it’s frustrating to see so much prime TV real estate squandered on tangential material and routine documentarianship.

The filmmakers responded with a variety of agendas and styles, from standard documentary to ambitious mixes of fiction and archival material. Their topics range from Scorsese’s tracing of the blues to its “ancient origins” in Africa (tonight’s overview opener, “Feel Like Going Home,” at 9 on KCET) to the rehabilitation of a notorious psychedelic-blues album.

Issues of race and class and social upheaval thread through the entire series, appropriate for treatment of music so close to the heart of black America.

But the seven shows taken together don’t maintain a thematic line. Scorsese put no restrictions on his filmmakers, so jazz fan Clint Eastwood’s “Piano Blues” (9 p.m. Saturday) is as much about jazz as blues, parading Dave Brubeck, Pete Jolly and other jazz players to the bench to be interviewed, informally and awkwardly, by the director.

And in “Red, White and Blues” (9 p.m. Friday), Mike Figgis devotes his 90 minutes to British blues-rock musicians. Figgis never establishes the relevance of the discussion. Worse, he tries to pass off Tom Jones as a blues singer.

“The Road to Memphis” (9 p.m. Tuesday), by Richard Pearce, sticks to documentary conventions, but his camera really gets around, and he zeroes in on the beating heart of the subject, capturing the vibrancy of the music as it moved from the country to cities. With an eye on both royalty such as B.B. King and weary, eternally hopeful foot soldiers such as Bobby Rush, Pearce lets you feel the texture of a remarkable era and a capital of American music.

Charles Burnett’s “Warming by the Devil’s Fire” also tries to provide social context, depicting the flow of black life by framing the history of the blues with a fictional drama. Set in the mid-’50s, it follows a 12-year-old boy who is sent by his mother to New Orleans to be saved from sin, only to be introduced to the blues and its attendant vices by his ne’er-do-well uncle. The telling is a little stilted, but the theme of secular vs. profane is essential, and the film is replete with the sounds and stories of such pioneers as W.C. Handy, the so-called father of the blues.

Marc Levin was lucky enough to have the ebullient Marshall Chess as the central figure for “Godfathers and Sons” (premiering at 9 p.m. Thursday), which hitches a giddy ride on the manic record man’s energy and unquenchable enthusiasm. The action pivots on the relationship between Chess -- the son of Leonard Chess, co-founder of Chicago’s storied Chess Records -- and Chuck D, the leader of Public Enemy and one of the rap world’s most articulate figures.

The rapper’s introduction to the blues was “Electric Mud,” a vilified Muddy Waters album that Marshall Chess produced in 1968. Setting out to reconvene the original band and add hip-hop elements (by Chuck D and Chicago rapper Common), the unlikely pair strikes up a warm rapport, and Levin mingles the history of a family with that of the music.

But the jewel of the series is Wim Wenders’ “Soul of a Man” (9 p.m. Monday), the episode that opens with the launching of the Voyager. The German director weaves the stories of three artists -- Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir -- into a study of fate and spirituality.

Emulating the silent films of the period with a hand-cranked camera and luminous black and white, Wenders recreates scenes of Johnson singing on desolate streets and James recording his legendary 1931 sides in a studio in a Wisconsin furniture factory.

Johnson, who was blinded as a child when his stepmother threw lye in his face to avenge a beating by his father, sang religious lyrics in a roughhewn voice over exquisite slide guitar, and he kept singing on the streets in the 1930s after his brief recording career ended.

Nehemia “Skip” James is one of the seminal figures of the blues, a one-time Mississippi bootlegger who won a recording contract in a contest and became an elusive legend after recording a handful of songs marked by his unearthly, high-pitched voice. James walked away from the blues in the 1930s and resurfaced decades later, to be embraced by the rock generation. The band Cream’s version of his “I’m So Glad” generated enough royalties to let him buy a few more years by undergoing cancer surgery.

Lenoir was a Chicago-based Mississippian who died in a 1967 car crash just as he appeared ready to emerge as a progressive, topically minded force in the field. In his segment, Wenders tracks down a couple who filmed the singer in the mid-’60s and even includes an autobiographical bit explaining his own fascination with Lenoir.

Besides juggling all of this, Wenders also juxtaposes the singers’ original recordings with footage of current disciples -- Bonnie Raitt, Beck, Nick Cave, Los Lobos, Lou Reed, T Bone Burnett, et al. -- interpreting the songs.

This is a film whose poetry matches that of its subject. It also underscores that the blues grew in the wild, largely driven by isolated visionaries and fostered in loose, informal networks.

Maybe Scorsese’s methodology was meant to honor that spirit, like a bandleader cuing his soloists and trusting them to come through and build up to something bigger, grander and richer than the sum of its parts.

If so, his daring wasn’t matched by his judgment. Right now, the sound of “Ken Burns’ Blues” has a pretty nice ring.

*

‘The Blues’

When: 9 tonight through Saturday.

Where: KCET

Production credits: Series producer, Martin Scorsese. Films by Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders.