>> from the library ofcongress in washington, d.c. >> stephen winick: welcometo the library of congress. my name is stevewinick, and i work here at the american folklife center. and we're conductingan interview, my co-interviewer is mary suetwohy from siriusxm radio, and our guests are thefilmmakers who made the series, american epic, whichshowed on pbs, and i will let themintroduce themselves.
>> allison mcgourty: i'm allisonmcgourty, one of the writers and producers of american epic. originally from scotland,now living in los angeles. >> bernard macmahon: and i'mbernard macmahon, i'm director and co-writer of the series. >> stephen winick: sowe understand it took about a decade for youto go from inspiration to the series, itself. so the series explores the earlydays of commercial recording,
particularly that burstof activity that occurred with 78 rpm disks allacross the country and particularly roots music. so can you tell us some of the inspirationsfor making this film? >> bernard macmahon: the periodwas of great interest to us because in 1925 inamerica the vast majority of music was being sold towealthy people in the cities, that was the audience.
and in '26 radiotook off in america and record salesdropped overnight. all those peoplein chicago, boston, and new york startedlistening to the radio. so the record companiesthought we're going to be out of business and theycame up with the novel idea of why don't we tryand sell music to poor people in rural america. but they're not goingto be interested
in buying the show tunes and theclassical music and the big band that we've been recording,we're going to have to record what they like. so they devised a plan and thatwas to advertise in local papers across the whole of americainviting people to come and audition andthousands of people came and the auditions wereopen to all americans -- african americans, mexicanamericans, hawaiians, cajuns, native americans.
and many of the guys, some of the guys organizing thesessions were song publishers so they, like ralphpierce, they insisted that people bring theirown songs they'd written. and they had just invented atthat time, the year before, the first electricalsound recording equipment, the first microphone,the first amplifier. and they were recordingeverything direct to disk on a pulley-driven lathebecause they couldn't trust the
electricity to turn theturntable at a constant 78 rpm. and it took aboutthree-and-a-half minutes for that weight to slowlyfall and hit the floor, which is why today the popsong is still three-and-a-half minutes long. and that explosion of recordingsis what our film is about, it charts the journey of thatmachine from new york to oahu, tells the story through10 families that participate inthose recordings.
and then for the fourthfilm we rebuild that machine from original partsscavenged over 10 years and it's the first time anyonehas seen it in almost 80 years. and we asked contemporaryartists to record on it. so i think the thingthat attracted us about this story was ithadn't been told before and it combined all the thingsabout america that we loved -- its entrepreneurism, it'sincredibly rich culture, its music and itsfreedom of speech.
>> stephen winick: great. well, thank you. >> mary sue twohy: canyou tell us a little bit about your background beforecreating american epic? >> bernard macmahon: i'llpass that to you first. >> allison mcgourty: well, ispent five years at the bbc in documentaries and acquisitionand also the bbc world service, and prior to that atreuters television, so i was always interestedin storytelling
and history and journalism. my dad was a newspaper man. my sister was a journalist. and then and i playedmusic growing up, so i'd buy music as a kid. i played the clarinet andmy sister played the flute. and my dad would comeon holiday to america and bring back records fromthe smithsonian and the library of congress and louisiana, soi grew up listening to jazz
and blues and old-timeamerican music. and then when i started workingwith bernard in about 2003-04, we started workingtogether on a record label that then quickly segwayed into a film companywith this project. >> bernard macmahon: yes, and ijust tagged along in her wake. [laughter] >> stephen winick: soanother interesting aspect of this film is thereare some names
that people will recognizeassociated with this film. you have executive producerswho are t bone burnett, jack white and robert redford. so how did those big namesessentially get involved in this production? >> allison mcgourty: well,i knew bob dolan's manager, jeff rosen, and once bernardhad gotten some really important findings, some filmfootage and photographs that we knew had never been seenbefore and published before,
we thought who better totake it to than jeff rosen who would essentially knowif we had a story here and if it was worth telling. so he was the first personwe went to and almost became like a mentor to us in thebeginning and helped us. so he's thought itwas a terrific story. i made an introduction to bbcarena, to anthony wall there, who came on as an executiveproducer immediately and was a super niceguy, really helpful.
and he said you must takethis to t bone burnett, so he made a phone call and literally we find ourselvesthe very next day flying to los angeles forthe first time. and we walked into the recorderstudio with our findings, our folder and photographsand walked into the studio where there was two figuresleaning over a sound desk, just finishing off,tweaking a record. and one was t bone burnett andthe other one was elton john.
and elton said, well, i've beenhearing about this project, you mind if i sit in and listen? so we went, oh, we'dbe delighted. and then we sat down withelton and t bone burnett, told the story of everythingwe'd done, where we'd been. at that point wetraveled from cleveland, ohio to the gulf of mexico. i've spoken to hundredsof families. and then bernard,take it from there?
>> bernard macmahon: yes, i presented thisfilm idea to them. and i think eltonsaid at the end of it, he said that you should becomean executive producer on this, right up your street, andhe said if you want me to do anything just give me acall, and passed on his numbers. and then a few days lateri had a call from t bone and he said i've been talkingwith a film guy for a few months about he wants to do amusic related project
and i brought hima lot of ideas. he didn't seem interestedin any of them. and i mentioned thatyou had come into the studio the otherday, he wants to meet you. so we went down to santa monicaand it was robert redford, and so i presented that to him. >> allison mcgourty:and he loved it. he said this is, i think this isamerica's greatest untold story. and he gave us hisoffices so we could kind
of finish our writingthere, so we essentially -- >> bernard macmahon: yes,it was like, it was almost because you're presentingthe whole idea of the film, just like having ascreening in front of a really tough audiencebefore you shot a frame, you know? and then when we came up withthe idea to actually do kind of a proof of theory film, whicha full film is essentially -- i've always had an issuewith historical films,
where a feature isbased on supposition of what may have happened. and i think that the practicalemploying of the ideas or what took placeis really important to understanding whatactually did take place. and if you actuallydo something, for example you could afilm in 100 years' time about the apollo missions, butif you were to actually rebuild that rocket and go to the moonthere would be innumerable
things you'd learn about whatthey must have done that aren't in any books and that noone alive would remember. and that was the purpose ofthe full film was to rebuild that machine and then record onit, and this was basically how, the way we communicatetoday at the end. and every, all the soundon these cameras here, all that technologycomes from this machine that no one had seen before. now, and so i felt we approachedchad white, i think we wrote
to him because we thought hewould be a good person to come and arrange and producethose sessions. i got the impressionhe liked working with analog here, which we did. and so i think i wrote him ane-mail, i think it was e-mail and i dropped him a line,i think i said something like i have a photograph of somehouse from 1929 and film footage of sleepy john estes from 1938. i think he wroteback in a minute.
>> stephen winick:it's a good book, yes. >> bernard macmahon: yes, yes, imean in his world that's catnip. >> stephen winick: yes, yes. >> mary sue twohy: so at thevery beginning of american epic, setting the scene in the1920s, you hear the voice of robert redford and he says,when america first heard itself. i love that phrase, can youdescribe just what that means? >> bernard macmahon: well, it'scoined by a dear friend of mine, charles shala mari @.i said, can you sum-up
in one sentence whatthis film is about? i talked to him aboutit many hours. and he goes, let me think. the first time americaheard itself. and, of course, as always hewas completely on the money. i like, i'm fascinatedand we both are with the beginning of things. i mean my first love wasearly american cinema where the language is beinginvented, from the teens,
the '20s, the early '30s. >> stephen winick: right. >> bernard macmahon: asyou go through silent and the early talkies,because that's where as a filmmaker youlearn the language of film. and similarly inmusic, this is the point that everything isbeing invented. but really the phrasecomes from the fact that, as i told charles, up untilthis point the vast majority
of america were notcommunicating with each other. the people living in theappalachians and in louisiana and in new mexico, therereally is no communication. we didn't have talking pictures, there isn't coast-to-coastradio, so these records when they first appearedwere a method that a woman picking cotton in mississippi could communicateher ideas about her life to the rest of america.
and it was the first timein the history of the planet that the poorest people in thecountry were given a platform on a nationally distributedmedium to express themselves. and it was for entirelycommercial reasons, they just wanted --the guy, the record men like ralph pier @wanted to publish songs, to own the words and the music. so they insisted if you showed up that you brought stuffyou'd written yourself
or at least did thecourtesy of adapting songs and sticking a few ofyour own words in it, but basically it meantfor the first time all of this incredibleautobiographical material. the other factorwas that the crisis that the record companieswere facing from radio in the cities was soserious that they needed to move really quickly. and so they were goinginto territories,
cajun being a perfect example, where they couldn't understanda word they were singing. french people couldn'tunderstand what they were sang. it's perfect french, but thepronunciation is so strange. but if they found after testsessions there were a few thousand people thatwanted to buy that record they'd go backagain and record more. and so they weren't editingor affecting the content of that material, they wereletting people do what they
wanted to do, and as longas it sold they carried on recording more of it. >> bernard macmahon: and so,yes, you had this freedom of speech, this platformfor people to come out, and these are people -- i meanimagine if you were working on a plantation ordockery and suddenly you're in this tiny ruralcommunity, you can't leave and suddenly you're on a recordthat is being distributed around the wholecountry and that people
to this day are still covering. >> if that isn'tfreedom of truth with speech i don'tknow what is. so that, i think that's why it'sthe first time america heard itself, and it actuallybecame a model as to how the world hearditself because the rest of the world picked up on that. >> allison mcgourty: andthey were writing songs about their everydaylives, their love lives,
local politics, stories of -- >> bernard macmahon: yes. >> allison mcgourty: you know,murders in their local town, and it was a method of -- >> allison mcgourty: sharingtheir stories with the world. >> bernard macmahon: and thething that's different is the library of congress i meanorganized these, you know, with john lomax theseamazing recording trips. these are noncommercial trips.
>> bernard macmahon: andthere's a huge amount of value many years later ofbeing discovered from the songs and things that wererecorded in these trips. but this i thinkwas an even more or a much more exciting thing because these were commercialrecordings, people wanted these to be heard by as manypeople as possible. they drew amazing adverbsdepicting the lyrics of the songs.
the idea was to get thisin front of as many people, and so it really meant that youhad blues musicians listening to country musicians,country musicians listening to blues musicians,hispanic musicians listening to cajun musicians, everyonewas hearing everyone else for the first time. so it kind of -- itbasically made american music and communication way richer. >> stephen winick:so is there a way
that particular challengesinvolved in making what's essentiallya visual film about sound? >> bernard macmahon:almost impossible because when we started therewas literally no archive at all. i would say half -- the figure,at least a third of the subjects of our film there was noknown photograph of them when we started, so thatmeant there might be -- there may never be aphotograph of them. we researched over 100 musiciansand groups that recorded
and whittled it down to10 for the film, but, yes, it was an enormousdetective job and so. >> allison mcgourty: i remember[inaudible] it looks here like we've got areally good radio show? >> allison mcgourty: becausethey were so [inaudible] at that time of any ofthe artists that we wanted to tell the story of, so findingenough material for bernard to make the film with. >> bernard macmahon: yes, soit involved going through,
now i'd say probably, i wouldsay it's the biggest archive in the world of materialrelating to that era in terms of the stills thatwe have and the audio and the private tape recordingsof these people speaking and all the documentation,along with the machine, itself. but i think it started actuallyas a kind of just a fascination with trying to track downsome of the people, you know? so i think one of them was,i love this song henry lee by dick justice, yes, andso i started running --
i wanted to find him. >> allison mcgourty: it wason the charts at the time. >> bernard macmahon: yes,it was in the charts. >> allison mcgourty: nickhaive @ and pt hovery @. >> bernard macmahon: and so ijust started running stories in all the -- he was believedto come from west virginia so i just started runningstories in local papers in west virginia in the miningcommunities because that was all that was known of him, thathe might have been a miner
from west virginia. and then must have run aboutsix stories and i ran one in the paper called the loganbanner and that resulted in the editor callingme and saying, an old man has left his number, and it was a guy called billwilliamson, a lovely man. and he said, i knowdick justice's daughter and she's quite elderly,but here's her number. and so i called her up and shewas really shocked to get a call
from england about herdad, and she had no idea that her dad's songshad been covered and were known around the world. and she talked about himgoing down in the mines and how the musicians hadauditioned over the telephones to record companiesbecause they couldn't get to the standard auditionseveryone else went to. and she said, she revealed sheonly had one picture of him, which was this embossedplaque that's in the book.
and i think we arrangeda car to travel 100 miles to this little community topick-up the picture and take it to the nearest placethat could photograph it. and i called bill back tothank him and he said, well, my dad was also in the group and they were called thewilliamson brothers in curry @, and i knew them, they did thefirst every john henry recording and he had all theseincredible stories. and i think we started lookingfor some more people and after
that allison said theyshould be made into a film, this is the last time thesepeople are going to be alive that can tell the story. and then with our producerand co-writer, juke @, we started in earnestto really track down the musicians wepersonally felt the strongest connection with. >> stephen winick: yes, i meanone sort of heartbreaking moment in the film is whenyou're talking
to i guess it's dick justice'sson and he says, you know, i never even knew that myfather had recorded these songs, i knew he played thepiano and sang in church but you'd think i wouldhave heard him sing one of these songs at some pointin his life and i never did. >> bernard macmahon: yes,yes, one of the things that was most beautifulabout doing this film, something i never expected,was that we would be going into communities and meetingfamilies that didn't know
about these records but theyknew about them playing music, maybe locally, or that theyhad an interest in music. and so you would often sometimesbe playing these records to people for the first time. and so what was amazingto me was that we were bringing somethingthat they really wanted, too, and they were giving all thisamazing memories and stories, sometimes i think theoldest interview was 104. so we were catching thesepeople before they moved
on to the next world. >> bernard macmahon: and thatwas the most pleasing part was to give all the researchthat you had put together, including the music to that andthen telling you the background of what they knew about it. >> mary sue twohy:one of the themes of american epic is howrecording technology has changed the world in terms of radiofor one and then of course, you know, the technologyof recording music.
>> bernard macmahon: well,yes, i mean that's -- the film is likeis multifaceted, it deals with a lot of things,i think is equally important and the technology is asimportant as the content, in fact it defines the content. and we in this moment here ourconversation is being shaped by the limitations of beingrecorded and sitting on a chair with a mike and what have you. and there the thing about thisrecording machinery was this
machinery, when you work with this recording systemit favors small groups, vocal led groupssound good on it, and guitar bass thingsparticularly. the microphone likes it. so our sense of it is that theemergence of the small group, be it a popular group, a countrygroup or even a jazz group is because that was sadlygiven that machine. and whereas opera and thatkind of music was much bigger
in the acoustic era when youwere singing and shouting into a horn because youneeded huge amounts of volume. this, in '26 when this machinewas invented it allowed you to capture very subtlenuances, and so performers that were singing very quietly and performing delicatelycould be captured on it. and then people actuallystarted to exploit that that sounded really goodand the intimacy of this. and so, yes, i think itfundamentally shaped the way all
music is to this day and nowrecording technology that's followed on from it. but most really hardcoreengineers consider the technology today inmany ways inferior, in recording technologythe purer it is, the less parts you're moving through between thesignal coming in and the end product the betterand this is very simple. so people that are really bigaudio buffs would love this
amplifier for its simplicity. but, yes, i think it shapedthe way we communicate. and this is the reallyinteresting thing in relation to say what we'refilming here today, hollywood had been resistingfor years putting sound on motion pictures butthey relented in '27 with and i think one of thefactors in this was that this machine was puttingelectrical sound recordings all around america in thecheap, in the poorest homes,
where the peoplewould listen to them on little wind-uprecord players. and i think this amongst otherthings is one of the factors that allowed western electricto go back to hollywood and go, how can you not havesound on talking pictures? you have the wholecountry listening to electrical soundrecording, you know? so it's impossible to evenoverstate how important this machine is to how wecommunicate today.
>> stephen winick: so you talkedabout the small group and one of those sort oficonic small groups from that era wasthe carter family. so what do you think is --there've been a lot of books and other things writtenabout that particular group, what do you think is your take on the carter family that'sdifferent in this film? >> bernard macmahon: well,that's it's a female group. we're not taking anything awayfrom a.p. carter in the film,
but if you listen to interviewswith sarah and maybelle, and we've been througheverything that exists as far as we know, they found a lotof songs themselves and a lot of the early repertoirewas theirs. and essentially it'sa female duo, i mean a.p. is often no presenton a lot of the recordings. >> bernard macmahon:and they often joke that he would justwander off in the middle of a recording session andjust look out the window.
>> bernard macmahon: and sothe carter family struck me as a female group andthat in itself in 1927 and in the country mediumis an unusual thing. and it's a pretty immenseproduced female group, it's like a strongpowerful female group. so i think that was theshading on the story. i'm now literally -- the waywe approached these stories was just we wanted tolet the families that knew these peopletell these stories
in their own words. and our sense was thathistorians in places like new york, some of who mayhave never have visited the appalachians, like my kentuckyfriends always tell me it should be pronounced, there would beall these theories and concepts about what would happen. and so after we traveledextensively in america we feltthe appropriate thing to let families themselvestell the stories.
and my feeling wasi just wanted -- we just wanted the viewersto feel what we felt was when we spent timewith these people. and if you're with the sonof somebody that has grown up their whole lifewith this person, not only do they have a lot oftheir father or their mother in them, they oftenspeak like them, they often think like them. and this is the closestway for another person
to touch the beatingheart of that story, when that personis long past away. and so our sense waslet them tell the story. and so really the stories as they are really how theysee them is an accumulation of how they depict that. and so i think our sense ofthe carter family story was that it was very much that hewas the driving force in terms of getting them the session,
but it was a female groupessentially in terms of records and its performance. >> stephen winick: interesting. >> mary sue twohy: how didyou find the connection between elder birchand dizzy gillespie? >> bernard macmahon:want to do this? >> allison mcgourty:yes, but you do it. >> bernard macmahon: well,all these stories come out of a particular record.
and i think we become --if you saw a beautiful girl or a handsome dashing manwalking along the street you'd become curious aboutthem, you know? and it's that kind of, it'sthe music that draws you in. and so if you're interested,i heard this record, my heart keeps singing, and ijust thought it was one of -- just this beautiful,beautiful record. and i thought if we do a gospelpiece in the film we have to put this song, my heartkeeps singing, in there.
it was only a few years laterthat taj mahal explained to me why i loved that song. i grew up in a west indianneighborhood in south london. and he said, this comesfrom saint kitts this song, this is a caribbean song orthis is a west indian song. if you didn't know the song, hesays, it's the style of singing. and i listened to when i grew upas a child listening to reggae, and i went, oh, my god,that's why i like this. it sounded like the songs thatmy jamaican friends would play,
their parents would play. and so i love this song andthis voice in me said we need to put this song on the film, but we need to at least knowsomething about who made it. and all that we had wason the record label, it said elder j.e.birch and congregation. and i remember asking around, all the different people i couldfind that were into gospel music and nobody had heard of birch.
they knew him, theyknew the name, but no one knew anythingabout him. and so i went to the sonyarchive in the basement of sony records and wentthrough their recording ledgers. >> mary sue twohy:what was that like? i mean did you have to goin an elevator, down floors? >> bernard macmahon: yes,it's deep in the basement. >> allison mcgourty:yes, exactly. >> bernard macmahon: and, yes,and it is these rows and rows
of boxes containingthe recording ledgers of each session, soat these sessions back in the teens even there wouldbe someone with a typewriter that would be typing upthe songs that were done and making notations about it. >> stephen winick: and thankgod that they did that. >> bernard macmahon: yes, andeventually i found in this box, birch, and it listed the songsand there was just one piece of information in the corner, itjust said turola @ misspelled,
north carolina i think itsaid, south carolina i believe. but anyway and there was noindication what that meant, often it was a place, andthere was no indication that birch had come fromthere but it was all we had. and so i think one of thereasons that doing this for the library of congressis appealing to me is i want to say this, thisproject was only possible because of librarians becauseanytime we found an obscure town the first thing we'd dois call the town library.
and librarians are the mostuniversally helpful people at trying to find theperson in the town that might know whatyou're trying to find. and librarians also seem toget very curious about the call from england about a member of their communitythey've heard of. so that's a big -- i justwant to say that if it wasn't for the librarians of americathere wouldn't be an american epic because so many ofthings were unearthed
because of a genial elderlyold librarian that kind of -- but never heard of him. [laughter] and let'sfind out about him, somebody in london knowsabout him, you know? so anyway we went to turolaand nobody knew anything about birch, and eventuallywe were told to speak to an african-americantown elder. and we went over tothe poorer part of town and we met this lovelyman, ted bradley.
and bradley remembered birch. >> allison mcgourty: hewas lovely, too, wasn't he? >> bernard macmahon:he's a gorgeous man. >> allison mcgourty: he justhad the shine about him. >> bernard macmahon:he really did, yes, he's one of the greatflowers of america, you know? wonderful fellow. >> allison mcgourty: we'dbeen there for two weeks. we first, it was our eveningbefore we were leaving we were
having a farewell dinner andwe failed in our mission, we hadn't found any leads. and we walked intothis restaurant that was only open a coupleof nights and somebody put us in touch with one of thepeople that worked there, made a phone call andsaid, oh, you need to stay, this person knows him. and so we extended our flight and that was the next day wewent over to the other side
of the tracks andmet ted bradley. so it was just inthe nick of time. >> bernard macmahon:yes, and so -- >> mary sue twohy:and he knew birch? >> bernard macmahon: yes,and he'd gone to that church and he described thatthe church was this kind of raw looking affair andthat he was not a sanctified church member. and so he said he would havebeen punished by his parents
if they'd known as alittle boy he was sneaking into this church, but the musicwas so good he was drawn to it. and he mentioned thatthe music was so powerful that white peopleafter they had been to their church would all sitin their cars and the trees around the little wooden triumphchurch that birch had built with his bare hands and listento the music all afternoon. and so it brought the white and black members ofthe town together.
and birch was one of the people that set-up the naacpin south carolina. and turola became quite anemancipated town and i think that church was a bigfactor in spreading, connecting the races together. and so but we still didn'thave a photograph of birch, and we were then introducedto ernest gillespie and he was a friend of tedbradley and ernest had also as a little boy snuck intothat church and listened
to all the stompingand the shouting. and he, when we met,he said, well, you know who was reallyinfluenced by this music, it was my cousin who livednext door, dizzy gillespie. and he pulled out this, hepulled out this autobiography by dizzy, it waslong out of print and no one has ever seenthis connection in there, and said look inhere and he talked about birch's church beingthe big inspiration for him
and going to hear, that's wherehe understood about rhythm and melody and spiritualtransport through music through going to that church. >> stephen winick: yes,i think that was kind of a really great moment in thisfilm because it really is true that elder birch's recordingsare known among the sort of record officiantsand, of course, dizzy gillespie isrevered among everyone who studies american musicand the connection was there
to be made but nobody madeit before because he wrote about elder birch in his book. so it was great that youfound that and were able to bring that out in the film. >> bernard macmahon: exactly,yes, and i think it's just -- so i think what i likedabout the story and the story for the audience was that inyour own communities there are those little pieces of string that if you start pullingthem could easily lead
to a story like this. >> bernard macmahon: andthey're all over america, and this is an example ofa guy that's just known for this one record but it transpired he was apivotal influence upon the most important musiciansof the 20th century. yes, i think so, and the josephkekuku story is the same. >> stephen winick: well, i wasjust going to ask about that because the kekuku story hasbeen somewhat known among
ethnomusicologistsand the like and many of them don't actually think heinvented the slide in the sense that it's part of african musicand so a way for it to get to the blues that's more obvious than hawaiian music would bejust through african roots, although obviously the styleof playing steel guitar or something that he did invent. so what is your take on thatand on the slide question? >> bernard macmahon: well, itdoesn't, the steel bar played
on the guitar, but it doesn'texist in any form that i'm aware of before he started playing it. and the earliest record ifound of it was in the '30s, a musician called c.s. delorno@ wrote in a track on a guitar and banjo, published in britain,and he recalls kekuku talking about when he came up with theidea and how he propagated it. and that's by far theearliest writing about that. and then the firstever book in the teams of slide guitar playing is --
or steel guitar playingis by myrtle stumpf @, and she was one ofkekuku's pupils. so i'm just, i'm not awareof that and i'm not aware of anything that proceeds it that is played ina similar fashion. and then the other thing toremember as well with this is that there's no way to beabsolute about these things, and i think that's a kindof a desire of historians is to be an absolute truth.
oftentimes you canhave situations where two people are working on the same scientificproblem solving or theory and on opposite ends of theworld, and one may popularize that theory before the other. but in this instanceit's pretty clear that after the world's fair in san francisco there wereextensive tours organized all across america with tootspaka that kekuku played with.
