Give My Poor Heart Ease Transcript with notes by William Ferris
Give My Poor Heart Ease, Transcription
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ]
Transcribed by folklorist Ali Colleen Neff, with additional Notes from her 2006 interview with director William Ferris. These important Notes appear at the end, after the film Credits.
(Joe “Poppa Rock” Louis seated at the turntables of a radio station) [6, 7, 8]
JOE “POPPA ROCK” LOUIS (into mic, interspersing speech with snippets of B. B. King recording): The man say, “Why I sing the blues is because I lived it. I know how it feels” (music)
When you’re hurt,
Someone must understand
How you feel.
The only way to do it is to say it loud and clear.
Make sure that everyone will hear.
It’s the truth the way it is.
That’s why I sing the blues.
This is B. B. King,
Making a statement.
And a natural fact.
All you got to do is sit back,
And dig where it’s coming from,
Listen,
Not only with your ear, but with your heart.
Everybody want to know,
Why I sing the blues.
(shot of B. B. King, seated and playing guitar) [9, 10, 11]
B. B. KING: [V/O] Everything lead me back to the feeling of the blues or the feeling I get from playing or singing the blues or hearing others singing it. In fact I think life itself is the blues. The earliest sounds (on camera) of the blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be picking cotton, chopping cotton or something. (strums guitar) Usually one guy would be plowing by himself (strum guitar) or maybe one guy would take his hoe and chop way out in front of everybody else. And usually you would hear this guy sing.
(shot of B. B.’s hand strumming guitar with pick, then shot of face, zooming out to include guitar)
B. B. KING, singing:
Oh I wake up in the morning,
‘Bout the break of day…
(Dissolve to shot of B. B. King playing in an auditorium, with close-up of B. B. King’s face as he plays guitar) [12]
(close up of his hand forming chords) [13, 14]
(wide shot of King’s back as he faces the audience [15, 16]
and applause as he ends, then traveling shot of yellow lines of Highway 61)
(film title over blues guitar and singing):
Give My Poor Heart Ease:
MISSISSIPPI DELTA BLUES [17]
© 1975 William Ferris, Yale University
(traveling shots of houses and fields along Highway 61
then Highway 61 sign, bridge and water to the side of the bridge) [18, 19, 20]
JAMES “SON” THOMAS (V/O, singing):
I walked 61 Highway ‘til I give down in my knees.
I walked 61 Highway ‘til I give down in my knees.
You know I ain’t found nobody, give my poor heart ease. [21]
(Shot of a small barbershop with barber Wade Walton playing guitar to a customer in a chair. A reflection of the shop and its inhabitants in the barber’s mirror) [22, 23]
CUSTOMER (to Walton): Oh baby. You must know Robert Nighthawk and B. B. King. I want to know how much he going to charge me for this haircut after all this serenading.
WADE WALTON (playing guitar behind his head): They used to do it like this here. (singing):
I want you to rock me mama, rock me all night long. (laughter)
I want you to rock me baby, rock me all night long.
I want you to rock me like my back ain’t got no bone. [24, 25, 26]
CUSTOMER (as Wade Walton dances while sharpening razor): Right on! I could have used you in Vietnam!
WADE WALTON (off camera, playing guitar behind his back):
Want you to roll me baby, like a new fly on your door.
Want you to roll me baby like a new fly on your door.
I want you to roll me ‘til I don’t want to roll no more.
CUSTOMER (clapping): That was right on. (laughs)
(shots of prisoners marching down a road toward camera) [27]
B. B. KING (V/O): The blues did have its roots and still does in the prison. To me, I think this is how the blues actually started. [28] [29]
BEN GOOCH [30] (close shot of Gooch’s face): When I first came here it was 1934, November the 5th. Parchman. Parchman. It was pretty tough then. You had to go ahead. Whatever he had you doing you had to run with it. (Gooch sits with belongings on table beside him) I was rode so hard, when it came time to go eat dinner I couldn’t eat with a spoon or nothing. The food would just shake off, been so nervous, you know.
(close shot of Gooch’s face, V/O) But I made it. I made it through all right. Far as I know they doing okay, all but my wife. Me and her are not together now. When I got in trouble she went on up the country. Where she at I don’t know. I try to keep her from rolling across my mind. (visuals of Gooch’s thumb rubbing his ankle, close up of face and a shoeshine box in his cell) I just go off to myself and try to forget it. Sometime I get my old shoeshine box here. Shine somebody’s shoes and make me thirty or forty cents, and I’m all right in the world. I’ll get back up on my feet. (sitting in chair) Get me a little cigarettes and things. So I’m making it pretty good. Yes sir, ain’t got no kicks coming.
