Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  But a year later, when they were going to Sweden again, they shot a second film. This time it was in black and white and much more elaborate. It was about twenty minutes long, was shot in J.B.’s living room, and had a lot of different setups, although every song is only one shot. They covered about twelve songs with J.B., and as they intended it for a Swedish audience, Rönnog and Steve were translating simultaneously whatever J.B. was saying—even what he was singing. Rönnog would translate in the middle of a song what the song was about. It was quite unique and extraordinary. Who at the time would do that—go to somebody’s house and shoot a movie with him? Again they took it to Swedish television, and this time they were very sure of themselves, they had made these elaborate setups, the film was in black and white, and the sound was much better now, but Swedish television refused it again. By now they had color, and somebody had recently covered the Chicago blues scene for them, without J.B. Lenoir, of course. Rönnog and Steve sadly went back to Chicago again, put the second film on the shelf, and that was the end of their filmmaking career. Very disappointing. And nobody ever saw these two films again.

  How did we find the Seabergs? Via the Internet and through research, we started to secure any photographs or footage that existed of J.B. Lenoir. Somebody knew that at some point these young art students had shot some footage, but nobody knew who they were, and finally we found somebody who knew their names. By now the Seabergs lived in Atlanta, Georgia, no longer in Chicago; forty years had passed. They were still artists, into acrobatic poetry, which sure is an elusive branch of the arts. They are no longer in filmmaking after the two disasters, but they still had the two films. And they had these memories of J.B.; they really had known him well and had become very good friends with him and also with his family. J.B. had died very early, and they had stayed in touch with his wife and his kids, so there was finally firsthand information on J.B. Lenoir. So the Seabergs and their two movies became the backbone of the second half of my film.

  But as The Soul of a Man is really about the music and about the songs, and not so much a film that is dealing with the biographies of my heroes, I really wanted to have the music speak for itself. I wasn’t so much interested in making a film with talking heads and people who remembered J.B. Originally I had shot lots of stuff, interviews both on Skip and on J.B., but in the editing process I decided not to use any of it. I used very sparse comments. Basically the only one who is commenting on Skip James is his manager Dick Waterman, who worked with him the last two years of his life and who was also a photographer. I felt it was better that people would hear about Skip and J.B. from one source only. It was more intimate that way, and you’d get to know these bluesmen more than if you’d hear lots of people talking about them. I have also shot extensive stuff with J.B.’s wife and his kids, and I regret that none of it ended up in the cut, but it would have been such a different film. And I can still make a whole chapter for the DVD of these interviews and these witnesses about the lives of Skip and J.B. We have a great piece, for instance, of a very old lady in Bentonia, Mississippi, where Skip grew up. She was in her eighties, and she remembered that when she was a teenager, she had a crush on Skip. When we shot it, I was sure this was going to end up in the film, but even that is not in. I also found people who knew Skip in the fifties when he was working on a farm and didn’t play the blues anymore. We found people who knew J.B. in the fifties and sixties in Chicago. But I finally just eliminated all these testimonies. There was no need for them.

  With a documentary, even if you might have a clear view of the film while you’re shooting your material, when you come to the editing room, you have to start from scratch. The film is still hidden in there, somehow, and you have to find the secret story inside. It took us almost a year to find that story in The Soul of a Man. Twice we went in the wrong direction. My editor, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and I basically finished two entire cuts before we managed to find the good one that we have now. Our problem from the very beginning was: There were these three bluesmen who had never met, who lived in different eras, and played very different music. They were basically only linked through the fact that I loved them more than any other blues musicians of the twenties and thirties up to the sixties. That wasn’t such a solid link, as we had to find out painfully. The first version of the film we cut had me narrating it. We did that whole thing and recorded and arranged my voice-over, and then we looked at the film, and I just hated it. It was simply not the right thing to have this German fellow talk about his three American blues heroes. Everything I wanted to achieve, everything I loved about them, was gone. The very fact that I was confessing it, so to speak, with my own voice, made it all strangely ineffective and pretentious. I wanted it to be a film just about the music, but had somehow destroyed my very aim. All of a sudden, my own experience had become the center of the film, which was the last thing I wanted.

  Rönnog Seaberg (with camera) and Sunnyland Slim, Steve Seaberg, St. Louis Jimmy, and J.B. Lenoir.