and the newspaper, if you gothrough the newspaper cuttings through the teens you can seethis tour going everywhere and it's a big sensation. there's no musician that weworked with that we tracked down that has as muchpublicity as kekuku has, which is incredible givenhow until this film came out he was largelycompletely forgotten. but that tour was organized by abig theater promoter at the time and it meant thatthousands and thousands
of people heard thatmusical style. and kekuku toured europeand around the world. he played in the birdof paradise show. >> bernard macmahon: and ibelieve that is how people heard that music and i thinkthat's how that playing got to the delta, people in thedelta heard those, that -- when the toots paka's grouptoured there they heard that music and wantedto do it themselves. and really if you look at it,
if you see someone playing itit's not that difficult to do. if you play guitar and youhear this incredible sound that is made simply just byflipping the guitar on its side and then running a beltacross it i mean most people or musicians would goback and go let me figure out how we did that, you know? and it wouldn't take verylong to realize you just need to raise the strings upand get a smooth object. so i think really thosetours are what propagated it
around america. and then i'm not awareof any other musical unit that was spreading that idea. because by the early '20s, youknow, hawaiian music was one of the most popular forms ofmusic in america, so there's no, any evidence whatsoeverthat points to anyone other than to kekuku as being theperson that propagated that. so i probably did thisbackwards, but i should say that the kekuku storyis about joseph kekuku,
a great hawaiianguitarist who is said to have created what wecall hawaiian steel guitar and also steel guitar ingeneral coming through that and that's i think undisputed. the only question amongethnomusicologists has been whether another form of slideplaying existed with the guitar, which would have beenessentially bottleneck slide playing on one string as opposedto across all the strings, and that's something
that ethnomusicologistskind of argued about. so i probably didthat backwards, i should have had you tellthe kekuku story first and then just bringup that point, but it is in a way a minorpoint in the sense that all that you are sayingis it is undisputed that he started what wethink of as steel guitar. >> bernard macmahon:that would be fascinating if someone presented a recording
or serious documentation showingsomebody using a smooth bar on an upturned guitarprior to kekuku. if such documentation existsit'd be fascinating to see it. there's no doubt he invented -- i've always foundthe distinction between the steel guitarplayed on all the strings and the bottleneck, i don'tsee a huge difference, myself, between them in terms ofthe concept is the same. >> bernard macmahon: but, yes,
i'm just not awareof anyone doing it. who do they cite asbeing the person that -- >> stephen winick: well, essentially what they cite isthe fact that slides are used in african music on a wholerange of stringed instruments, including musical bows, andthe diddly bows were known in the south, and so amore obvious way of getting to the bottleneckslide in southern, african-american music wouldhave been straight from africa
as opposed to it coming infrom hawaii, but there's no way to prove it because, as yousay, i don't think any recording of it, specifically aguitar, being played with a slide exists beforejoseph kekuku's recordings, so. >> bernard macmahon: yes,and all the countries, which is in the same regionsis clearly hawaiian based of the steel guitar. >> stephen winick: yes. >> mary sue twohy: what was it
like to hear the slideguitar on the recording? you had mentionedsomething about it just, it being a very good experience. >> allison mcgourty:oh, it was wonderful. and bernard discovered thisrecord with joseph kekuku, i think one of the earliestrecordings, i think it was from the late teens, wasn't it? >> bernard macmahon: well, asdelorno mentions in his article that kekuku had made,he'd appeared on records
with this group calledlayton and johnstone, which were an english,african-american group that went over to britain andstarted making these kind of musical numbers,all dressed in tuxedos, and the king was abig fan of theirs. and they said that he playedon three of their records, and everything he had said in his article ichecked out panned out. and so i went and isearched these records
and it took something liketwo years to find one of them, they were the hardestrecords to find. the internet is saturated withthe layton and johnstone records from britain, butnot those titles. and eventually oneshowed up and we dubbed it and halfway through,the slide guitar, which is kind of incredible. so in the film webrought that to oahu and because no one has everheard joseph kekuku play
and played it to thefamily for the first time, so the first time anyone in oahuhad heard what it sounds like. >> allison mcgourty: andto answer your question about what it felt like, whenyou hear the music in the place that it came from it touchesyou differently, it feels right. so it sounds different inhawaii than it does in london, and we noticed thateverywhere we went with all the differentkinds of music in the place where the music wascreated you can tell,
you can sense it's right,that's where it belongs. >> mary sue twohy:wow, so the landscape and where it originatedwas really truly important? >> allison mcgourty: yes,absolutely, yes, so the rhythms. >> bernard macmahon: wecalled it geographonics. >> allison mcgourty: yes. >> bernard macmahon:that that music sounds like the place it comes fromand you can hear the landscape in the music and you can alsoonly truly understand the music
when you go to theplace it was made. so as a londoner you only everreally truly understand jazz, modern jazz when you're sitting in a new york taxicaband it's playing. that was the first timei understood jazz truly, i loved it but ididn't understand it. and the nature ofamerican music, the hopi songs i was fascinatedby them, but when i went to hopi, which is oneof the strangest places
on the planet i've ever visited,those songs certainly sounded like pop songs when i was there. i know they're scared songs,but they sounded catchy to me, and once i heard them at hopii started humming the songs. >> bernard macmahon:and i didn't, i couldn't even followthe melody line of the songs originally,they disinterested me, but once i'd been there in thatgeography and playing that song as we drove around or wanderedaround hopi i was like, oh,
this basically soundslike this landscape. >> mary sue twohy:that's fascinating. >> allison mcgourty: yes,[inaudible] talks about that as well in the other film whenhe talks about the cajun music and the [inaudible] that themusic reflects the environment in which it comes from. >> bernard macmahon: yes, cajunmusic, which is a little strange to other people's ears isreally commercial when you're in louisiana because itsounds exactly like the place.
>> bernard macmahon: so alittle weird, a little strange, going everywhere and swamps and strange thingscrawling out of them. this slightly odd music soundsexactly right there, you know? yes, and i guess that -- >> stephen winick: oh, yes. >> bernard macmahon:yes, so i think a lot of art is mirroringour environment and it's entirely affectedby the environment,
kind of responding, andso it's best i think. >> mary sue twohy: san antonio,texas, that became kind of a hub for record companiesin the 1920s, and that is where lydia mendoza@ and her family first recorded. you actually met with some ofher relatives and got to visit with them, can youtell us a little bit about that experience? >> bernard macmahon:the hernandez family, they're lydia's grandchildren,and they live --
yes, they live in san antonio. and the house, they'rewonderful, it's roger and ann -- >> allison mcgourty:ann mckinney. >> bernard macmahon:and their dad, fernando. and the house is almost partly like a shrine totheir grandmother. >> mary sue twohy: wow. >> bernard macmahon: sothey had more photographs and memorabilia related to her
than i think almostany other family we met in researching this film. and she had obviously been thishuge larger than life figure, and when you were with them theyalmost spoke in hushed tones about her as if she couldwalk in the door at any moment and go, what areyou saying about me? [laughter] so she was awoman that cast a long shadow and i really likethat, that's why i kind of wanted the audience, i hopedthe audience got a little sense
of that in the films,was this woman, she felt like shejust left the house and she died a long time ago. and so i found them really kind of really wonderfulpeople to hang out with. and i think i like theidea, i love the idea of all these different storiesbeing next to each other because i think americanculture, that's what makes americanculture really exciting is the
hispanics mix, the cajunsmix, the native americans, the african-americansand the hawaiians. so kind of it was like itwas almost like being hit by this emotional tsunamitraveling from these places because when you arrived to filmit would often be the result of many meetings, manyphone conversations, a really close relationshipbuilt with these people and then this explosion of themtelling the story on camera. and you'd be justinundated with all this stuff
and these new things they'dfound, and then you'd go on to the next placeand into their world. >> stephen winick: well, onething you might find cool is that lydia mendoza performed inthis building in 1977 or '78, i can't remember the exactyear, but she performed in the coolidge auditorium,which is right in the building where you're sitting here. >> bernard macmahon: this [inaudible] wasshe here for that?
>> stephen winick: it may havebeen, yes, it may have been. >> bernard macmahon: the jimmyfox @ inaugural, so, yes, that was -- yes, she was -- i'veforgotten the specific question about -- what was it about? >> mary sue twohy: well, wewere just kind of talking about how it wasmeeting with her family and you describedthat, but i also want to know about the dresses? she made her dresses anddid you see one on premise?
>> allison mcgourty:yes, she made the dresses and the family talked about howthere was always sequins all over the place. and i met the familyagain this year when we -- when i went down to san antoniofor the arsc annual meeting, and we invited the family in totalk and they got to see the cut of her story forthe very first time. >> mary sue twohy: oh, neat. >> allison mcgourty: withthe audience at that meeting,
so that was wonderful and thatbrought a tear to their eyes, but they were just so thrilledto have their family honored like that and havepeople remember, yes. >> bernard macmahon:yes, that's the best bit of the film is screeningit for the families and then getting the approvalof the people that it's about. i mean actually as afilmmaker that's the only, that's the thing youreally care about is that they think it'strue, you know?
and actually those familiesare very, they're very open, you know, the story doesn'thave to be sugarcoated, there's lots of toughbits to it. >> allison mcgourty: butwhat was it like in sedona, i didn't come to thatscreening with the hopi when you got their blessing? >> bernard macmahon: oh,yes, so i had invited lee, who is in the film, who is -- >> allison mcgourty: suvant @.
>> bernard macmahon: yes, andhe's a very, very senior hopi and to come -- theywere having -- the last screening at the sedonafilm festival, and i thought, well, let's do this, thiswill be an opportunity to show lee the filmbefore it airs. and we go to this theaterand i'm expecting it to be like 20 people thereor something. and it's absolutely packed andthe film director says, oh, we invited lee to a few things,
but he never comes,he won't come surely. and he shows up and he'svery friendly and goes in. i was sitting next tohim and the film starts and i was thinking thankgod i put the hopi story at the beginning of this filmbecause [laughter] i don't want to wait for 40 minutesfor his reaction. and i think about 10 minutesthrough he started laughing at something out loud andthen he kind of leaned over and tapped me onthe arm, like this.
and the screening was up there and it was a very kind,wonderful reception. and then someone was askingus questions and they ran up to the back of the theaterand put a mike in front of lee. and this is obviously avery big deal he'd shown up, apparently he doesn'tshow up at these things. and i said, whatdo you think of it? and he goes i thinkit's wonderful and i give it my fullblessing, you know?
that was a very meaningfulmoment. >> stephen winick: sure. >> bernard macmahon: and hewas very kind, he let us use -- we showed him all the footagewe were planning on using and gave his permission touse it, and so it was -- because i said, look, we've found some amazingthings you see in the film. the performance on the stepsof congress i said are we okay to use this, it's your call?
>> stephen winick: wheredid that footage come from? >> bernard macmahon: we, this was like anotherdetective story, like the whole film i suppose. i had basically -- i wasfascinated in this record, it was one of the firstelectrical sound recordings of native american music and iknew a tiny bit about the hopi and i know a very littlemore since i did that film. >> stephen winick: andit was called the hopi?
