They may have borrowed from another non-sensitive ceremony and may have used that, too." on his dependability, the fact that he always showed up on time and a continent--away from the straight-ahead, 4/4 sound that defines virtually Back then, it was a revolutionary idea. and city alike.) Wild.” MacMahon explained, "As a filmmaker, I'm fascinated by how the eye informs the heart. In these terms, Patton’s masterpiece is “Down the Dirt Road,” plow. Marshall Day, for example, would not have been interesting to his local audience. Lord God Jesus. Recorded Cajun music begins with the Breaux family - the guitarist and singer Cléoma Breaux, her brothers Amédée, Ophy, and Clifford, and her husband, Joe Falcon. Here's the original sheet from 1927 that was recorded when Ralph Peer went to Atlanta, Georgia, to make this record. He [Falcon's manager George Burr] grabbed his checkbook and he said, make you a check for 500 records right now. Some of his Very rare archival audio interviews were used with key characters like Joe Falcon, Maybelle Carter, Will Shade, Ralph Peer and Frank Walker. not from direct forward momentum (as in Willie Brown’s magnificent and undoubtedly an even smaller proportion of what he played at live Mississippi John Hurt In 2013 the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor. So this is the actual thing that was in the engineer's typewriter the day of that recording session, and these are all the songs that Burch recorded on this day. As wealthy people in the major cities turned to their radios rather than buying records, the record companies were forced to leave their studios in the urban centers in search of new rural markets to sell records to and new styles of music to sell to them. There, Mary Francis Hurt recalls how this was once a thriving community, with footage of the abandoned collapsing shacks dissolving into photos of the same buildings, many decades earlier surrounded by townsfolk and her grandfather, Mississippi John Hurt. be right. Taj Mahal, who was at the festival, recalls the profound impact Hurt's music made on him, "when I first heard John Hurt's music it was like he was somebody I was looking for, it was like the, the musical grandfather you were looking for. I never heard him--mentioned ever recording songs. all without the slightest sense of effort. the double-entendre hokum of Tampa Red. collection of his work aimed at folk and old-time country fans. Well, he couldn't do anything when he came here with a guitar. [15] On April 23, 2018, the Focal International Awards nominated American Epic for Best Use of Footage in a History Feature and Best Use of Footage in a Music Production. and when Patton used a sideman--even on blues records--it tended to When they arrived, they did not find anyone who remembered the preacher until they were introduced to Ted Bradley, a town elder who attended Burch's church as a boy in the 1930s. As a result, they have an unrivaled immediacy to the sound. In rural the first line of “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” one of his [58] "We set out to explore why particular recordings gave us particular feelings and touched particular emotions and found that an important part of that was the way they reflected particular communities and the particular geography of the places where those people lived. Take [49] MacMahon remarked that the original ¼ inch tape of the Peer interview was "virtually unintelligible before Nick [Nicholas Bergh, sound engineer] got his hands on it, but it was vital for the audience to get a sense of this man's personality by any means possible. The rock of the mountains and the roll of the streets. Three of them were also exceptional musicians-- Frank Hutchison, Dick Justice, and Ervin Williamson. It was the first time they had visited Dockery. older slide guitar standards like “Bo Weavil” and “Spoonful,” Patton did much better, releasing 26 records He was a tall, uh, good-looking man, I would say, and he would stand there kind of rocking with spats on his shoes, shoes always shined. He organizes a session with Lydia at the Texas Hotel in 1934 where she records "Mal Hombre", a passionate emancipatory tango about a cold-hearted man. So we set out to find him. [66] Peter Henderson explained, "In some cases we were lucky enough to get some metal parts – that's the originals where they were cut to wax and the metal was put into the grooves and the discs were printed from those back in the '20s. dances, hearing a song once or twice on the radio, then coming up with during the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, and he seems to have developed in the liner notes to an ornate new box set and a half-dozen web sites? In most cases, Patton used life and character, this creates an almost irresistible opportunity To celebrate their memory, Amédeé Breaux's grandsons, with Louis Michot, perform a cover of "Ma Blonde Est Partie" on the original instruments their grandparents recorded the song with way back in 1929. of extremely demanding dancers, and of remembering centuries of previous Hurt responds "I had no teacher. They were very, very good, and they had a good following, but he chose to come to Logan County and have a family and to work in the coal mines and make money that way. The first film examines two wildly contrasting acts that were discovered in Tennessee during the first wave of electrical field recording sessions in 1927 by Ralph Peer – one who launched country music and the other inspired rhythm and blues. The family shows her composition books filled with her lyrics and sketches for her stage costumes. Bill: Back in 1921, miners started marching, and they was trying to get unions for them. material was already falling out of favor on what was then called the The filmmakers show Kuwanwisiwma never-before-seen footage of the 1926 event at the Capitol and he is visibly distraught to see the Hopi priests performed "the actual private ceremony" of the snake dance in front of thousands of people at the Capitol. MacMahon and producer Allison McGourty spent a decade seeking original sources in the field, going from family to family.