Friday Video: The Winding Stream: The Carters, the Cashes, and the Course of Country Music.

The Carter Family. From the Winding Stream.

The Winding Stream: The Carters, the Cashes and the Course of Country Music, a film by Beth Harrington, is now in post production!

It’s impossible to overestimate the influence the Carter family had, and continues to have, on country, roots, and traditional music. Mother Maybelle’s guitar playing revolutionized the instrument and she popularized the auto-harp, as well. Their songs have been covered by countless musicians off all genres and all of their recordings are still in print today.

There’s been much written about the Carters and the Cashes, but this is the first film to trace and explore all aspects of their continual influence in the world of music. Here’s a short synopsis from the film’s webpage:

Starting with the seminal Original Carter Family, A.P., Sara and Maybelle; this film-in-progress traces the ebb and flow of their influence, the transformation of that act into the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, the marital alliance between June Carter and music legend Johnny Cash, and the efforts of the present-day family to keep this legacy alive.

The film features interviews with Johnny Cash (who granted an interview shortly before his death), Roseanne Cash and the living Carter family members, as well as performances by roots musicians like the Be Good Tanyas and Jay Farrar.

Beth Harrington is also the producer of the film Welcome to the Club: Women in Rockabilly, which received a Grammy nomination in 2003.

To complete post production they’ve turned to Kickstarter to help raise some funds.  Check out a few of the previews below.  And, if you feel so inclined, help them out with their project. This is such an important story! To visit their Kickstarter page click here.   And if you’re a Twitter user, you can subscribe to the film’s tweets, which tell the story of the Carters in one tweet a day!  Check it out there.

And here are a few of the clips available via The Winding Stream’s webpage.

The North Carolina Chocolate Drops:

And here’s a pieced-together song circle featuring several musicians singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.”

Friday Video: Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story.

From PBS.

While in Memphis for the Folklorists in the South retreat we visited the amazing Stax Museum and heard a little bit about working behind the scenes at the museum from Levon Williams, curator of collections.  The visit to Stax was inspiring, and an excellent example of the power of music to work toward change.  So this week’s Friday Video is a trailer from PBS’s 2007 Great Performances presentation, Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story. 

Stax was amazing for many reasons, especially its integrated approach to music in the same town where sanitation workers were paid less-than-human wages, leading to the Sanitation Worker’s Strike which was linked to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign.   In addition to the genre-altering and community-building music, they also produced documentaries like the Wattstax concert and documentary in Los Angeles,  a film, according to PBS POV, that “captures a heady moment in mid-1970s, “black-is-beautiful” African-American culture, when Los Angeles’s black community came together just seven years after the Watts riots to celebrate its survival and a renewed hope in its future.” To enable everyone a chance to attend, tickets were sold for only a dollar each.  On many levels Stax was a movement a gave birth to a new form of music, soul music,  a raw and transcendent blend of gospel, blues, country, and jazz.

Here’s what PBS says about Stax and this film:

The legacy of Stax Records is a unique one that spans more than half a century. Stax Records is critical in American music history as it’s one of the most popular soul music record labels of all time – second only to Motown in sales and influence, but first in gritty, raw, stripped-down soul music. In 15 years, Stax placed more than 167 hit songs in the Top 100 on the pop charts, and a staggering 243 hits in the Top 100 R&B charts. It launched the careers of such legendary artists as Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, Sam & Dave, Rufus & Carla Thomas, Booker T, & the MGs, and numerous others. Among the many artists who recorded on the various Stax Records labels were the Staple Singers, Luther Ingram, Wilson Pickett, Albert King, Big Star, Jesse Jackson, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, the Rance Allen Group, and Moms Mabley.

But Stax Records was more than just a label. It was a culture. While segregation was fervently supported in the South during Stax’s formative years in the 1960s, Stax was one of the most successfully integrated companies in the country – from top management and administration to its artists. With more than 200 employees, it was the fifth-largest African-American owned business in the United States during its time.