>> bernard macmahon:hopi indian chanters. >> stephen winick: okay,and the title of the? >> bernard macmahon: thetitle of the record was chant of the eagle dance andchant of the snake dance. and the snake dance is themost sacred hopi ritual and that is used tobring rain to the desert, so it is essential thatsong is for their survival. >> mary sue twohy:and it's a private -- >> bernard macmahon: entirelysecret, private ceremony.
so a friend of ours flew usto flagstaff when we found out about a hopi conventionthat was happening in flagstaff where all the hopielders were meeting to discuss preservingtheir language. they were worried that theyounger generation may stop speaking hopi. so we went there and met themand i met a hopi called satilla, and i played him the songs. and he said, well, that'snot the snake dance,
that's the eagle dance, and theeagle dance is not the eagle dance, that's the buffalo dance. >> mary sue twohy: sothey're inaccurate labelings on the victor recordingsfor the title of the -- >> bernard macmahon: well, they're entirely what the hopiwanted victor to call them. [laughter] but thefilm, the one thing about the hopi is they don'tfeel the rest of the world needs to know their business,
it doesn't really helpstuff for them, you know? so try to respect thatand it's a little message that we don't have tolook under every rock, you should let certainpeople be if they want to be, let them do their thing. they're certainly not in an area where they're botheringanybody, you know? >> bernard macmahon:they've chosen to be in the toughest place onthe planet or one of them.
so, yes, so i wanted -- so i started searchingaround for this and eventually i tracked down that billingsley @ was awhite guy that traveled the hopi and he had befriendedthem and lived the hopi, and congress were attemptingto ban the snake dance and they felt that if they couldban the snake dance it would basically pull theheart out of hopi. and that tribe, which wasresistant to being integrated,
were being messedwith, they felt, lee said if they could breakthe religion they'll break the tribe. and so they moved in congressto get the snake dance banned because it involves carryingsnakes in the mouths of dancers and they argued thatit was barbaric. it's not barbaric to snakesor anything, it's just, as lee puts it, it was amechanism that they saw of destabilizing the tribe.
and so billingsley,rightly or wrongly, decided that if he broughtthe hopi and toured america with them and showedtheir rituals. it would bring an acceptance that these rituals weren'ta threat to anybody. and so they went to victor andmade recordings, which i think to make them morecommercial they wanted it to be the snake dance, but obviously no white peoplehad any idea what they were
listening to. and so there was another dance. and then they brought them tocongress like a few weeks later, so they were on this tour. and i found newspaper reportsof them dancing on the steps of the capitol, and so reallyessentially it was purely a gut instinct that there might havebeen a newsreel camera there, and zero showed upuntil we eventually went through some archives in northcarolina that had thousands
and thousands of feet ofunused fox movie time newsreel. this is where theunedited newsreels went, things that weren'tcut into newsreels. and buried in there was footagefrom a fox movie time newsreel. >> mary sue twohy:that's amazing. >> stephen winick:that is amazing. >> bernard macmahon: soit was just an instinct, and i think someone mighthave been there with a -- actually i found a still,a picture of the crowd
and the crowd was huge,which i show in the film. i found that and thatin itself was a eureka. and then looking at itafter it's like it has to be a camera, a movie camera. and that was still silent film,but i think the camera there. i was going through thething with a magnifying glass and i couldn't see amovie camera, but yes. >> stephen winick: did youshout when you found it? >> bernard macmahon: oh, my god,
and the footage yousee is stunning. >> mary sue twohy:it is stunning. >> stephen winick: it sureis, it's amazing footage. >> bernard macmahon: ididn't tell leo i was going to show it -- >> stephen winick: yes, it looks like it was shotyesterday except for being black-and-white. >> bernard macmahon: becauseit had never been used
since it was developed,it had never been in a projector before. it had never been transferred. so a lot of the footage in thefilm is like that, it's unseen. and so, yes, and so i thought when i interviewed lee ihad never even told him about the footage, i thoughti'll just show it, i'll show him that and see what he thinks, andlike he was very moved by it. he was obviously shocked becausehe'd heard about the event,
but he didn't think they'dactually done the snake dance there, he thought theyhad done a fake ceremony. >> bernard macmahon: thinking that white people wouldn'tknow the difference. and so he was moved to tearswhen he saw they actually had to do, they did the ceremony. >> bernard macmahon: and sohe felt that was something that the rest ofthe world should see that the hopi shouldn't havehad to do that in order just
to continue doing something thatthey'd been doing for so long. >> stephen winick: yes, soone of the connections for me that was really interesting just because it's not something youwould necessarily think of was to find out that charliemussel white @ was mentored by will shade @ ofthe memphis jug band. [laughter] so talk about jugband music a little and how that sort of dominatespart of that first film? >> bernard macmahon: i loveit, i mean i'm obsessed
with the memphis jug band. i see the memphis jug band aslike the first black pop group. i think they're absolutelybrilliant. i love everything about them. that was one story that was likewe're doing then, i don't care if there's nothing, we don'tknow anything about will shade, we're doing this group, peoplehave to hear this music. and it so obviously isa precursor of r and b, everything seemed that.
>> allison mcgourty:even skiffle. >> bernard macmahon: yes,absolutely, yes, yes, i mean. >> mary sue twohy: absolutely. >> bernard macmahon: imean that's what skiffle, they called it skiffleback in the '20s. >> bernard macmahon: i thoughtskiffle was something my mom used to like, you know? but, yes, that'swhere that comes from. and we all know the beatleswere a skiffle band or some
of them were originally. yes, so will shade. so then the question was how doi tell the story, there were no, there were like two picturesof will shade in existence and pretty much nothing else. there are a few fragments of aninterview that paul oliver did, but he really wasfor someone that was like a huge big musicselling artist with masses of records being covered by allthese people there was very,
very little known about him. and so i tramped with allisonaround memphis repeatedly trying to find anybody that knew him. i knew from the center'srecords, i found in the center's recordsthat he didn't have children, so that really makesthings very difficult. and there was nobodyalive that remembered him, even though he died in 1996. so something happens in memphis,
things get swept away unlikeany other city i've been to in america and youreally got the sense after three visitseven though in '66, which in historical termsnot long ago it felt like this is gone, this has justbeen it's like katrina has come in and just swept thisaway, any memory of this. all the houses where theylived were knocked down, the area he lived in. and so i was literally aboutto give up until my friend,
garth cartwright, anauthor in britain said, i think charlie mussoway @,a friend of mine, knew him. and i was like it justseemed too good to be true that a well-known musicianwould actually know this dude, after we tramped over the city. and i called charlie andhe went, my god, yes, two guys were my biginfluences in memphis, you know, it was will shadeand elvis presley. so charlie would begoing to this really,
really poor neighborhood andlearning to play from will shade and then he would go toa fun fair late at night that elvis presleyhad rented out. and i just thought,wow, the dichotomy between those twomusical worlds, you know? [laughter] but, yes, socharlie, and i just -- it felt to me likeit was a wonderful, that became a storyof mentorship. so a lot of these storiesare emotional stories
and the music is emotional. people can take all thisinformation now and go into much detailedhistorical treatise and pull all the bits together,but to me i love the story of this music beinghanded down to this boy that was visiting his house. >> mary sue twohy: andhe was, he was a boy when he first met will shade. >> bernard macmahon:he was, yes.
>> mary sue twohy: tell usabout where you filmed charlie when he was talkingabout will shade? >> bernard macmahon: all thepeople in the film are filmed on location in a place that isvery significant for stories, there are no interviewsthat are like we are, just to give us a backdrop. although we are in aspace, not like a studio. >> allison mcgourty:lydia was here. >> bernard macmahon: yes,this is a perfect a place.
but, yes, you're brought intoa studio and are interviewed. we want to interviewcharlie in a club that will shade would haveplayed in on beale street and all the clubs had beenknocked down on beale street, pee wee's, [inaudible] themonarch, which was owned by jim canane @,who was a big kind of mafioso type guy in memphis. old jim canane is the place. in fact, there's evena song on our box set
by robert wilkins called old jimcanane about going to that club and sniffing cocaine,very rough. >> mary sue twohy: yes. >> bernard macmahon:and will shade and the memphis jugband were the house band and we found thebuilding, and we peered into the building itwas a police station. >> allison mcgourty: the irony. >> bernard macmahon: butfor some strange reason the
downstairs of the clubwas largely untouched with the same walls and brick, and the police storedtheir bicycles there. and the upstairs floor wasthe actual police station. when we went into the policestation they were so bemused and intrigued of what thehistory of the club was that they let us basically emptyout the entire police contents of the ground floor and set-upa makeshift studio there. so, yes, we filmed charlieon the very club floor
that will would have played inin the '20s, yes, in the '30s. so, yes, all the films, allthe places are shot like that, you know, in the churchat sharore @, on the steps of maybelle porter's chop house. so really just as a filmmakeryour hope is to bring people to the place on a film wherethe story happened to be talking to the family and just to havea sense, to create a sense of what it would be like if youwent and met, spent an afternoon with dale jet @,sitting on his porch,
and he's telling you the story,and he's effectively bringing out the photographs and the filmclips and showing them to you. and that's all we wanted todo was to create that sense of you going into theplace where it happened. >> bernard macmahon: with thepeople that knew those people, their blood, and they'retelling that story. and if they don'thave blood, you know, they're protegees, you know? >> mary sue twohy: exactly.
>> bernard macmahon: andso, yes, and so i think with charlie it's emotivewhen you're in that place, when you're in that room, theemotions are strong, you know? and you could feel itin the way he talked, the way he sings his song. he knows that will wasin that room, you know? >> mary sue twohy: at onepoint he breathes in deeply and just sort oftakes in the air of the room and all its history.