(line of prisoners chopping wood, zoom out and down the line) [31]
WORK GANG (singing while chopping):
One of these days and (chop)
Won’t be long. (chop)
One of these days and (chop)
Won’t be long. (chop)
Call for me and (chop]
I’ll be gone. (chop)
One of these mornings daddy (chop)
Oh won’t be long. (chop)
Call for me and (chop)
I’ll be gone. (chop)
JAMES “BLOOD” SHELBY (V/O shots of prisoners):
Well when you’re working and you’re singing, it makes you get your mind off everything else and get it on your work. (close-up shot of Blood’s face) Older fellas was here before I got here. And I heard them singing, so I just start helping them sing.
(Shots of prisoners chopping cotton, taking a water break and being watched by a guard)
PRISONERS singing:
Peaches I love, don’t grow on trees,
Little hard naval just above her knees,
The thing you call her stingaree,
Little before the day she put that thing on me.
Oh Lordy, Berta, Berta, Oh Lord, Gal. [32]
Be my woman, Gal, I’ll be your man.
Every day Sunday, dollar in your hand.
Cut your wood, I’ll make your fire,
Tote your water from the boggy bayou.
Would do your cooking if I just knowed how.
(shot of dirt road with homes on either side) [33, 34]
SHELBY “POPPA JAZZ” BROWN: (V/O audio of prisoners singing): Why do you think they play the blues in Mississippi? (close up of Brown’s face) Because of the way they used to plow, folks here chop cotton at daylight and in the morning. They would get out there and work so hard they be even looking at the sun. Saying, “Hurry, hurry sundown, let tomorrow shine.” They wanted the sun to go down so they could stop working, they worked so hard. They learned the blues from that. And then they learned the blues from the women. You can get the blues about a woman, you go to kissing and hug her, and won’t see her for three or four night looking for her. You can get the blues there. Understand me now? You touch one up like that will give you the blues now. And Mississippi got more of it than anywhere. That’s why all the blues people come here singin’ the blues.
(scenes of musicians and audience inside a small country store, with James Thomas, seated, playing guitar in front of the meat counter) [35, 36]
(Thomas sings and plays guitar and Joe Cooper plays bass)
JAMES “SON FORD” THOMAS, singing:
Well, Mama told Poppa about a little something she heard.
And Poppa told Momma “Don’t believe none of that.
The boy’s a man now.
Let him go out and have himself some fun.”
Hey, and it felt so good.
I wanta ramble.
I wanta ramble.
I wanta ramble.
I wanta ramble.
(shot of Son Thomas playing)
Woo, I wanta ramble if it takes me all night long.
I’m gonner tell you something here now.
If I can’t get in the bed, let me make a pallet on the floor.
I’ll leave so early the next morning your real man never know. (woman dancing)
I say, if I can’t get in the bed let me make a pallet down on the floor.
I’ll leave so early the next morning ‘til your real man never know.
I got to ramble.
(pan of audience and zoom to Thomas)
I got to ramble.
I got to ramble.
I got to ramble.
(close up of Thomas] [37]
JAMES “SON FORD” THOMAS: Women’s what gives you the blues. A woman tell you, say, “I love you,” and all that, and you go and find out she’s loving somebody else. Well, you can’t have nothin’ but the blues. I was working in the, uh, log field until the cotton got big enough to chop, and I come in that evening. I had bought her a pack of cigarettes. I never will forget that. And uh a little boy told me, say, “Your wife gone.” And I got sick all at once. I said, “She carried all her clothes.” I said, “I know it, boy. Get away from here.” But that hurts you though.
(close up of Son Thomas’ hands forming chords) [38]
JAMES “SON FORD” THOMAS:
Rock me baby, rock me all night long.
Rock me baby, rock me all night long.
I want you to rock me,
Don’t care how it make me feel.
See me coming, run get your rocking chair.
(shots of Thomas playing guitar as Cleveland “Broom Man” Jones rhythmically scrapes a broom against a wooden floor. Joe Cooper sings. “Poppa Jazz” is in attendance) [39]
JAMES “SON FORD” THOMAS, singing:
I walked 61 Highway ‘til I give down in my knees.
I walked 61 Highway ‘til I give down in my knees.
You know, I ain’t found nobody, give my poor heart ease.
Well they tell me 61 Highway is the longest road they know.