Teachers should take note that this film comes with a lesson plan including assignments that help students to both identify genres of music and the role Stax played in the community.  Check out the lesson plans by clicking here. 

For more information on the film and viewing options click here.  

The Seed and the Story: Alive Inside Documentary. What Can Be Done Where You Are?

Image of Henry from the film.

Earlier last week a friend called my attention to an online preview of the documentary film, Alive Inside.  Produced by Ximotion Media, the film follows social worker Dan Cohen as he brings IPods filled with music to residents in a nursing home.  It’s not long before the patients—many of whom were previously silenced by dementia—begin communicating again.

The clip that’s been circulating online features Henry, a man who’s confined to a wheel chair, is virtually nonverbal, and doesn’t even recognize his daughter who visits him daily.  After he’s given headphones to listen to Cab Calloway, one of his favorite musicians, his eyes light up and he begins to sing along.  It’s not long before he’s speaking again, expressing how music encapsulates feelings of love and humanity. Social worker Dan Cohen seeks out the expertise of neurologist Oliver Sacks and together they investigate how music affects our brains in the most profound of ways.  The patients aren’t cured of their dementia, but they do find news ways to communicate, which clearly provides a huge dose of hope to the family members and staff who care for them, an oft under-recognized casualty of the illness.

Chances are that you have, or will, care for someone with dementia. Watching a loved one lose their ability to communicate is one of the more difficult things any of us will face. The fact that music remains so powerful in the lives of those with dementia will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s grown up with music, be it in church, on the radio, or in juke joints.  Music is a link to our past, a connection to former generations, and can encapsulate hope for the future.

In watching the film preview I was reminded of all those times as a child when we visited area nursing homes to sing to the residents, many of them joining us and singing along to songs decades old.  I thought about how my own grandmother, fully overcome with dementia, didn’t always know where she was but could remember every word to the gospel songs her husband once sang as a song leader in the rural Chickalah Church of Christ.  And I remembered how her roommate, a woman who often mistakenly brushed her hair with a sock, was the one who had to remind me of many of the melodies that afternoon when we broke out the old hymnal in their room in Stella Manor.   I’m sure you have similar stories.  Music is a bridge builder across years and generations and possesses a mysterious power that is beyond our ability to articulate.

The producers hope this film will be more than just a moving story. They want it to fuel a grassroots movement of everyday folks thinking of ways they can bring music to their own loved ones and others in area nursing homes.  After all, we are surrounded by Ipods and other forms of technology.  Too often they’re just sitting in drawers gathering dust. The film begs the question: How can we use the technology we take for granted to reach out to our elders? And, of course, the bigger question becomes: what are each of us doing to care for the aged in our community?  I’d love to hear what you’re doing and other ideas you might have that can help all of us transcend generational gaps. You can watch the film clips at http://www.ximotionmedia.com.   And for those of you who care for the aging in our society:  thank you.  Your job is one of the most important in all the world.

You can watch the preview below.  You can learn more about the Music and Memory Project by clicking here.  

Alive Inside Trailer from Michael Rossato-Bennett on Vimeo.

Friday Video: Where Do They All Go?

Today’s Friday Video is a preview of the upcoming film, Where Do They All Go? by Tom Davenport.

Davenport is currently raising money to finish the film on Indiegogo.  This film follows Dr. Jerry A. Payne, “Entomologist, Georgia Naturalist, Uppervillian, Friend and Artist,” who remembers, as a child, looking at dead animals in the woods and wondering how they al disappeared.  As he says in the preview, “Animals die all the time.  Where do they all go?”

According to the producers, this film will be of special interest to anyone who enjoys watching birds and butterflies, those interested in the intersection of science and religion, entomologists, forensic scientists, and anyone interested in the history of northern Virginia.  It will also be of interest to those who find themselves pondering concepts of death, aging, and friendship.  Isn’t that all of us?  Sounds utterly fascinating, doesn’t it?

