Films

Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Episode 1, directed by Martin Scorsese (2003)

Our chosen segment of this Emmy Award-winning series uses rare archival Library of Congress recordings and footage gathered by John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s and 1940s to explore the birth of the blues from the hard-time experiences of black farmers and cotton workers in the Mississippi Delta. The film introduces the great early blues masters Son House, Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson, while also taking us into rural cabins and juke joints to hear contemporary blues musicians in Mississippi and Alabama.

Say Amen, Somebody, directed by George T. Nierenberg (1980)

This award-winning documentary classic focuses on three pioneers of the Golden Age of Gospel Music: Thomas A. Dorsey, Sallie Martin, and Willie Mae Ford Smith. Their stories reveal the origins of gospel in Dorsey’s marriage of blues music with inspirational lyrics and Martin’s contribution in bringing the new genre to national audiences. “Mother” Smith’s talent and vocal dynamism made her one of gospel’s most proficient soloists. The film’s rousing on-screen renditions of some of gospel’s classics reminds viewers of the power and sheer joy of this unique form of American music.

Overview: Tin Pan Alley, originally an area along 28th Street in New York City, became the center of American music publishing in the mid-1890s. Tin Pan Alley songs were sentimental, formulaic, catchy, and extremely popular. After the First World War, Tin Pan Alley accommodated the tastes of millions of new Americans who made the city the new center of a vital and flourishing popular culture based in the immigrant experience. Composers like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern—and songwriting teams like Rodgers and Hart—rose to the challenge of adapting popular songs to the demands of theatrical narrative and ushered in a golden age of sophisticated lyrics and melodies for Broadway productions.

Film

Broadway: The American Musical, Episode 2, directed by Michael Kantor (2004)

This episode of the Emmy Award-winning series focuses on the Jazz Age, Broadway’s most prolific era. In the 1920s, Broadway showcased the sweeping changes transforming American culture: new roles for women; the mix of social classes in Prohibition speakeasies; creative opportunities for African Americans in jazz clubs. The descendants of Jewish immigrants—including the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, and Rodgers and Hart—combined the syncopated rhythms of jazz with lyrics that established a vibrant, witty new American argot. Their music became big business and rode newly emerging technological innovation to unprecedented national influence.

Overview: Jazz, a form of music characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation, developed at the turn of the century around the same time as blues, gospel, and country music. Jazz’s popularity grew with the roaring 20s, but the height of its mass appeal was the swing era during the Depression and World War II. Crossing social, regional, and economic lines, swing jazz in the 1930s and 1940s became the music of an entire generation, featuring danceable big band music.

Films

Ken Burns’ Jazz: Episode 6, directed by Ken Burns (2001)

This episode from the acclaimed award-winning series picks up the story of jazz in the late 1930s. As the Depression deepened, swing jazz thrived. The saxophone emerged as an iconic instrument; Kansas City became the center of a vibrant new music scene epitomized by Count Basie. Basie refined his sound in New York City, where Benny Goodman held the first jazz concert in Carnegie Hall. The episode also tells the stories of Billie Holiday, Mary Lou Williams, and Ella Fitzgerald, women musicians who emerged on the jazz scene.

International Sweethearts of Rhythm, directed by Greta Schiller (1986)

This award-winning documentary tells the little-known story of a multiracial all-women swing band that became an international sensation in the 1940s. The band of sixteen young women grew to embrace members from different races and ethnic groups—black, white, Latina, Asian, and Native American—and many of the best female musicians of its day. Along with remarkable archival footage of the band playing in the U.S. and Europe, the film records the often wry and humorous recollections of its members about defying Jim Crow laws in the South and the sexism that they encountered in the music world.

Overview: Country music developed in the twentieth century against the backdrop of an economically struggling post-Reconstruction South, where uprootedness was a familiar experience for many. A wide variety of regional country music styles developed throughout the South and quickly travelled to the North and its cities, disseminated through records and radio in the 1920s and 1930s. The popular themes of country music explore the collision of older rural values and ways of life with modernization, urbanization, and industrialization. Bluegrass, a sub-genre of country that emerged in the 1950s, is an amalgam of old time music, country, blues, ragtime, and jazz.