They tell me 61 Highway is the longest road they know.
You know it run from Chicago down to the Gulf of Mexico.
(traveling shot of the shops on Memphis’ Beale Street) [40, 41]
Muddy Waters’ recording of “Hoochie Coochie Man”)
MUDDY WATERS:
The gypsy woman told my mother
Before I was born
You got a boy child coming,
Gonner be a son of a gun.
He gonner make pretty women
Jump and shout
Then the world want to know
What this is all about.
‘Cause you know I’m here.
Everybody knows I’m here.
(close-up of hat salesman Robert Shaw at Lansky’s clothing shop on Beale Street) [42, 43]
ROBERT SHAW: Everything here is the blues. It goes back to feelings. How you feel today. You know blues has always been something that you don’t have to be black to have the blues. You can have blues, wake up in the morning and something is blue on you—you understand what I’m talking about? Around your bed, and you done got blue, you understand? (Shaw stands before shelves with hats stocked on them)
Your old lady just quit you and you’re blue. (laughs) So you understand what I’m talking about? I know you’ve had the blues. Have you ever had the blues? I’m sure you’ve had the blues sometime or another in your life. Like when your girlfriend quit you. You thought you was in love and she was in love, and all at once you found out she’s gone and you’re gone. You say, “Man, I’m sad here, and I’m blue.”
(camera moves between close and wide shots of Shaw talking animatedly)
You understand, that’s what it is, uh huh. Everybody gets the blues, huh? It’s sho’nuff the blues. If you wake up in the morning and don’t have no money in your pocket and you can’t get a loaf of bread, ain’t you blue? (laughs) And the baby crying too? (laughs)
Now I’m going to tell you about the life of the blues. Now this is the blues: [44]
Living ain’t easy and times are tough.
Money is scarce, and we all can’t get enough.
Now my insurance is lapsed and food is low,
And the landlord is knockin’ at my door.
Last night I dreamed I died,
The undertaker came to take me for a ride.
I couldn’t afford a casket,
And embalming was so high,
I got up from my sick bed because I was too poor to die.
Now ain’t that blue?
(visuals of B. B. King singing and playing guitar at Yale University. Bill Oppenheimer plays keyboards.) [45]
B. B. KING (V/O close-up of B.B.’s guitar): Whenever I would sing and have these people gather around me like they did, then this seemed to me as family. This is another thing that make the blues singer and the blues musician continue to go on because this is his way of crying out to people.
(shots of B. B. sitting in a living room and playing guitar) [46, 47]
The thrill is gone.
The thrill is gone away.
The thrill is gone, baby.
The thrill is gone away. (zoom in to close shot)
You know you done me wrong, baby,
And you’re gonna be sorry someday.
Thrill is gone.
Thrill is gone away from me.
Thrill is gone, baby.
Thrill is gone away from me.
Although I still live on,
But so lonely I will be.
Thrill is gone.
The thrill is gone away for good.
Thrill is gone, baby.
Thrill is gone away for good.
I know I’ll be over that one day, baby,
Like I know a good man should. (zoom in on guitar)
You know I’m free now, baby.
I’m free from your spell.
Free, free, free, now baby.
Free from your spell.
Now that it’s all over,
All I can do is wish you well. [48, 49]
(video of B.B. King playing guitar]
CREDITS roll over black and B.B. King playing guitar [50]
editors [51]
Dale Lindquist
William Ferris
a production of
Yale University Media Design Studio
in cooperation with
Center for Southern Folklore
produced in association with
Howard Sayre Weaver
our thanks to:
B.B.King
James “Son” Thomas
Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown
James “Blood” Shelby
Cleveland “Broom Man” Jones
Parchman inmates (Camp B)
Joe Louis
Joe Cooper
Wade Walton
Robert Taylor
James Shaw
Ben Gooch
Yale University Audio Visual Staff
with support from:
Ford Foundation
Poynter Fund
National Endowment for the Arts
Edward W. Hazen Foundation
photography
Dale Lindquist
sound
Robert Slattery
production assistant
Sara Miller
a film by
William Ferris
“Why I Sing The Blues”
used with permission of
B.B. King, Dave Clark
A.B.C. Dunhill Music – Sounds of Lucille Inc.