Here’s Davenport’s full description of the film:

Jerry and I met each other in the 1950s, riding the school bus to our small rural Marshall High School in northern Virginia.  His high school nickname was “Osmosis” because of his interest in the biological sciences.

Jerry grew up in a tenant farmer family on Llangollen, a 4000 acre estate and thoroughbred horse farm in Loudoun County near Upperville, VA.  Jerry describes his family as “hunter gatherers”.  His father and mother came from Appalachian backgrounds, with only grade school educations.  But Jerry’s mother Becky Payne, encouraged him to get an education so he could leave the farm. “When I got to college and they closed the door of the classroom, we were all equal.”

Jerry excelled and completed his PhD at Clemson University in South Carolina.  With the encouragement of his beloved teacher, the entomologist Dr. Edwin Wallace King, Jerry did a remarkable study of insect succession in carrion, using dead baby pigs he collected from local farms.

This study attracted national attention in Time Magazine and Scientifc American, and became a foundation of modern forensic science.  Jerry donated his 16mm time-lapse footage of the decomposition of a baby pig to the Smithsonian Institution, and on Youtube the clip has over 2 million views.

After retiring from a career in the field with the US Department of Agriculture in Georgia, Jerry and his wife Rose devote themselves to their 80 acre nature preserve near Macon, Georgia which they walk nearly everyday in the tradition of Darwin and his wife.

Both he and Rose excel at the taxonomy of birds, butterflies, and native plants, and they are active in naturalists circles in Georgia where they often bird and butterfly watch with Father Francis Michael Stiteler, the abbot of the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers, GA.  Jerry’s artwork (he paints bones and odd pieces of wood he finds in the woods) is often a prize in fund raising efforts by the Enviromental Resouces Network (T.E.R.N.)

Click on the link below to watch the video. 

The Seed and the Story: Learning From Students and Folkstreams films

The Landis family. From the film, A Singing Stream. Image from Davenport Films.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

I’ve had two exiting developments recently. I recently found out this column will be running every week rather than every other week! Thanks so much for your support.  I’m looking forward to more opportunities to learn from readers about this area’s history and its present day, and I’ll be working toward making this column more interactive, featuring more voices from our diverse and culturally rich community.

Secondly, this past week I began teaching an online class at Arkansas Tech entitled “Folklife and Oral History.”  I’m thoroughly impressed with my students and their level of engagement.  I’m a firm believer that the best part of teaching isn’t sharing your own knowledge but rather learning from the students themselves.  Their questions require me to think more deeply about the readings, and their observations are opening my eyes to new ways of conceptualizing the importance of traditions, music, and the role of tradition bearers (a phrase folklorists use for people who carry on traditions) in a community.  Plus, they’re teaching me about their own family and community traditions, which I find endlessly fascinating.

This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to teach a subject like folklife and oral history—a subject that dwells heavily on the past and its role in the present day—in such a modern, online format. I’ll be the first to say that I deeply appreciate the lines of communication the Internet provides.  It can be a tool for greater democracy and a way to reestablish connections lost over the miles or years.  Yet I feel strongly that younger generations could use more exposure to a life a bit more unplugged.  Funny how online resources can actually introduce students to traditions that are decades, even centuries, old. So last week I had the students watch a few films via Folkstreams, an Internet site housing hundreds of folklife films.

To give them an introduction to traditional singing styles I chose two films: A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle produced by Tom Davenport and Alemda Riddle:  Let’s Talk About Singing produced by George West. The first film explores traditional African American gospel music as it is passed down in the Landis family from rural North Carolina.  The film highlights how music plays a key role in the family’s fight for civil rights and provides an example of how a study of traditional music opens a window into family, political, and community histories.  This musical link to the past provides a source of strength to fight for a more just future.

The second film profiles Ozark ballad singer Alemda Riddle, a woman who lived her entire life near Greers Ferry, Arkansas.  The well-known ballad Hunter, John Quincy Wolfe, met her in 1952, and began recording her songs, some which dated back to the 16^th century.  Riddle became a hero of the folk revival and recorded and traveled extensively.  The songs she was singing may have been hundreds of years old, but her role as a widow traveling the country made her quite a radical figure in her day and age.

