Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey (review)

One of the highlights of the fall 2003 Public Broadcasting Service television season was Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues (henceforth The Blues), a series of seven films broadcast on consecutive nights in late September. There had never been such an extensive television presentation of the blues, so the series was notable even to viewers familiar with this music. The group of films did not attempt to give a chronological account of the blues, perhaps partly due to the scarcity of film footage of blues shot before 1960, and perhaps also due to criticism of the 2000 Ken Burns series Jazz (see for example Steven F. Pond, "Jamming the Reception: Ken Burns, Jazz, and the Problem of 'America's Music'," Notes 60, no. 1 [September 2003]: 11-45). Rather, the director of each of The Blues films concentrated on one aspect of the music: Martin Scorsese on African antecedents of the blues; Charles Burnett on blues and its associations with social concepts of sin; Richard Pearce on the chitlin circuit blues in Memphis and north Mississippi; Wim Wenders on Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J. B. Lenoir; Marc Levin on Chicago and Chess Records; Mike Figgis on the British blues scene of the 1960s; and Clint Eastwood on piano blues. Celebration, not documentation, appeared to be the mission, and on assuming that, I found each film at least watchable, a few enjoyable, and the Pearce, Wenders, and Figgis offerings the best.

The occasion for producing the film series, its companion book, and other related materials is the Year of the Blues (YOTB) 2003, marking the centennial of the estimated year when "Father of the Blues" W. C. Handy heard a blues slide guitarist for the first time at a Tutwiler, Mississippi, railroad station. The Year of the Blues was declared by the 107th United States Congress on 1 August 2002, promoted by periodicals such as Living Blues and Blues Revue, and monitored by the Experience Music Project, Seattle, and the Blues Foundation, Memphis. Since its initial television broadcast, The Blues series has been available on DVD in longer edits than those originally aired (Sony Music Video 55808). The Experience Music Project (EMP) coordinated an educational outreach campaign with the series and prepared a teacher's guide with an illustrative compact disc, of which twenty-five thousand hard copies were distributed to American high schools; these materials are accessible electronically through the Web site http://www.pbs.org/theblues/classroom.html (accessed 20 May 2004). A set of soundtrack compact discs was issued by Universal Musical Enterprises and Sony/Columbia/Legacy, along with a historical compilation on five compact discs and a series of twelve compact discs, each presenting individual artists from Bessie Smith to Keb' Mo'. (For a complete bibliography and discography, see also http://www.theyearoftheblues.org [accessed 20 May 2004].)

The companion book reflects the films. It is a sumptuously prepared volume that crisply reproduces vintage and contemporary photographs laid out on variously colored pages. When the closed square volume is opened, the resulting rectangle represents the letterbox-shaped format of the films, and the structure is based on the seven episodes, accompanied by a thirty-seven page essay "A Century of the Blues" by Robert Santelli. The prose texts, some newly written for this volume, others selected, edited, and reprinted from classic writings, are broadly grouped according to the types of blues styles featured in each film. Like the film series as a whole, the book does not aim to give a chronological account of the blues; as the series editor Alex Gibney writes in the book's foreword (p. 9), "Neither [the films nor the book] intends to be the last word on the subject. Rather, they are 'first words,' agents provocateurs meant to stir audiences and readers to explore the emotional territory of the blues on their own."

To give a variety of "first words...