  So we threw that entire cut away and started from scratch. And now we were going to do the opposite; we were not going to have any narration, we were just telling it from inside the songs. Which we did, very elaborately. But that didn’t work either. So we threw that away and started a third time. This time we were successful. I realized that the secret narrator of the film had always been there; we just hadn’t noticed him. It was the first of our three characters: Blind Willie Johnson. The fact that his voice was out there in space on Voyager—by now on the outskirts of the solar system—made him the perfect instrument to narrate our film. He had the necessary distance, so to speak; he had a beautiful “objective” point of view. Plus, there was a certain irony in the fact that a man who was long dead now became the commentator on the lives of his two colleagues who had lived after him. That narrative perspective really worked well for the overall film. It gave it a certain lightness that certainly my voice never had. I just knew I needed a good voice for that! My first idea for that was Laurence Fishburne. He sure has a gorgeous voice. I knew Laurence from long ago when he made Apocalypse Now in the late seventies—he was a young man then. I didn’t have to twist his arm. He accepted the invitation immediately. With his voice, talking from the impossible perspective of a man in outer space, everything fell into place, and all the problems we had before with the structure and how to find a story that would unify it all vanished into thin air. Everything I had ever hoped for was there. In documentaries, you often have to run into a deadend street, make a U-turn, and come back in order to see the right passage for the film. You have to shape the story from inside the material, and it’s not obvious right away what that might be.

  Cassandra Wilson reinterprets the work of J.B. Lenoir.

  Once Blind Willie emerged as the narrator, the film’s title came by itself. Blind Willie wrote and recorded a song called “The Soul of a Man,” and in a way that song summed up the entire journey—Skip’s and J.B.’s, as well as his own. It defined the search that the blues is constantly on in very simple words. And it finally brought out the topic of the Sacred and the Profane that the film was still about, somehow. In short: It was the perfect song to come from heaven or from outer space. What is the soul of a man? How much can you tell about these people, how much can you try to know them, and what do you then know if you know their music and their lives? Do you know the soul of these men? Have they expressed it in these songs? The blues is a very existential medium, as it goes to the core of things.

  Wanting the music to be the center of the film, I soon realized that the best way to let the music speak for itself was to rerecord the old songs and to find contemporary musicians who would pick a song by Skip, J.B., or Blind Willie, and reinterpret it. This would also help to make my three blues heroes contemporary again and have an audience from 2003 listen to their songs and be attentive. I was hoping I could interest a number of musicians or bands to play some of these songs. I looked for those who had already expressed an interest in that work, maybe had already
covered a song by Skip or J.B. But I also approached some of my friends like Nick Cave and Lou Reed, who I knew would be interested because they love the blues. In the end I think there are twelve old songs interpreted by singers and songwriters and bands who work today. They all recorded live, during the sessions when we shot the musicians, so it’s not playback. One of the highlights was Beck, because he wouldn’t play a song the same way twice. He covered two songs by Skip James, “I’m So Glad” and “Cypress Grove,” and each time he would start, he would play on a different guitar and in a different rhythm, and he would have a different approach. I think he played twelve variations of “I’m So Glad,” but each one was different, and there was no way that you could intercut one with the other. That was exciting. And scary.

  Bonnie Raitt tackles Skip James’ odd tuning.

  All these performances were fantastic, really. Over almost one year, we shot them in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and London. Bonnie Raitt was very generous—she gave us two songs. The one that she played on her own was extremely demanding. She actually played in Skip’s tuning. And that really breaks your fingers, because Skip played in open D, which is very unusual and difficult to get your fingers around. So Bonnie was really heroic. I was also very taken by the performances that Cassandra Wilson gave. She actually sang three songs, two of which ended up in the film. “Vietnam Blues” is my favorite song of J.B.’s. Her version of it was just very, very moving, and strangely contemporary. Eagle-Eye Cherry put together the most unbelievable band of musicians, including James “Blood” Ulmer, an awesome guitar player and singer himself. T-Bone Burnett got together a big band with an amazing brass section, Jim Keltner on drums, plus two other percussionists. T-Bone sang in J.B.’s high tenor voice, with a woman singer doing the lower voice.

  The most fun was probably the shoot we had with Lou Reed. He did a rare Skip tune and a twelve-minute version of “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” during which he was smiling happily. The band did that entire song in a state of bliss. One take only! I don’t know how often that happens in Lou’s life, but I’m very proud and extremely lucky that I shot him for several moments laughing with joy!

  A sad moment was our shoot in Chicago, because we just happened to arrive in time to witness the destruction of Maxwell Street. We were there to shoot when the bulldozers came in and tore it all down. None of it actually is in the film, because it didn’t make sense to use it, but it was a really heartbreaking moment, to see this legendary place in the history of American jazz and blues just be obliterated—to be turned into offices, banks, and restaurants. In a sense this makes these films even more important to me, personally, because they show that the music itself is so vibrant that it will survive even the sort of callow indifference that would fail to preserve an institution like Maxwell Street. And my awareness of how the music is still alive in our culture today, still flourishing, really allows me to feel less blue about the loss of Maxwell Street—because no doubt the things that made Maxwell Street so remarkable at one time are happening right now, someplace else.