Many of the students noted how this traditional music, centuries old, can provide a source of strength for the present day and how the music was a tie linking family members across generations and miles. As I watched the two films together, I began to notice how each individual, in their own unique way, held on to the past with one hand while reaching out for the future with the other. And ultimately that’s what a healthy tradition is about: a link to the past that builds a bridge to a better future.  You can watch these, and countless other folklife films, at www.folkstreams.net.  I love hearing stories and traditions from readers.   Or send me a letter with your stories.  I especially love those.

Friday Video: Truck Farm

From Truck Farm film.

This week’s video is a teaser from one of the films they showed last week at the Dig In Festival in Fayettveille, Arkansas.

Based in Brooklyn, this film chronicles the making of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in the back of a 1986 truck, an effort to supply healthy, locally grown food in urban centers.  The concept has grown and there are truck farms popping up all over the nation.

Follow the project online and watch portions of the film via truckfarm.com.   Check out the film teaser below.

Would something like this work in your hometown?  Maybe you already have a truck farm.  We’d love to hear about it!

Friday Video: Seed Swap Documentary

From Seed Swap Documentary

This week’s Seed and the Story column looked at the organization Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH) and the annual Seed Swaps currently taking place throughout the state.  This afternoon we will be posting a radio piece which will air on KUAF today  profiling voices from the swap last year in Russellville.

In keeping with this coversage of CAAH, today’s Friday Video is a trailer for the film, Seed Swap Documentary.  Produced by Zachariah McCannon, the film documents the early days of the CAAH organization and the work of anthropologist Dr. Brian Campbell as he organizes the first seed swap in Mountain View, Arkansas.   According to the film’s Facebook page:

This documentary film uses the development of a seed exchange and agricultural biodiversity conservation project in the Ozark Mountains as an ethnographic lens to explore the seed saving subculture of the region. 

To learn more about the film, follow the project on facebook here.

To read more and to keep up with screenings around the state, visit the film’s webpage.  It looks like there will be screenings coming up this March in Fayetteville, Hot Springs and Eureka Springs.

And don’t forget there will be a swap this Saturday in Russellville and one Sunday in Conway.  Go here for a full listing of swap dates and times. 

Friday Video: Color Outisde the Lines: A Tattoo Documentary.

Filmmaker Artemus Jenkins. From Kickstarter.

Don’t forget, you can follow the Boiled Down Juice on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend.  And thanks for reading!

This week’s Friday video is somewhat related to our ongoing Arkansas Tattoo Project research.  (If you want to know more about this project, go here to see all the recent posts.  You can also follow the project on Facebook and Twitter)

In researching various tattoo styles and forms of expression, I came across this Kickstarter video for an upcoming documentary.  Produced by Artemus Jenkins, Color Outside the Lines:  A Tattoo Documentary explores the work, culture, and styles the African American tattoo artists and their clients. It looks like it will also address the need for more black tattoo artists and some of the problems within the industry, including the prevalence of shops owned by white supremacists.

It looks really interesting.  Have you heard about it?   What are some of the tattoo documentaries you’ve seen and which ones would you recommend?

Director Sharon La Cruise Discusses the Film, “Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.

Film maker Sharon La Cruise. From PBS.

Last week’s Friday Video was a preview of the upcoming film Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.  Today on the University of Arkansas campus director of the film, Sharon La Cruise, will preset the film and answer questions.

Yesterday Ozarks at Large’s Antoinette Grajeda spoke with La Cruise about the making of the film including her research in Little Rock, her quest to discover why Daisy Bates was not initially seen as potential leader of the movement, Bates’s life as a social and political radical, and a her role in the desegregation of Central High.

