Joe Manganiello on Discovering He’s Part-Black and Descended From Slaves The most meaningful result of that culture clash? “Robert Johnson is a household name now,” Clapton says. The film restores the strangeness and exhilaration that artists such as Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, John Mayall and Mick Fleetwood felt when they heard the music and encountered legendary performers including Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. That international perspective lends a freshness to British director Mike Figgis’ Red, White and Blues. You can be in the desert, but ODB is on your TV.”
“The point is that things are global now. He was like, What is this shit?’ So we explained to him, ‘Have you ever heard of Wu-Tang?’ ” Harris laughs at the incongruity. He has satellite TV and suddenly Ol’ Dirty Bastard comes on. “Me and Jamal Millner were hanging out with Ali Farka Toure. “There are cats over in Timbuktu who listen to James Brown, Bobby Bland and Otis Redding,” he says. Harris, too, was surprised by the linkages that he found. That seemed like two great incentives: I could pay homage to them and find out more about them at the same time.” “I didn’t know much about their lives myself. “Some of my all-time heroes from the history of the blues had remained in the shadow of public acceptance,” he says. Lenoir, for example, Wenders teases out connections between spirituality, obsessive love and social consciousness. In relating the stories of Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. While responsible to the facts of blues history, these films are also idiosyncratic, a testimony about the impact of the blues on the directors’ lives. This series not only examines how and why that happened, it is determined to rectify it.
In the course of that journey, the audience for the blues shifted from black to almost exclusively white.
Most provocatively, they look at the music’s complex racial history - its African origins, its rural roots in slavery and share-cropping in the American South, its urban electrification after World War II in Chicago, its key function in the creation of rock & roll in the Fifties and its revival by British musicians in the Sixties. Just as Jimi Hendrix transformed the blues into genre-shattering psychedelic rock, these films attempt both to honor the history of the music and to demonstrate its ongoing life and significance.
That statement could serve as the guiding principle for these movies. “You don’t copy his techniques, you copy his mind-set.” Hendrix was able to take the blues and put them on steroids,” says Chuck D in Godfathers and Sons, one of seven documentaries that are part of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which will air on PBS beginning Sunday, September 28th.
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