These two DVDs should come with a warning: "May cause you to miss work and 'quality' time with family and friends." Because once you start watching, you'll find new revelations with every viewing and won't be able to stop. This is the rarest of examples, where any of the two discs' 36tracks could pass the price-of-admission test. This is the best footage of blues artists I've ever seen, bar none--featuring a staggering roster of the genre's giants at or near their prime.
It's ironic that this release comes (as I write this) only weeks before Martin Scorsese's upcoming multi-part "Blues" series on PBS. While the Scorsese series (or at least the segment directed by Wim Wenders) features acts with nebulous connections to blues such as Eagle-Eye Cherry and Lou Reed, this is the genuine article--the Old and New Testaments and the Holy Grail combined. If you want to see T-Bone Burnette, there's the PBS series; if you want T-Bone Walker, this is the place.
Volume One opens with "Shakey Jake" Harris singing outside what looks amazingly like a rural house, while T-Bone provides country blues accompaniment on his unplugged Gibson ES-5. Who knew? Walker throws in a few jazzisms, but for this telecast he was dipping back as close to his roots as anything he ever recorded. At song's end, he puts down his arch-top and walks to the front of the house to introduce Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who perform a rousing "Hootin' Blues," Terry's harmonica tour de force, with couples dancing and enjoying the music like it was a Saturday night fish fry in the deep South.
In just that small segment, festival promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, set designer Gunther Kieser, and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus captured, in 1962, the blues and its surroundings more accurately than anything Hollywood or American television has done to date--even though theyhad to fabricate those surroundings in Baden-Baden, West Germany. There are concert segments that also rival any blues that's ever been documented, but the performances with the constructed sets (a tenement alley, a saloon, a gas station) are enthralling.
Captured in a street scene, the effect of a late-forties-ish John Lee Hooker thumping his blond slim-body Epiphone so hard it doesn't need to be plugged in, singing "Hobo Blues," is positively primal and hypnotic. Mississippi Fred McDowell's humble dignity is heart-warming to watch, while Lightning Hopkins (in shades and seersucker sports coat) playing "Mojo Hand" on a plugged in flat-top acoustic is the epitome of hip.
In the live footage, Otis Rush's vocal intro to "I Can't Quit You Baby"(1966) is sure to raise the hair on the back of your neck--not to mention his stinging vibrato licks on his upside-down Epiphone Riviera. A 1963 performance by Lonnie Johnson (playing a cheap metal-pickguard Kay electric) offers a rare glimpse into the single-note style the jazz/blues great pioneered in the '20s. At the other end of the spectrum, Big Joe Williams, the "King of the 9-String Guitar," plays much the same as he did on his first recordings, also made in the '20s--a primitive but idiosyncratic Delta style that hearkens back to blues' very beginnings.
The highlights are too numerous to list, but to tease you a little bit more, how does an all-star jam with Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey, Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Slim, and Matt "Guitar" Murphy sound? Or can you imagine a harmonica battle between Big Mama Thornton, Walter Horton, Dr. Ross, J.B. Lenoir, and John Lee Hooker? (I saw The Hook play a couple dozen times; I never even knew he played harp.)
Each volume has "bonus" footage from 1969, featuring the amazing talents of Earl Hooker and Magic Sam, respectively. These are the DVDs' only backstage clips, with Earl parodying some country and western with "Walking The Floor Over You" and Sam being interviewed on the tour bus. But onstage (each, incidentally, playing Hooker's self-decorated Les Paul copy) these guys absolutely burn--rocking out more overtly than anything contained in the body of the collection.
Volume Two's three selections by Howlin' Wolf are perhaps the pot of gold at the end of this magnificent rainbow (all shot in rich, dense black-and-white). Backed by bassist Willie Dixon, pianist Sunnyland Slim, drummer Clifton James, and guitarist Hubert Sumlin (just let that sink in for a moment), the Wolf delivers a truly inspired performance in spite of the fact that the only audience he was singing to was a film crew. When Sunnyland steps forward on a boogie-woogie, Hubert takes off on one his jazzier (but still twisted) solos.
Doing the math, "Little Hubert," as Sonny Boy introduces him, must have been about 32 when this was taped, but he looks like a teenager. Pianist Eddie Boyd ("Five Long Years," 1965) is backed by a 29-year-old Buddy Guy on guitar and a bassist the booklet identifies as "Lonesome Jimmy Lee"(actually the prolific Jimmie Lee Robinson). It's startling to realize that, of all the blues legends presented here, Guy, Sumlin, Otis Rush; drummers Clifton James, Robert St. Judy and Billy Stepney; and Matt Murphy (who, at 75, has been very ill recently) are the only ones still alive. Blues has always been a music of evolution, but the sad truth is that precious few of the figures who originated the vocabulary for what is now the accepted language are still around, with an ever-increasingly diluted crop coming along to take their place. Thank God the American Folk Blues Festival captured these legends when the Mount Rushmore of blues were not only living, breathing creatures, but were still vital and really did have their mojos workin'.
Ironically, 2003 has been declared the "Year Of The Blues"; par for the course, we're at least 40 years late in honoring perhaps the most American of art forms, yet we have Europeans to thank belatedly for documenting its heyday for us. As producer David Peck rightly points out in the accompanying booklet notes, these performances are a national treasure worthy of the Smithsonian. The good news is that more volumes are scheduled for release in 2004; the even better news is that all of the artists and their estates are getting royalties for these DVDs. So with each 90-minute disc listing for $19.95, this is the best deal you're ever going to find.
If this hasn't sufficiently piqued your curiosity, go to reelinintheyears.com and take a peek at some of the photos taken during these shows and see what it looked like when Gods walked the earth.
(c) 2003 Dan Forte; all rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.
