Muddy waters electric mud pbs
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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. Chris Thomas King, who played Tommy Johnson in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and who has long explored the links between blues and hip-hop (his most recent album is called Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues), takes the role of holy bluesman Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders’ The Soul of a Man, which includes historical re-creations as well as archival and contemporary footage.
#Muddy waters electric mud pbs series
In Feel Like Going Home - directed by Scorsese, who is executive producer of the series - guitarist Corey Harris travels to Mali to tie the binds between African and American musicians. In Godfathers and Sons, Chuck D and Marshall Chess, the son of Leonard Chess, one of the founders of the Chicago blues label Chess Records, orchestrate a jam between Chuck, the rapper Common and the musicians who backed Muddy Waters on Electric Mud, the bluesman’s controversial 1968 venture into psychedelia. 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.