“Daisy Bate’s life” La Cruise says, “is the classic example that life really is like ten percent of what happens to you and ninety percent of how you handle it.  Because that is how she lived her life because she could have had many options as far a path she could have went down considering where she came from and what she went through.  And she made a decision to do good with her life.  I’m hoping she’ll be inspirational to young adults….”

To listen to the entire interview go here and click on the link.

In case you missed the Friday Video here it is again.  Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock will be airing nationally on February 2nd at 9:00 pm on the PBS series, Independent Lens.  The presreening will be held today at 2:00 PM at the Reynolds Center on the U of A campus.   The event is hosted in connection with Martin Luther King Jr. week and organized by the University Libraries and Diversity Affairs.

A Family Undertaking: Documentary on the Modern Home Funeral Movement from POV

From Netflix.

Yesterday we posted the most recent Seed and the Story column about the “Rest in Peace” Exhibit” at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History.  I’ve gotten great responses to this piece and several people have told me stories about home funerals they remember from their own childhoods in Arkansas and beyond.  They told me about folks building coffins, creating the coffin liners, sitting up with the death, and grave digging.

I’ll be posting more about this in coming weeks and sharing some of these stories with you.

This has also sparked several interesting conversations about the nature of community, death rituals, and what makes for  meaningful ways to say goodbye.  One question comes up again and again: Have we lost something in our desire to professionalize death?  They’re are a variety of different opinions on this subject, all of them worthy of attention.

As a folklorist and community activist, I’m a firm believer that how we mourn our dead is just as important as how we welcome our youngest into the world.  The ways in which we honor our elders, attend to the grieving, and support those who’ve lost someone suddenly, is an instrumental part of what makes a strong and sustainable community.  I’d say it’s the foundation, really.  Or at least a big part of the foundation.  After all, a community can’t sustain itself without healthy ways of saying goodbye.   Certainly there are countless ways of doing this, and only a family can decide what it right for them and their loved one.  One tradition that’s very important where I live and work is Decoration Day.  There are countless others.

But all these discussions reminded me of a film I saw a few years ago entitled A Family Undertaking.   It’s a documentary about the home funeral movement throughout the United States.  Featuring interviews with families who choose to keep their dead in their homes, forgo funeral homes and embalming, and dig graves and make their own caskets, this film explores the decisions of families who bury their dead in much the same ways people did at the turn of the last century.  They sidestep the funeral industry and take part in all the details of burial.  For these families this way of saying goodbye is more personal and therefore healing.  The film also explores the options families have for the burial process in our modern age.

I checked online and was excited to see that if you’re a Netflix account holder you can currently watch the 2003 POV documentary online.  Just visit Netflix and type in the title in the search engine.

Here’s a brief summary of the film from the POV webpage:

What is old is often new again. Most funerals today are part of a multimillion-dollar industry run by professionals. This increased reliance on mortuaries has alienated Americans from life’s only inevitability — death. A Family Undertaking explores the growing home funeral movement by following several families in their most intimate moments as they reclaim the end of life, forgoing a typical mortuary funeral to care for their loved ones at home. Far from being a radical innovation, keeping funeral rites in the family or among friends is exactly how death was handled for most of pre-20th century America . . .

A Family Undertaking makes clear that the heart of the home funeral movement is the desire to rescue funerals from the impersonality of a mass-market industry, and to reshape them according to personal beliefs or family and community traditions. The film introduces us to individuals like the Carr family of South Dakota, preparing for the death of 90-year-old family patriarch Bernard, and Anne Stuart and Dwight Caswell of California, preparing for the end of Anne’s struggle with terminal cancer. Through their stories we see that “hands-on” care for the dead by family members, including children, can aid in grieving, bring a sense of fulfillment, and help loved ones to grasp the reality of a death. Their home funerals are remarkable documents of death made intimate, meaningful, and even joyful.

To read the entire synopsis, go here.

You can also read an excellent interview with filmmaker,  Elizabeth Westrate.  To read the entire interview click here.   She is also the producer and director of the film Passing on the Gift:  Heifer International’s Mission to End Hunger.