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130 Warming by the Devil’s Fire: Director Interview Charles Burnett/2003 From PBS, The Blues, www.pbs.org/theblues/aboutfilms/burnettinterview.html. © 2003 Vulcan Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Historically, there’s a complex, even antagonistic, relationship between the blues—the devil’s music, Satan’s music—and the church in the black community. A lot of blues players, many of them women, left the church to pursue a career in the blues, and ended up going back at the end of their days. In Warming by the Devil’s Fire, we mentioned how Son House, who was a preacher at one time, went to jail for murder in selfdefense , came out, tried to be a preacher again, then went back to playing the blues. “Georgia Tom” (whose real name was Thomas A. Dorsey) wrote sexually graphic songs for Bessie Smith and others, then he went and wrote some wonderful, lyrical religious compositions later on. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Reverend Gary Davis did the same thing. This relationship between the sacred and the profane is the theme of Warming by the Devil’s Fire. It tells the story of a young kid going back to Mississippi before he’s twelve to get baptized. To get saved. But then he’s kidnapped by his uncle Buddy—a blues person—who takes him around to experience what he’s gonna be saved from. At the end, his other uncle, a preacher named Flem, finds him and puts him on the road to the mourner’s bench. And years later, Uncle Buddy also ends up becoming a preacher. When we started this project, I screened a lot of footage on the blues; if I hadn’t, I probably would have made a relatively conventional documentary . But after seeing so many others, I began to think what could I add? How is this going to be different? I also had to consider how to frame the film—because there’s so much to the blues, what do you charles burnett / 2003 131 include, who do you exclude? It took quite a while for me to sort these questions out, which must have frustrated Marty Scorsese. The story I chose for Warming by the Devil’s Fire isn’t strictly autobiographical , but everything in the film happened to a certain extent, and I used these experiences as guideposts to come up with a story that everyone could identify with. I had an uncle who was very much like Buddy. Like the trickster figure in folklore, Buddy awakens things in his nephew and gives him experiences that will help him become a complete person. At the same time, I wanted to tell a story about the blues that echoed the form. There’s play within the material; it tries to be loose. And the character played by Tommy Hicks—Uncle Buddy— personifies the feeling of the blues and embodies all of its contradictions . The story’s told from the perspective of the narrator, the young kid who returns to Mississippi and becomes aware of the blues as an art form. It’s through his eyes that we, the audience, meet the blues. It’s through his ears that we listen to the blues and come to appreciate them. The film includes a wide range of music, from raw gutbucket blues to the more sophisticated R&B, and is representative of both male and female singers. I wanted to put the music in context, too. The blues came out of the South, and the South has its history of struggles, and it seemed to me you can’t really separate the blues from their historical context: how people lived, the hardships they experienced, the texture of their daily lives—it was all related. I was looking for things that spoke to that period, that conveyed the harshness, the humor, and the contradictions . For example, we use a lot of footage of the horrible flood that devastated that part of Mississippi. Lives were lost. The whole economy was damaged. We showed the levee camps that sprang up as a result— another tragic period in the history of black labor. We used chain-gang images. For a black person in the South at the time, it didn’t take very much to go to jail. You didn’t have to do a serious crime—just look the wrong way. Out of those experiences came the elements for the blues. The blues encompasses every emotion; people listen to...

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