Blues On a Rainy Night in Durham

A few hours before, King sang an old blues tune at the premiere sampling of the Martin Scorsese-produced PBS series "The Blues" (now appearing on PBS) at the Full Frame Documentary Festival. You could hear some of the harsh, biting chords of the real Delta blues in King's rendition of the Skip James song he did for the premiere. King is best known for his appearance as old time blues singer Tommy Johnson in the Cohen Brothers movie, "Oh Brother Where Art Thou," which starred George Clooney.

Rush, 69, featured in one of the films, also appeared at the Durham-based event on that cold, rainy April night.

When it ended, another journalist and I offered to drive King and Rush to their accommodations rather than send them off in a cab.

The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival boasts Scorsese and best-selling author Walter Mosely, who attended the last day of the event, on its board. It qualifies short films for academy award consideration and presents substantial and prestigious awards to filmmakers from MTV, HBO and Kodak, as well as audience awards.

But following the evening reception with cool rain chilling the air, King and Rush are ready to be home. "The cab driver made a face and shook his head when I told him the address," King says.

King's career is racheting up. He is on his way to appear in another film and his recording career is hot. But this night he remains soft-spoken and calm, although he has good reason to think we may be lost forever on the streets of Durham. The lost bluesmen of Durham, forever caught in the warren of one-way streets behind these one-time tobacco warehouses.

King's bed and breakfast is on 922 Magnum, a one-way street. We take him to 600 Magnum. Then 700 Magnum.

Since I'm a blues fan and have written about the Piedmont style of blues which flourished in Durham during the depression years, I point out places where some of those old bluesmen played on street corners while auctioneers stuttered prices for heaps sweet-scented bright leaf tobacco.

"Blind Boy Fuller played here for tips," I say. "Later, the blind harmonica player Sonny Terry played with Fuller, and after Fuller died, with Brownie McGee."

"Blind Boy Fuller and Sonny Terry played here?" says Rush. I nod.

We get to 800 Magnum… Ta Dah! 900 Magnum. But then we take yet another wrong turn and get really lost. Several police cars pop out of nowhere, although none pays much attention to our wandering. Our driver pulls up next to one and asks a cop for directions. The policeman sends us off the wrong way, which becomes quickly clear.

I can almost hear Chris Thomas King thinking, "people in Durham must be dumb as a stump." He looks at me and says, "No wonder the cab driver was worried, you guys live here and you're lost."

But we finally get pointed in the right direction and take him to his bed and breakfast door. Don't be surprised if he raps a Bull Durham blues out someday.

The films he introduced appropriately with Skip James' raw blues approached their subject in a variety of ways.

The Full Frame Film Fest presented samplings of five of the seven blues films produced by Scorsese and directed by top names with a love of the blues, including Mike Figgis, Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, and Scorsese, among others.

As anyone watching the series now can see, they show very personal takes on the blues.

Most people know the blues from either the Mississippi Delta brand of Son House, Robert Johnson, or its electric successor, the Chicago Blues, forged by Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Son Boy Williamson II and Chess Studios.

But numerous other styles were popular throughout the south from before the depression to after World War II. They included Memphis blues, Texas blues, and North Carolina's own Piedmont style, which most people know, if they know it at all, from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.

The PBS Blues series looks at several of these styles. In one segment, Bobby Rush does his act. It includes, as he calls her, "the girl." The girl has a protuberant caboose. They should include her picture next to the definition of callipygean in the dictionary. And, brother, she shakes that thing.

Mr. Rush calls attention to it. "This is foreign to you," he suggests to the filmmaker.

After the premiere, Rush confides he hopes the film will help him "breakout" from his niche audience but without abandoning his traditional racy — some might say somewhat raunchy — act.

Several of the blues series films explore the deep connections between blues and gospel and blues and the devil and the inevitable conflicts the two created. In the film, Rush and his band drive all night to get home in time for Sunday services in church.

Another North Carolina resident, Bob Margolin, who played guitar in Muddy Water's last band and frequently appears at the Double Door Inn in Charlotte, says, "If the blues is a sadness, blues music is the cure," another contradiction.

Out of pain and misery came the great beauty of the blues, in which four chords of feeling could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Chris Thomas King puts a hint of that bite in the Skip James song he performed.

But listen to Robert Johnson sing, "Listen to the Wind Howl," on "Come Into My Kitchen," and you'll really hear what I mean. That authentic sound gives you what the old Hawaiians used to call "chicken skin." It's the agony of poverty and lost love and life's pain.

Listen to Skip James sing "Me and the Devil." Even on the bowling ball vinyl they used to record those founding fathers of the blues, you hear that soul-ripping sound. Listen and you'll hear just a few notes of what they could express in music about the black experience of depression America.

Some of the filmmakers trying to capture the blues in the PBS series approach this, but you'll hear it more clearly in the songs being issued on cassette and CD in conjunction with the series. The book, "The Blues," that goes with the series, is beautifully done and more revealing in many ways of blues history than the films themselves.

This is appropriately, "The Year of the Blues," according to the U.S. Congress. But the blues is the ultimate roots music. You hear the blues chords in rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jazz, and pop music.

The blues also led to many of the most popular forms of modern dance, from shimmying separately and suggestively to swing, shag, and hip hop - a connection one of the PBS films explores.

The blues never die. They transform. Every year is a year of the blues.

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Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues - Piano Blues
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Best Price: $13.30

Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues - The Soul of a Man
Directed by Clint Eastwood

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
DVD - George Clooney
Best Price: $9.95

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Soundtrack CD
Best Price: $5.99
Listen to samples

The Legend of Tommy Johnson, Act 1: Genesis 1900's-1990's
Music by Chris Thomas King
Best Price: $16.99

More Music by Chris Thomas King

The Full Frame Documentary Film Fest, formerly known as DoubleTake, offered up another type of personal blues later in the three-day event. Charlotte native Ross McElwee, known for his groundbreaking independent film, Sherman's March, showed the rough cut of his latest, Bright Leaves. Bittersweet and funny, like McElwee's previous efforts, Bright Leaves also shows a maturing of his talent. See our review of Bright Leaves.

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