Blues Movies Reel Away the Blues by Roger Stolle

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.

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.

Barefoot Workshops Capture the Blues

I relocated to Clarksdale in 2002. Around 2004, I met an impassioned filmmaker and teacher named Chandler Griffin, originally from Jackson, MS, but living in New York City. The blues had started coming back to Clarksdale in a reliable way, and tourism was starting to grow as a result. Griffin planned to bring a two-week film workshop to Clarksdale to capture the often untold stories (and by default, music) of the Mississippi Delta. Soon after, he did – again and again for a decade. Not all the films are “blues” films, but many of the best are, and most of the other stories live within the culture, if not the music.

Go to www.barefootworkshops.org, and click on the Video Gallery to watch films for free. In particular, check out The New Roxy, A Blues Redemption, LaLa Land, Just Monkey, Son & Son, Devil Showed Me How, Early Time, The Real Deal, Babies Got the Blues, Black & Blues, The Music Maker, All This Blues, It’s Just a Feeling and Knockdown. You’ll meet everyone from street musician Foster “Mr. Tater” Wiley and folk-artist bluesman James “Super Chikan” Johnson, to Mississippi boogieman Jimbo Mathus and even the blues fanatic who owns Cat Head (yours truly).

Hard Times

One of the workshop assistants I met during those first filmings was Mississippi cameraman extraordinaire Damien Blaylock. A short time later, I brought Mississippiborn Big George Brock to a (I’ll just say it) ridiculous, allstar blues album recording session up in Memphis. Long story short, martial arts actor Steven Seagal was bringing in the best of the old school to back him up on a CD. That story is for another time, except to say that Blaylock was there trying to capture the whole crazy thing on film for a mutual producer-friend David Hughes. That evidence footage sits in a vault to this day.

Anyway, I was impressed with Blaylock as both a filmmaker and a person, so I hired him to film what became Hard Times – the blues story of Big George Brock. Check out a clip on YouTube and buy it at www.cathead.biz.

About the time Hard Times was coming out, I met a fellow blues lover in my Cat Head store. His name was Jeff Konkel, and after a weekend of moonshine and juke joints, he pledged to return in two weeks to start a blues record label. He did – the aptly named Broke & Hungry Records. As I worked with Big George Brock, Konkel worked with the then super-obscure Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, slowly helping to bring the Bentonia bluesman out of the shadows.

M for Mississippi & We Juke Up in Here!

Konkel and I spent many long weekends searching for the real deal, the authentic, the deepest blues. Along the way, we made great blues friends and experienced situations that led us to turn to each other and say simply, “That’s ‘The Project’!” It became code for what we thought would make great film. And so, in 2008, we lined up some sponsors, withdrew a bunch of cash from our bank accounts and set out on the ultimate sevenday blues road trip through North Mississippi.

The idea was to make the blues world here seem just as approachable as it really is – full of Southern hospitality and hints of danger hanging with blues characters from another time and place. Among the living dinosaurs in what became the Blues Music Award-winning movie M for Mississippi, were “Cadillac” John Nolden (still with us today at 93 years old), “Mississippi Marvel” (still can’t give his real name since he had one foot in juke joints and the other in the church house), L.C. Ulmer (perhaps the film’s biggest “discovery”), Robert “Bilbo” Walker (in the performance Chuck Berry didn’t want you to see), James “T-Model” Ford (“I got to go to Parchman”), Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson (the first to pass away after the film’s release) and others.

Terry "Harmonica" Bean plays at Red's Lounge during We Juke Up in Here! filming. Photo by Lou Bopp

In 2012, we released a follow-up documentary called We Juke Up in Here! which concentrated as much on the juke joints and their owners as the musicians performing inside. The jukes included the Blue Front Café, Po Monkey’s Lounge and Red’s Lounge. The musicians ranged from Anthony “Big A” Sherrod to Elmo Williams, Hezekiah Early and Lil Poochie.

Leo "Bud" Welch during Moonshine & Mojo Hands filming. Photo by Lou Bopp

Moonshine & Mojo Hands

As DVDs gave way to Blu-rays, and everything gave way to downloading and streaming, we thought we’d take a different tact on our (so far) final film contribution to the blues world. Coproducer Konkel and I created a free web series with the hope it would give musicians, juke owners and related personalities bigger exposure. We again hit our own bank accounts, but also ran a successful Kickstarter campaign.

The resulting 10-episode web series Moonshine & Mojo Hands (2016) covers a lot of territory throughout the Mississippi Delta, North Mississippi Hill Country and even a quick foray into Memphis. We’re proud of the results, and you can see them at www.moonshineandmojohands.com.

The True Delta Project

Around this time, I met a few part-time filmmakers from New York who wanted to document the blues in Clarksdale. The main ringleaders were Erickson Blakney and Lee Quinby, and they have gone on to create some beautiful blues films under the umbrella of the True Delta Project, including “True Delta,” “From the Crossroads to the White House” and “Walk with Me,” among others. More info on the films and how to view them at truedeltaproject.org.

Other Must-See Blues Films

Other recommended blues films include: The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins (one of the greatest blues docs ever; lesblank.com), all of the American Folk Blues Festival films (exceptional big-name concert performances captured in the 1960s; see on YouTube), The Search for Robert Johnson (with John Hammond, Johnny Shines, Honeyboy Edwards; trailer on YouTube), The Early Films of William Ferris (including bluesman James “Son” Thomas; dust-digital.com), Cheesehead Blues (a Dutchman’s adventures in Delta blues land; vimeo.com/58095701 ), Late Blossom Blues (the late-in-life discovery of gospel-bluesman Leo “Bud” Welch; lateblossomblues.com) and Gip (story of 90-something Henry “Gip” Gipson and his juke joint; gipthemovie.com).

Clarksdale Film & Music Festival

A decade ago, along with my fellow Juke Joint Festival co-organizers, we started a highly specialized film festival. Our theme? Films must be either blues (or roots music) related or Mississippi connected. Most are both. We accept submissions, but also search all year for new films in the process of being made or classic docs that are new to us. This is a curated festival that also includes a healthy dose of live blues performances, workshops, history tours and more. Check out our last festival’s lineup, and plans for 2021 at www.clarksdalefilmfestival.com.

By the way, at this year’s festival, we previewed Part I of a forthcoming full-length blues doc by Bostonian Ted Reed. Half filmed by college student Reed in 1970, and half by modern Reed in 2019, his final work, The Blues Trail Revisited, will compare and contrast the blues of then and now. Come see his blues finale at our fest in Clarksdale January 29-31 of 2021, y’all.

Till then… Will somebody, please get the lights?

Roger Stolle operates Cat Head – “Mississippi’s blues store in Clarksdale since 2002” – co-produces the occasional film or recording project, and is author of Mississippi Juke Joint Confidential and Hidden History of Mississippi Blues (The History Press). His website www.cathead.biz has a local music calendar as well as a celebrated web store.

Owner Red Paden sits outside Red's Lounge during We Juke Up in Here! filming. Photo by Lou Bopp