  —Wim Wenders

  Some of the remains of Chicago’s Maxwell Street, 2000

  VISIONARY BLINDNESS: BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON AND OTHER VISION-IMPAIRED BLUESMEN BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  In the popular imagination, blindness and the blues seem to go together. When people are asked to envision a blues musician, many see in their mind’s eye an old black man in a rumpled suit, probably wearing a brimmed hat and dark glasses and blowing on a harmonica or playing a guitar. For example, the 1986 movie Crossroads, a fictional story about the blues and its history, features a main character who’s an old black man, who sometimes wears a rumpled suit and a brimmed hat and plays the harmonica and whose nickname is Blind Dog Fulton. He’s not blind, but he sports large glasses and uses a wheelchair and just got out of a nursing home. In the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, the title characters, symbolically, purchase instruments to restart their blues band from a store owner played by Ray Charles. And in Wim Wenders’ documentary The Soul of a Man, the role of the film’s narrator, and one of its three central subjects, is given to the great Texas bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, as portrayed by Chris Thomas King.

  Music is often linked to cultural insurgency—slaves communicated through it, civil rights protesters in the fifties marched to it, and the socio-sexual upheavals of the sixties and seventies were set to it. To be a musician is to have power—over words, over rhythm, over the cultural history threaded through one’s lyrics, and over the emotions of one’s listeners. Imagining a blind black musician, perhaps, is a way of robbing a musician of a bit of his or her power, of letting a musician have his talent but making him culturally safe. Blindness (wrongly and unfairly) is often associated with confusion and impotence in Western thought, and a long list of commonly used expressions underlines this attitude: blind alley, blind faith, blind rage, three blind mice, blind date, and so forth. On the other hand, love is blind, the personification of justice wears a blindfold, and time and time again politicians ask constituents to imagine a day when society is color-blind. For the sighted, blindness is both a disability and potential means of blocking out the world on the path to moral, social, and aesthetic harmony.

  Blind Lemon Jefferson was one of history’s most important blues figures—but he was far from the only significant sightless blues performer. In addition to Blind Willie Johnson, there were other greats: Blind Willie McTell, Reverend Blind Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and Sonny Terry. Blind female performers also found a place in the music, including the blues gospel singer Arizona Dranes. As the blues became R&B, other blind performers emerged, including soulman Ray Charles and his heir, Stevie Wonder. Over the years, there has been a lot of speculation in blues circles about exactly why there seem to be so many blind blues performers. One answer, an unsatisfying one, is that it is all a strange coincidence and there is no reason or explanation behind it all. Another answer is that when one is blind, black, and living in the rural South, there are few options, professionally speaking, besides going into music. Another argument, perhaps the most persuasive of them all, holds that blind performers, whose focus, by nature, is on the senses they have remaining, are more suited to master an aural and oral discipline such as the blues.

  Paramount Records, Jefferson’s recording label, used his blindness as a marketing tool. His not at all politically correct biography in The Paramount Book of Blues, released around 1927, read, “Can anyone imagine a fate more horrible than to find that one is blind? To realize that the beautiful things one hears about—one will never see? Such was the heartrending fate of Lemon Jefferson, who was born blind and realized, as a small child, that life had withheld one glorious joy from him—sight. Then—environment began to play its important part in his destiny. He could hear; and he heard the sad-hearted, weary people of his homeland, Dallas, singing weird, sad melodies at their work and play, and unconsciously he began to imitate them—lamenting his fate in song. He learned to play a guitar, and for years he entertained his friends freely, moaning his weird songs as a means of forgetting his affliction. Some friends who saw great possibilities in him suggested he commercialize his talent, and as a result of following their advice he is now heard exclusively on Paramount.”

  Did Blind Lemon Jefferson have a special talent for the blues not in spite of but because of his visual impairment? Blindness and insight have also long been linked in popular lore. Egyptian tomb paintings often depict the image of potbellied, balding, blind harpists. Far from a negative image of the blind, the potbellies indicate that the musicians were well-fed and thus living well, and the bald heads indicated physical purity—such musicians were thought to be held in high social regard. In Norse mythology, the god Odin cast one of his eyes into the well of Mirmir in return for a sip of its waters and the accompanying gift of great wisdom. The Roman poet Ovid wrote of Tiresias, who, after resolving an argument between Jove and Juno in the former’s favor, was struck blind by the la
tter. Jove, however, compensated Tiresias by opening his “inner eye.”

  This anonymous blind street singer wandered Maxwell Street in Chicago in the 1960s.

  Is there something specific about the blues, among all the arts, that either attracts blind artists or allows performers with visual impairments to excel?

  “BLIND WILLIE MCTELL”

  By Bob Dylan [1983]

  Seen the arrow on the doorpost

  Saying, “This land is condemned

  All the way from New Orleans

  To Jerusalem.”

  I traveled through East Texas

  Where many martyrs fell

  And I know no one can sing the blues

  Like Blind Willie McTell

  Well, I heard the hoot owl singing

  As they were taking down the tents

  The stars above the barren trees

  Were his only audience

  Them charcoal gypsy maidens

  Can strut their feathers well

  But nobody can sing the blues

  Like Blind Willie McTell

  See them big plantations burning

  Hear the cracking of the whips

  Smell that sweet magnolia blooming