>> mary sue twohy: andcompletely enjoys that moment. >> bernard macmahon: yes,it was absolutely real, history did that, youknow, he was like -- he knew what it meantto be in there. and i think it was we had a veryfunny moment, i really wanted to put in the film but it justcouldn't fit, was we wanted to go and visit willshade's grave and have charlie leave amemento for will on the tomb, a harmonica or some such.
and so we get to the cemetery where will is buriedoutside memphis and there is yellow tickertapearound the whole cemetery and just mountains ofpolice cars piled up. and we're like whatwent on here? and they go, thecemetery is a crime scene. [laughter] and charlieturned to me and went, only in memphis itwould be a crime scene. and i said to the policemen,
i said what do youmean a crime scene? he goes, well, the owners of the cemetery have been doingillegal things with the bodies, removing them, reburying them. >> stephen winick: i rememberthis story, it's crazy. >> bernard macmahon: i said whendo you think they'll open it? you know, it was like weexpect this to be a crime scene for another couple of years forhim to figure out all the stuff, like digging up corpses.
and charlie stoodoutside on camera and played his harmonica songto will, outside the cemetery, and he just said -- he looked up and he said this is a will shadejoke, he said he didn't come and see me enough when i wasalive, he certainly ain't going to come and see mewhen i'm dead. >> stephen winick: but thatrelationship between charlie and will shade kind ofbrings up another issue that i think is a sort ofan undercurrent to a lot
of the film, but you don'tget very explicit about it which is the question of race, that there was probablymore musical interplay among african-americans and whiteappalachian folks, for example, then is evident fromthe records, themselves, and yet there's also allkinds of racial tension and racial issues going on. and i mean an example thatcame up in the film was when mississippi john hurtwanted to hear his record
and his neighborplayed it for him and he stood outside the windowand listened to it playing through the window rather thanjust going into her house, as would be normal now. so how do you feel thatthe story of race is told through this music, as well? >> bernard macmahon:well, the records are not in themselves an entirelyaccurate representation, they're a piece.
talking to the oldmusicians, that you may recall in the film we interviewed thethree oldest blues musicians i the world -- robertlockwood and honey boy and holmes @. i thinkit was '98. and lockwood made it clear that those musicians would haverepertoires for white audiences, as well as black audiences,and that they were very fluent in country music and music thatwould appeal to white audiences. obviously, thereare white audiences
that enjoyed listeningto blues, as well. and i think that thoseissues are implicit in a film and being in that environment. i mean there's a momentthat i was discouraged by the broadcastthey put in the film, which was when charliepatton's relatives go to dockery and they meet bill lester,who is the owner of dockery, and there is this interestingand uncomfortable conversation where the current curator
of a plantation is tellingthe history of their relative to them on a plantationwhere the family worked. and i felt that that scenariowas enough to tell you about the interesting and uncomfortablesituation at that time. however, the mostimportant thing that the film is really about,and it's certainly the heart of what i've, we've come to feelmaking this film and traveling across america and meeting allthese people, i mean hundreds,
is that music is the onething that unites the races. music is like the, itis the communication that transcends everythingelse, and it's music that actually brings peopletogether and it's music that puts an african-american in a white person's home beforeany government decree or law or any book or newspaper. it's a record thatbrings those out and the record bringsthose ideas
and those feelingsinto someone's home. and how we appreciate othercultures generally is first through music. i mean before reggaetook off with bob marley, most people could have writtenwhat they knew about jamaica on the back of a postage stamp. it was music that made anawareness of the west indies, that's how we hearabout those cultures. and because generallyfilm doesn't,
from other culturesdoesn't penetrate to the same degreepopular music does. so i think music wasactually something that brought thesecultures together, and they're all listeningand playing with each other. i'm always bemusedby the kind of some of the really weird theories youread in books about this person and this person, it'snot as clean as that, everything is bleedingone into the other.
i mean you could certainly makea strong case that there's a lot of irish folk music in blues,and if you talk to someone like taj he wouldabsolutely agree with you. he would also probablysay that there's a lot of native american musicin some of the delta blues because there was a lotof native american blood within the people, like patton,that were making that music. so there really isa huge comingling, i mean every singleafrican-american blues performer
was a massive fanof jimmy rogers, i mean they all hadjimmy rogers records. >> bernard macmahon: you sawjimmy rogers' records were advertised in all theafrican-american newspapers at the time. so there's a big crossover. it's just the thing that foolspeople is it's not always the people that you would think, liking the thingsyou would think.
i remember yearsago meeting some of these early hip-hopartists from the '80s and they basically thoughtgary newman was a god, gary newman and [inaudible]. >> bernard macmahon:now they're not into some white dudethat's doing soul music, they're into a white guy that'sdoing some robotic schtick that is about as far away from african-americanculture as you can get.
and we tend to be drawn tothings that are really different and look differentfrom what we know. and so i think it was -- ijust thought it was amusing that there was that, thatthere's always been a comingling of those culturesand those ideas. so i kind of think thatwas really it for me. the film is about saying allthese radically different cultures are in the samecountry, that's why america is such an incredibleand beautiful place.
and we had actually the mostwonderful luckiest experience of a lifetime to be able totravel in a really deep way through all thesedifferent bits of america. and i decided to go,when you get from -- when you travel from new yorkthrough the appalachians, you know, down into mississippi,louisiana, texas, hopi, then over to hawaii, the ideathat one person in washington, d.c., the president ofall this, is mindboggling. >> mary sue twohy:yes, absolutely.
>> bernard macmahon:it is staggering that all this is actuallyunder this is one country. >> bernard macmahon: andthat's an incredible thing. and, as we said, when youtravel america you see parts of old britain, wherewe came from, untouched. and you see people with oldbritish cultures, you know? >> allison mcgourty:especially in south carolina when i was down there. >> mary sue twohy: i hear,too, in west virginia.
>> mary sue twohy: iwanted to bring up, maybe this is a good time, theimportance of gospel music. it's kind of central, essential-- can you talk to that? >> bernard macmahon: well,it's spiritual and i think that spiritual music has apower to it and an energy and a passion thatyou can't approximate in the secular world. and i think an examplepeople will appreciate, i grew up listening tolittle reggae music as a kid
and since the rastafarianismthe religion has gone out of the music and it's becomedancehall i just don't think the music has anywhere nearthe same commercial and global reach it once did. what people were drawn to, people didn't reallyunderstand rastafarianism, but they were drawn to thespirituality of the music, the fact that thepeople singing it, whether it was winstonrodney and burning spear,
or bob marley, had thisabsolutely unshakeable passion and belief in whatthey are projecting. and that spiritual belief iseven more powerful than being in love with your partner,it's a higher thing. and so i think these preachersin the south were fundamental to the emancipation of theafrican-american people, as they told me,and those preachers, those church serviceswould last the entire day. i'm repeating what ted andthe guys there would tell me.
and a lot of the time people atbirch would be up in the pulpit and they would be talkingabout issues, social issues that related to themand being proud and standing up for themselves. i mean birch came back and he -- we met an old lady that was tooold to interview for the film, she was like 98, wasn't she? >> bernard macmahon:and she remembered birch in the '20s building the church,
when she was a littlegirl, with his bare hands. and so he would be standingup and he would be the person that would be puttingforward those ideas about how there was equalitywas needed, how people needed to stand up, how they needed to, and the church was theirinspiration in that. and you can see,if you're trying to track these peopledown, when you're looking through the african-americanpapers,
like the pittsburgh courierand the chicago defender, all these people that levybird and birch is speaking to each other in thesecolumns in the paper and those newspapers, most people weredistributing those newspapers, like levy bird, in turola, theywere getting those papers sent and they were distributingthem on street corners because they wanted theirfellow people to hear those, read those words and find outwhat was going on in the cities.
i think the church, itwas incredibly important for those people, andi think in the kind of secular era we're livingin now i think it's easy to forget how importantthat spirituality can be. and i think, dizzy says in hisbook, i think he says something like the closest to the newtestament is those sanctified churches, which althoughchurches look down when people are reallylosing and getting into it. but if you go, ifyou see those kind
of performances youjust get swept up in it. i mean when we filmed, whenwe got all the triumph choir, members in the triumph choirfrom around america to come to the little church, it wasreally difficult to film it because it's reallyhard to concentrate on shooting something when that's goingoff in front of you. it's so explosive, theemotion that you have to be constantlypinching yourself
to remind yourselfto stay on point. so i think gospel music is,it's in the very kind of rubric of all good contemporarymusic, that it's not a -- it's a commonly known thing thata lot of the greatest rhythm and blues music came frompeople being in the church and singing in the church. and people sing better being inchurches, people that have sung in churches sing betterbecause they learned to sing out from a young age,so you project better.
so i think even on apractical physical, therefore, the church makes better singers. >> stephen winick: all right. >> stephen winick: so one ofthe reasons why we were keen to have you at thelibrary of congress and to show your film hereand to talk about the film was that there's footage fromour collections in the film. and i'm going to tell alittle bit of the story of some footage, whichthen you'll pick-up on
and tell the rest of it. so this is footageof honey boy edwards, whom you've already mentioned, who passed away afew years ago sadly. but this footage was madeby alan lomax in 1942 when he was doingrecording for the library of congress in mississippi. and he brought along a silentfilm camera, color film, and he filmed some of theartists that he recorded.
and out of this footage he puttogether a demonstration reel that he would takearound and show to people about what he haddone in mississippi, and other people brought thisdemonstration reel around, as well. and over time this reel gotvery ratty and the color faded, and it was labeled and we don'tknow who did the labeling, it was back in the 1940s. it could have beenalan, himself,
but it was probablysomeone else. and so the individual segmentsof this film were labeled and one of them waslabeled, charles edwards, which was not honeyboy edwards' name, his name was david edwards. and so we just assumedthat this was film of some buy namedcharles edwards, which would not have beenthat significant necessarily in the history ofamerican music.