Film

High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music, directed by Rachel Liebling (1994)

This lovingly realized documentary traces the history of bluegrass music, from its origins in the hills of Appalachia through the innovations that shaped its current form. Using haunting archival footage from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as toe-tapping recordings and performances, the film shows how country music enlivened and dignified the lives of the folk it sprang from. The film centers on the story of Bill Monroe, considered the father of bluegrass, whose musical genius melded the Scots-Irish traditional melodies of his childhood with new instrumentation and driving rhythm to produce the “high lonesome” bluegrass sound.

Overview: The birth of rock and roll in the 1950s is captured in the exuberant recordings of Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly, who sang songs about love, sex, identity crises, personal freedom, and other issues of particular interest to teenagers. By the early 1960s, the music industry was appealing to this lucrative new audience by creating and promoting teenage crooners like Pat Boone, Fabian, and Dion. Tin Pan Alley techniques—such as teaming lyricists with professional melody writers—were used profitably in the 1960s (for example, Berry Gordy’s string of Motown hit records). The rock music of the late 1960s helped fuel a protest movement against social injustice and the Vietnam War, spurred by the shift of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan from acoustic folk to electric rock. Mass music now incorporated new and timely subject matter. The late 1960s marked a period of corporate expansion in the American record industry, as the youth-oriented popular market branched into diverse styles—including psychedelic rock, hard rock, jazz rock, and folk rock.

Film

The History of Rock ’n’ Roll: Episode 6, directed by Susan Steinberg (1995)

This episode from the award-winning ten-part series on rock and roll centers on the reinvention of rock in the mid-1960s, when most adults considered it mindless music. Emerging from the folk scene in Greenwich Village, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan transformed what rock communicated. Dylan’s fateful meeting with the Beatles in England moved the British group toward greater experimentation with lyrics and led him to “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Susan Steinberg’s lively documentary combines thrilling performance footage with social and musical commentary from critics and musicians.

Overview: Mambo, a musical form that originated in Cuba, descended from European social dances and was flavored with rhythms from African folk music. Mambo migrated to America in the 1930s and rose to prominence in postwar New York City, where it picked up jazz influences and in turn influenced the 1950s jazz scene. Younger-generation musicians— departing from the traditions of mambo—blended it with rhythm and blues and rock and created salsa, which swept the country in the 1970s. Like mambo, hip hop—which was created by blacks and Puerto Ricans in the New York City slums of the 1970s—both reflected and defied ghetto status. Both styles have African roots, refracted through the Caribbean and the city.

Films:

Latin Music, USA: Episode One, directed by Pamela Aguilar and Daniel McCabe (2009)

The first episode of this series on the history of Latin music in America explores the origins of mambo. This Cuban hybrid of traditional danzón fused with Afro-Caribbean rhythms migrated to New York City in the 1940s, where it was further developed by the great barrio-born Latin band leaders of the time, including Perez Prado and Tito Puente. Mambo became a music and dance craze that swept the country and was eventually mainstreamed by television and the music industry. The film humorously explores how its popularity loosened some of the stiff social rules of the time, as its appeal across classes and ethnic groups integrated the dance floor and helped prepare the way for less restrictive social interaction between the sexes.

From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale, directed by Henry Chalfant, Elena Martinez, and Steve Zeitlin (2006)

This exuberant documentary celebrates the emergence of hip hop. In the ruins of the South Bronx, where the mambo had its heyday a generation earlier, hip hop was created and practiced first by Jamaican and African American youngsters, and then by Latinos, in abandoned parks and burned-out buildings. Break dance competitions and battles of songs and words redirected gang fighting into creative expression and brought a measure of fame to the most successful artists. Candid interviews with hip hop’s founding artists demonstrate how hip hop, like mambo before it, both reflected and defied the economic deprivation of its creators.