Blues Movies Reel Away the Blues Willie "Po Monkey" Seaberry looks across the cotton field beside Po Monkey's Lounge during We Juke Up in Here! filming. Photo by Lou Bopp
By Roger Stolle Even before the big blues of the Covid-19 quarantine of 2020, the Blues Festival Guide thought a feature on blues films might be of interest to y’all. Now that the pandemic has hit, all the more reason to check out these films to ease your stay-at-home blues. In this age of YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc., it’s easier than ever to access titles via streaming or physical product. In my past 18 years in Clarksdale, MS, I’ve had the pleasure (and at times, adventure) of co-producing four blues film projects, as well as 10 editions of our nonprofit Clarksdale Film & Music Festival (which is chock-full of blues docs and live music). Plus, I’ve become friends with many amazing filmmakers, mostly from across the counter at my Cat Head blues store. What follows is a brief journey through some of my favorite blues-related films (mostly documentaries), including at least one that helped alter my path in life and a few that created memories forever in my heart. Deep Blues Rocks My World One Friday evening in 1991, I was living in Dayton, OH, and looking through the local newspaper’s entertainment listings for the weekend… no Google back then y'all. At the Little Art Theater in nearby Yellow Springs, a film called Deep Blues was screening the next day… I was there. About five years later, I started seeing many of the film’s musicians perform at festivals and juke joints in Mississippi. And I met the director, Bob Mugge.
24
Blues Festival Guide 2020
At the risk of building up Mugge’s ego too much, Deep Blues is, to me, still essential viewing for anyone contemplating a blues journey to Mississippi. Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Big Jack Johnson, Lonnie Pitchford, Booba Barnes, Jack Owens and others totally deliver. There are definite quirks to the film (e.g. the delightfully hippie narration of music critic Robert Palmer and the eternally awkward appearance of rocker Dave Stewart), but they make the whole experience all the more memorable. A couple years after I met Mugge, he offered me a production assistant (a.k.a. “go-fer”) position for a new Mississippi blues film he was making, but I was a “Mad Man” in corporate America at the time and couldn’t do it. Ultimately, the film was called Last of the Mississippi Jukes, and while not as essential in my book as Deep Blues, it is definitely still recommended. It was reissued a couple years back with both the DVD and CD soundtrack packed inside, so look for that version. Deep Blues is currently “out of print,” but well worth scouring the web.