“The Thrill Is Gone”
used with permission of
B.B. King
Arthur Benson, E. Dale Petite
Grosvenor House Music
End Notes—William Ferris’s Comments on the Film, from an interview recorded and transcribed by folklorist Ali Colleen Neff
1. Give My Poor Heart Ease is one of four films that were done with the Media Design Studio at Yale University in the mid-seventies. The Media Design Studio was directed by Howard Weaver. The vision was to create a film equivalent to Yale University Press that essentially would allow faculty to develop and produce films in their fields in the same way that scholars write books. This project on black folklore was really the first major project they did. It was initially designed to create a series of films based on my black folklore class. We did a great deal of filming for that, which we eventually decided was less effective than actual documentary film, which we then shifted the focus to.
2. We created four 20-minute documentaries: one on the blues, Give My Poor Heart Ease; the second on black religion, Two Black Churches; the third on folktales and storytelling called I Ain’t Lyin’; and the fourth on folk art and crafts called Made in Mississippi. This is really a package of four films that are designed for teaching and resources in the field of black folklore.
3. I did the production with three wonderful people: Robert Slattery who did the sound recordings on all four films and edited Two Black Churches. Dale Lindquist did the camerawork and also edited Give my Poor Heart Ease, and Sara “Trudy” Miller did production support and photography and also edited the other two films, Made in Mississippi and I Ain’t Lyin’.
4. We worked as a team in the actual production work and then later in the editing suite, which was at Yale University. In the course of editing, Walker Evans came and visited the project and was very interested in the work.
5. Frank Ashburn was my headmaster at Brooks school [in North Andover, Massachusetts]. Mr. Ashburn had studied as an undergraduate at Yale and later was the first headmaster at Brooks and led Brooks for many, many years. He also served on the Yale Corporation, the managing board. One day, to my delight, I ran into him on campus. He was there several days. He asked what I was doing and I told him about these films. He, like Walker Evans, also came into the studio and looked over our shoulder as we were editing. So those were two little nice pieces that flowed into our lives: both Walker Evans and Frank Ashburn.
6. The film opens with a studio scene in WOKJ/WJMI, a black radio station on Lynch Street, just down the street, a few blocks down the street from where I began my teaching career at Jackson State University. One of my oldest friends worked there, Bruce Payne, and through Bruce we were allowed to come in and do filming inside the station. The opening scene is Joe “Poppa Rock” Louis. Joe “Poppa Rock” Louis had a morning show, and he loved B. B. King’s blues. This opening scene is of him doing his intro voiceover and then playing a part of the piece from B. B. King.
7. This opening scene is a great example of what we call “call and response” in black culture. Musically, an artist like B. B. King sets up call and response with his guitar, Lucille. We also see call and response in the black church, as the preacher calls out and the congregation responds. Here we enter the world of technology, and there’s an amazingly powerful call and response that the black DJ, in this case Joe “Poppa Rock” Louis, sets up with the recordings to give what already is an extraordinarily powerful musical recording even greater energy through the interaction of with his voice being intercut with the record. This really foreshadows more contemporary sounds of black DJs who are playing and overdubbing and cutting their voices in.
8. This rhythmic call-and response between a live MC and pre-recorded music anticipates that of the hip-hop aesthetic. In the ‘70s, radio DJs in New York and Jamaica would use two turntables and a microphone to create this effect until eventually the DJ and the MC duties began to be performed by two artists. This method of sampling continues to provide the basis of hip-hop today.
9. This scene cuts to B. B.’s apartment in New York City. His apartment overlooked Central Park, and I always remember him closing the curtains with an electric switch, which pulled this enormous curtain across the room to darken the it for our cameras. From that perch, he could look over Central Park. It was a very exciting moment to be allowed in his apartment in this way. This is an informal session in which B. B. reflected about his life and his roots in the Mississippi Delta. [He is] playing a Gibson guitar, which was my guitar when I went to Yale. Actually, my guitar had been stolen, and I bought this guitar a few years earlier. So we were able to get an intimate visit with B. B. and get his thoughts about life and music.
10. B. B. King is from Indianola, Mississippi, a town located in the Mid-Delta on Highway 49. Club Ebony, the Indianola juke joint B. B. frequented as a young musician, continues to host blues acts today.
11. The description that B. B. gives of blues being heard over distances is a familiar memory for blues artists in the country. Especially at night, the music could be heard for miles. This kind of very evocative sound of musicians playing in the countryside and being heard at great distances was especially memorable to the musicians. It was a way of communicating and sharing music even though you were not very close to the musician who was playing.