but at some point our curatorof the lomax collection, whose name is tod harvey,whom you met a little earlier, tod had this insight and it wasactually i was the person he was talking to, we were sitting inthe reading room and he said to me, why would lomax filmthis guy playing the guitar but then not record hismusic, there's no recordings from anyone named charlesedwards in the collection? and i said, you know,that's a really good point. and we both sort of said, youdon't think they could be?
nah, couldn't be. [laughter] becausehoney boy had gone on to be a grammy winning artistand blues hall of fame and one of the great blues artists ofthe 20th and 21st centuries. so we, so i started, i wouldn'tlet this go, i kind of went and did a little legwork and i started reading bothlomax' accounts of his meetings with honey boy andhoney boy's accounts because he wrotean autobiography.
and the reason this wasdifficult to determine was that there was no otherpicture of honey boy known for 25 years after this event. even honey boy in hisown book had no pictures of himself to print. so his appearance had justchanged a lot in those 25 years and it was not immediatelyobvious that this was him. but i started to read theseaccounts and the hat was right and the thumb pick was right,and the guitar was right,
and i said this has gotto be honey boy edwards. so we bundled the filmtogether, we got a good transfer from the original whichlooks beautiful, as you know, and we sent it to michael frankwho had been honey boy's sideman and manager for many years. unfortunately, honey boy hadjust died a year before we made this, we had this insight. but we sent it to michaeland michael showed it to honey boy's stepdaughterand he communicated to us
that her immediate phraseon seeing this film was, that's my daddy, andso that's how we knew that that was honey boy. and then we were really tickledwhen you used this footage in the film, so explain how youused it because you synched it up amazingly withhoney boy's music, so explain how you used it andhow you found out about it? >> bernard macmahon: wewere, one of the things that got american epicstarted was michael frank.
a friend of ours, garth cartra@, who i mentioned earlier, had approached usand said you know that these three blues menare coming to a festival in the lake district to playand nobody knows about it, it's run by some wealthyguy and he just brings in blues musicians he likes and doesn't do anynational promotion, it's just the locals come. and he wanted to have thesethree oldest blues musicians,
and so i had found out thatmichael frank looked after all of them -- lockwood,homesick and honey boy. so i called michael and said,could we come up and film them? money will changehands if need be. and he said, sure. you know, i said,when are they free? he said, they're completelyfree, no one knows we're here. [laughter] far from the gig. and so that's, i'm surethat's how i met michael
and spent this entireday with all three of them interviewing each ofthem for a couple of hours each and then i think an hour or sowith all three of them together and we use a partof that in the film. and so then when you made thisdiscovery, which is amazing. this is very strange havingthis interview because this is like the genesis of theproject full circle, basically. >> allison mcgourty: wow. >> bernard macmahon: sothat's the very beginning
of the whole americanepic research was that, doing that interview. i did that because i thoughtthis needs to be filmed and one day i'll probablyneed it, that's why i shot it. >> stephen winick: andi'm really glad you did because honey boy is gone. >> stephen winick:and, you know? >> bernard macmahon: and ontop of it there's three guys, so the mountains ofother stuff they talked
about was just incredible. i'd just love to -- i thinkone day i'd like to put that up online sopeople can just watch it, it's really hilarious andthey go all over the place. i mean all these musiciansthey knew, but anyway. so michael calledme and he told me that you'd made this discoveryand that he knew we were going to do a piece, this isafter you'd found it, and said i can speak tothe library of congress
and get permission for youto use it in your film. so i was kind of over themoon that this had turned up, and then i spoke to tod. and it just seemed to -- it was like one of thosemoments it just seemed to good to be true, it seemed staggeringthat someone had shot this. >> stephen winick: it seemedtoo good to be true to us. >> stephen winick: and todreally had that great insight that it's got tobe something other
than what it appears to be. >> bernard macmahon: soit had something about it. as i said, you would havethought it had been done the same day he'd beenrecorded, but it wasn't. >> bernard macmahon: and idon't know where i heard this, but i was told that when lomaxwas shooting him he wanted to record him and thathoney boy had said something to the effect, i'm making toomuch money on this corner, come back another time, andthey arranged another time.
but i don't know where i -- ihave to say it wasn't germane to the film and i just don'tremember where i heard this, but generally thesethings power out, i remember they stickin my mind. however, i got a holdof all the recordings that lomax had madeshortly after he shot that. i think, was it aweek or two later? >> stephen winick:i think it was, yes. >> bernard macmahon: andi hired a lipreader to try
and decipher what he wassinging, couldn't do it, and then i hired anotherlipreader, couldn't do it, then i hired anotherlipreader, they couldn't do it. i got five lipreaders,all of whom i paid, until eventually ifound a lipreader that identified twowords that he was saying. and that, i went back to thetapes and i went, oh, my god, this is from army blues, oneof the songs he recorded, he was actually singingone of the songs.
and so an engineer,peter henderson, who said and i think it's army blues and i think the otherone is called west coast, was it waterfront -- it waswater blues or something, there's a fragment of that. because he's takingdifferent clips. >> stephen winick: right,yes, he shot the camera. >> bernard macmahon: two songs,the bulk of it is army blues. all right, peter henderson, whoworked on a lot of the sound
for american epic, is a genius,won his first grammy at 21, and he's a wonderful guy, hugeimportant figure in this film in terms of like always guidingus in the right approach. and i said, peter, youneed to synch this. and he went, you'vegot to be kidding? [laughter] and he just, he said, this guy has neverplayed the same song in the same way twicein his life. but he did a reallyamazing job of that.
>> stephen winick:a real good job. >> mary sue twohy: yes, he does. and so basically he'splaying the same song. and so it was incredible, it waslike this really amazing moment. >> stephen winick:yes, it's funny -- well, i mean that he was playingarmy blues, which was very much on his mind because whenlomax met him he was going off to be drafted, and the reasonthat lomax lost touch with him for many, many yearswas that he assumed
that he had been drafted but, infact, he managed to talk his way out of the draft byclaiming an injury. and that injury is a dent in hishead that he got from being hit by a bottle of sodathat was thrown at him, and that dent is one of theways that people were able to identify that thisactually was footage of him. so it all goes around. >> bernard macmahon: oh,that's incredible, yes. and then what was wonderfulthere was all this other
beautiful footagethat you transferred of kids dancing nearby,which we also used at the end of the film. and there's somethingvery touching about that, those young african-americangirls dancing in the field. and i love old photographsof people happy decades and decades ago and wonderingwhat happened to them. >> bernard macmahon: there'san innocence about it. yes, it's very emotional.
so for that reason wedecided in the film that there were quite a lotof dissolves between stills from the '20s and '30s, andthen we dissolved a footage of that same place. so we were all the time tramping around where we were doingthe interviews, is take -- i remember our line producerwould be constantly tamping his watch and we were trying tofind the exact location of where that still had been takenso i could match the frame
and that you could dissolve, sothat people could see how places in america looked thenand how they look now. >> bernard macmahon: and sothat's kind of the metaphor for walking by and just oras you walked past every door and every street justthinking for a minute what that building may have housed80 years ago, 100 years, who might have been in there andwhat they might have been doing. >> mary sue twohy: it's agreat segway to the question of how you meldedarchival footage,
i mean you said one way, dissolve into thecontemporary footage, but i'm sure there areother ways that you worked with both contemporary andarchival footage in the film? >> bernard macmahon: well,we developed a new technique that we invented for usingarchival footage, that a couple of really sharp cinematographershave spotted. but most people just go,it looks really nice, and they don't actuallyknow why.
>> stephen winick:that would be me. >> bernard macmahon: nowit's all scanned at really, really high resolution,sometimes as high as 8k. we went to greatefforts to ensure that everything was originalprints so that it felt as tangible as possible,like the music. but what we did with thearchive footage is one of the issues you have withhistorical documentaries is, and you see this in all ofthem, they do something --
on a film the aspect ratio,which is the shape of the image, has changed over the years. and now we were in a sort ofletterbox format for a film, but in the '20s and intothe '50s we were dealing with a 4-3 aspect ratio, which is essentiallymore like a square. and so what filmmakershave done in documentaries since there were documentaries in the modern format isthey punch into the footage,
now that is to say they zoominto the footage so that that image fillsthe whole screen. and i'm not knocking it,if that's what you like, but you are basically losinga massive amount of what that original cameramanframed up. and i think in historical things and in everythingcontext is everything, you need to see thewhole picture. so i like total truthin documentaries,
so i mean my view isjust you have the people, the family talking, you see thereal photographs and you show as much of everythingas possible. so what we did is we did atechnique called over-scanning, which is where we scan theentire film showing the frame. so this would normallybe cut-off, so you see the curvededges of the frame. and then we would scanthe leader of the film, which is like the blackleader which is the celluloid
or the nitrate before you getto the film, before you get to the actual images, andthat would be superimposed at the side of the screen, soyou actually have the grain of that film at theside of the screen. so basically the picture isnever retracting and expanding as it would when you're movingfrom contemporary footage to old footage, it isalways full screen. so you're not only seeing theentirety of the '20s picture with no cropping, infact, you're seeing more
than you would be seeingwhen it was projected because there would have beensome cropping of those edges, but also the entirepicture is breathing. and so we devised thattechnique to use this material so that we couldconstantly move in and out of the old and the new. and that was it really. and then the other thing isjust a sense of momentum. we shot the whole -- ishot all the interviews,
much to the chagrinof my cinematographer, on a slider or a dolly. that is a device thatallows the camera to move from left to right. and so this gentle movementis happening, but the idea is to mimic the feeling ofthe way your head looks when you're staring at somebody. if you're in a situationof conversation with somebody your head isnot held by a metal clamp
so you're unmoving,and you are moving and your constantlylooking around and at the sides of the people. so the sense was that notmore, yes, so essentially it's to mimic the feeling as if iwas standing on a porch talking to somebody, i would be lookingat them slightly from the left and right and it's to mimicthat feeling of being there, but it also createsa sense of momentum which interestingly enoughblends the old footage
with the new footage andthe old footage better. >> mary sue twohy: interesting. >> mary sue twohy:that's fascinating to me. >> bernard macmahon:that's just tricks of the trade i've nevertalked about before. >> stephen winick: well, ithink we're probably running low on time, so we should talkvery briefly about some of the related productsthat you've come out with in addition to the film, itself.