12. We now cut to Sprague Auditorium in the School of Music at Yale University. This was probably a first: to bring a blues musician into a hall that would normally be reserved for classical music and classical concerts. There was overwhelming enthusiasm and excitement about B. B.’s coming to Yale and being honored in this way. We later were able to secure an honorary doctorate degree for B. B., a Doctorate of Humane Letters. He was also unanimously selected [by the senior class] to give the senior commencement speech. When he responded that he was not a good speaker, the students responded, “Just play.” So this concert led to his speaking and performing as the Senior commencement speaker at Yale and the following day, receiving an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at Yale. Gerald Ford received an honorary degree that same year. Several years later, we were able to present an honorary doctorate to Eudora Welty, another Mississippian who distinguished herself through literature.
13. Here, [we move] from the acoustic guitar (the country blues sound) to Lucille, the Gibson electric guitar for which B. B. is so well known. You immediately hear in a much more powerful way the tremolo and use of his electrical guitar.
14. B. B. often mentions that he never sings when he’s playing his guitar. His mastery of guitar, of Lucille, is a solo performance that then allows him to sing. When he’s singing, he doesn’t play, and when he plays, he doesn’t sing. There, again, is a call and response between the performer and his instrument.
15. The guitar is accompanied by a keyboard artist, Bill Oppenheimer, who was one of my students from Mobile, Alabama. He accompanies B. here on the piano, and later in the film, on an electric keyboard to give a little instrumental support to B.’s performance.
16. It’s important to note B.’s elegant dress, coat and tie, a very dapper outfit. He is very conscious of his dress and of his desire that the blues be treated with dignity and respect as America’s classical music. The stereotype pf the musician sitting on the front porch in a ragged outfit, sipping from a beer, is just that—it’s a stereotype. The reality is that the blues artist is an artist in the deepest way, and B. B. is the ultimate spokesperson for that music. His dress reflects the kind of dignity and honor that he expects the blues to receive when they are performed.
17. We cut from this amazing Ivy League world at Yale directly to Highway 61, the great route celebrated by the blues. We take the title of the film from the blues “Highway 61” and its verse: “I walked Highway 61 ‘til I give down on my knees, trying to find somebody to give my poor heart ease.” The juxtaposition of Ivy League student University worlds with the strong imagery of the Mississippi Delta is what we’re working on with this sequence.
18. This section of Highway 61 is in North Mississippi. It’s north of Clarksdale and going through miles of cotton fields that stretch for miles on either side of the Highway. The song is being sung by James “Son Ford” Thomas, who appears later in the film. Son Thomas is playing on an electric guitar, just as B. was playing before. Son Thomas also came to Yale virtually every year that I taught there and spoke and performed for my students as well. So there’s a really wonderful continuity between these Delta worlds and Yale and the voices of B. B. and James “Son” Thomas, who were literally adored by the students.
19. We are passing shotgun houses, which are the classic African American architectural form in the Deep South. The folklorist John Vlach has traced these shotgun houses as an architectural form to Africa and has also documented their widespread appearance in the Caribbean and New Orleans and in the Deep South. There are essentially three rooms a row, like a railroad apartment in New York, with a front door leading to a front room, and you walk through the two other rooms and out the back door. They are celebrated in blues and in storytelling and Southern Literature. The shotgun house for black culture is counterpart of the dogtrot house for Southern white culture--the dogtrot, of course, being celebrated by Walker Evans and James Agee in their classic book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
20. Highway 61 has since been renovated and rerouted to bypass many of the small towns in the Delta. It is still possible to trace Old Highway 61 through the African America neighborhoods of the Delta.
21. The lyric “give my poor heart ease” has been incorporated into many blues songs, perhaps most famously Ida Cox’s “Coffin Blues.”
22. We are now in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the barbershop of Wade Walton. I first met Wade in the [late 1960s] when he was barbering and performing in a much larger barbershop. And I filmed his “Barbershop Boogie Woogie” there with a Super 8 camera and a tape recorder. Since that time, Wade had opened his own barbershop with a bar and pool hall in the back of it. This is a wonderful example of how his business as a barber was enhanced by his knowledge of the blues.
23. Wade Walton’s barbershop is still open on Yazoo St. in Clarksdale today as Big D’s juke joint. The original counter and some of the mirrors are still intact.
24. Wade was really a scholar of the blues in a very wonderful sense. He had worked with Paul Oliver when he first came to the Mississippi Delta, and helped Oliver when he went in to Parchman to do recordings there and other recordings in Clarksdale. Shortly after coming to the University of Mississippi in 1969, we brought Paul to Clarksdale for a blues symposium where I also spoke at the first Delta Blues Museum, which was in a small library just off of Highway 61. Wade also appeared on that program. Until his death, he was actively engaged in blues initiatives in Clarksdale and the Deep South.