one thing that reallyinterests me is the box set, which you talkedabout the influence of the harry smithanthology in the film and this is sort ofa similar concept. how did you conceptualizethe set? >> bernard macmahon: well,the set is 100, maybe 100, as i mentioned 100 groupsor musicians were researched for the film across all thesedifferent genres of music. i wanted american epicto have all the kinds
of indigenous music in it that other sets beforehadn't included. and so the hispanic, theafrican-american, the hawaiian, i wanted all those thingsto be in it because they're such an importantpart of the mix, and so are the native american. and so in doing that and lookingat the artists that should be in the film we cameup with the idea of having what wethought were the hundreds
of the most powerful songs,performances from that era. it was a method of havingsomething people would really dive into and they couldexperience just how colorful this period was. and this is really a metaphor for how we shouldbe proceeding today. i mean what they were doing thenis what should be happening now. we should be embracingthat level. and actually the doorway hasbecome much more restricted
since that time in terms of whatgets in and what gets in front of the public or what'savailable to the public. and so this was a methodof saying here is hundreds of the greatest parts. and american epic isa film, it's not -- it's what we woulddescribe as nondidactic. it's not a scientific project,it's an emotional response to music and a culturethat we love and it's basically the reason,
it's the reason whywe love america. it's two bricks in one american,putting on to film what we love about america, and we'redoing it at the point when america really kind ofexplodes and comes into its own, which is the '20s, and the worldis still kind of in the throw of what america developedin the '20s. and so those songs, when youwatch the american epic films, the visual metaphor we use to convey how the film is beingapproached is an old record
album is kind of pulled off theshelf and we see the book open, and these were thoseold leather-bound books that people wouldput their records in. >> stephen winick: albums. >> bernard macmahon: yes, that'swhere the term album comes from, like a photo album exceptyou had your records in it. >> bernard macmahon:and years later, a few years later recordcompanies got the idea why don't you put someone's photograph
and have all oneperson's records in there. but before then you'd buythese leather-bound books and you'd put your singles,if you will, in that and that would becomeyour record album. and so you see that bookturning and you see the records and we zoom in on a recordand we hear the story behind that record, some are anartist you might have heard or many you willnever have heard. and the idea thatwe're suggesting is
that there are hundreds ofthousands of these records and here are 10 ofthese stories, go forth and explore yourself, becausebehind every one there may be a story like this. and so the book, the box set,is a method of going into 100 of those things and youcan start to extrapolate from looking at the film whatthe stories are about those. so the box set has i thinkit has lyrics transcribed for all the songs, which manyhave never been transcribed
before, and again in anemotional response as opposed to historical we have quotesfrom the artists or their family about every single one, thatwas incredibly hard to find that once you said, oh, we'regoing to do this for everyone. it was really difficult,and stills for most of them, i mean there's many,many people in there that music fans havenever seen before. but the big breakthroughis the sound. >> stephen winick: yes, iwanted to talk about that, yes?
>> bernard macmahon: that'sa huge part of american epic. in a music film or any filmsound is 50% of a movie, and yet sound is often a bigneglected part of features, it's like a poor cousin, it's a thing that's generallytossed off at the end. and so here when we had thewestern electric recording system and nick burgerand ginny had got that machine working we recordedall the contemporary artists on it first.
what was amazing was that i suddenly could hearhow the old records might have sounded because i washearing willie nelson or elton john on that machine. i in my mind's ear hear howjohn hurt was meant to sound, how those recordsmight have sounded, because we were the firstpeople in almost 80 years that were using this machinerythat made those records. and so i said, spoke to nick andsaid, look, how would you feel
about doing some serious r and d work using what we'velearned recording this to transfer these records? and nick being the highlyprofessional individual he is kind of put that off formonths and months and months, but he was -- he was actuallydoing it, he just didn't want to say he was going to do it until he figured he could makea significant improvement. and he said, okay, i'll do it,
but he'd actuallyfigured it out. and so he was able totransfer these old records and bring things out in themthat we never heard before, but the main thing isthey were really musical, the transfer soundedreally, really musical. they had a kind ofmusicality and nuance to them i'd never heardand there were songs, these songs weremaking me feel things that i had never felt before.
and so we asked himto get involved in transferring all the disks for the compilation,as well as the film. and what i noticed i'd neverheard before is that the trouble with the '20s music is thatthe disks they recorded to were often so gnarly andit's so difficult for people to know how to play them backthat the problem you have is after four or five songsyour ears get really tired and you can't listen toany more and you want
to put a modern recording on that's made ontape or something. here, on this box set, youdon't have that affect anymore, you can just listen to the song,song after song, they just roll into each other because theyhave a musicality of flow to them but theyalso have a clarity. and so the engineers, peterhenderson and joel teftella @, they did just insane amounts of work manually removing allthe clicks from these records
without putting them throughprocessing and stuff like this. >> bernard macmahon: soeverything sounds very open, like there's lots of air,you can really hear the room, you can just when you hear therecordings you can hear the sound of the record, theperformance as it echoes around the room thatthey're in recording it. >> mary sue twohy: and youactually have before and after of the recording to kindof compare the improvement? >> bernard macmahon: yes,i mean, yes, you can,
we can play an example of one ofthese disks how they would sound like if you transferredthem on a normal turntable and then we can play anexample of how they would sound, how they sound like now when they've beentransferred to the system. and, yes, so then -- >> allison mcgourty: and thenwe can play a reimagined version where we rerecord the song in the present dayon the same machine.
>> bernard macmahon: yes,the contemporary, doing that. but, yes, so there are 12,i think 12 album releases, there's the box set,there's a soundtrack, and then there are 10 artistsand genre compilations. so there's all of johnhurt's recordings, a selection of thememphis jug band stuff. yes, it's pretty -- >> mary sue twohy:it's productive. >> bernard macmahon: yes,it's very -- yes, yes.
>> mary sue twohy: and youhave your companion book, too, a beautiful, beautiful companionbook with all these photographs, it felt like a scrapbookthat's kind of done up right. >> bernard macmahon: and, yes. >> stephen winick: an award-winningbook we should say. >> allison mcgourty:yes, thank you. yes, we wanted to let thereader feel like they were on the journey with us,
understanding how bernard didthe research and what it was like to be traveling acrossamerica, meeting these people. >> bernard macmahon: yes,that's like kind of the -- we get asked a lot about makingthe films, and so the book is -- i mean all the parts are meant to be really essentiallysomewhat exclusive, so that's really the insight ofhow everything was put together and it's an opportunityto tell a lot of stories you can'ttell in a film, but yes.
>> mary sue twohy:and elijah walt. >> allison mcgourty:oh, he's wonderful, yes. >> mary sue twohy: youworked with him on the book. >> bernard macmahon:elijah is fantastic. he's like a scientistwith words. he's really, he was reallyhelpful, he came in and went through the iteration beforewe went to see redford with it and recorded it. and elijah has got awonderfully acute eye and ear
for exactly what thesentence is saying. because here, i mean youraised this thing about this, the question about theslide guitar earlier and where it came from, and i just presented theinformation that we found. i think it's not possibleto be absolutely right on any of these things. >> bernard macmahon: and sothere are statements you have to make in a film whereas emotionally to try
to tell a story and peoplein the room is we have to steer the audienceroom to room. and elijah was very helpful inhaving a line of iteration not to say more than itwas meant to say. yes. >> mary sue twohy: that's key. >> bernard macmahon: it'sreally, it's very important. >> mary sue twohy: weknow this in radio. >> bernard macmahon: yes, yes.
anything else? >> stephen winick: no. >> mary sue twohy:well, let's see. i think we covereda lot of ground. >> stephen winick: i thinkwe've covered a lot of ground. >> stephen winick: and ithink we have to get you over to the soundtrack so thatyou can actually get your movie screened tonight. >> bernard macmahon: okay.
>> stephen winick: so, onceagain, these are the producers and director andwriter of american epic, which was a series of filmsthat became a series on pbs. mary sue twohy fromsiriusxm radio, and my name is steve winick,i work here at the library of congress in theamerican folklife center. thanks very much. >> allison mcgourty: thank you. >> this has been a presentationof the library of congress.
visit us at loc.gov.
0 Comment
Write markup in comments