25. Just as with B. B. King’s performance, we should note that Wade Walton dresses very carefully with his wonderful bow tie. This is a professional who is both a barber and a musician, and again, he is a spokesperson for the community. He is a leader in the political and cultural worlds of his community and a successful businessman who, with his wife, ran the barbershop and a restaurant and pool hall in the back part of the barbershop.
26. I should also say that the barbershop is an especially important part of the black community. It is where men tend to gather, not only for haircuts, but for gossip and to catch up on news. It has been the subject of several feature films over the years. When we look at the barbershop we see an inner world within the black community that is distinctively their own.
27. This is a section from Parchman Penitentiary in Camp B [Lambert, Mississippi] where Sergeant Webb was the head of the camp. I had filmed here earlier in the sixties and recorded work chants and interviews with musicians and inmates. We were able to enter the camp and [were] given complete access to the inmates. This is the march from the camp to the field to chop cotton, to take their hoes and literally chop the weeds out of the cotton. They did this under the supervision of the trustees, who were inmates who were given the level of trust that allowed them to carry guns and to use guns if the inmates tried to escape.
28. The terror and loneliness and violence of life in Parchman Penitentiary is hard to imagine. In a separate project I did earlier, I interviewed and photographed a former inmate named Have Mercy, who described his experiences there. He describes, just as this voice describes, that if you didn’t run and try to stay ahead of what you were asked to do, you were beaten and often killed. As they were beating one inmate who didn’t pick enough cotton with four inmates holding his arms and legs stretched out--they beat him with a leather strap that would draw blood on each strike—Have Mercy said, “If you kill him, he can’t work anymore.” Said, “Have mercy on him and let him go back to work.” And that’s how he received his nickname. Everyone gets a nickname as soon as they go into the penitentiary.
29. The work chants that are a part of the prison work pattern go back to African musical roots. There are work chants in West Africa. They were the subject of a major book by Bruce Jackson called Wake up Dead Man. They also are the origin of many blues lyrics. Traditionally, there was a caller who would call the lines, and the men would sing the lines while they chopped wood or worked to line railroad tracks. The work chants are a way of pacing hard work in hot, dangerous conditions. They are also a way of coordinating gang labor so that everyone raises their axe and brings it down together to make it a little safer and less random than it might be otherwise. Lastly, they are a way of expressing anger and frustration and protest that can be done safely without fear of reprisal from the boss because placing these messages in music somehow makes them less threatening. So the work chant really is the origin of many blues lyrics. They have been chronicled by the recordings of John and Alan Lomax and celebrated in films like Oh Brother Where Art Thou?
30. Ben Gooch is the black man who is alone in the room. Ben Gooch is amazing. We were just talking with him, and we said, can we go in your room to get away from all the people around, and we did, and it became a very intense moment.
31. Each man essentially “carries a row,” as they say, and will take the hoe and chop the weeds from around the cotton plants, which are growing as far as the eye can see. And every so often, there’s a water break and a handmade cup—from a metal can—the water is served from a container.
32. The name “Berta” was traditionally used in work songs throughout the Deep South to refer to a particular female archetype: an object of longing and a purveyor of sorrow.
33. That’s Kent’s Alley, which is the heart of the black community in Leland, Mississippi, where Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown, the patriarch of blues in that world, lived and in his home ran Saturday night blues concerts and served corn liquor and sandwiches to local people who would came to dance and hear the music.
34. That’s Shelby “Poppa Jazz,” an amazing figure who had confronted racism and dealt with it in the pre-civil rights [period] in ways that were heroic.
35. Blues can create events anywhere: in back room of a home, at a house party, at a small bar. In this case, Son Thomas is playing in a small sandwich shop that serves beer and cold cuts. On the floor, a dance hall is created when he picks up his guitar.
36. The whole bar is a much more public area than the back room of Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown’s home. Because of that, you have much a more diverse group age-wise there: teenagers and young men and women as well as older people. In Shelby Brown’s home, the group would have been almost exclusively older people who grew up with the music.
37. Now we’re cutting from Leland, Mississippi back to Yale. This is the little living room in my apartment in Calhoun College at Yale University, one of twelve residential colleges. We had several of my students there in a much more intimate context. Son Thomas is reflecting on the blues and how he first got the blues when his first wife left him.
8. We cut from my apartment at Yale back to Leland to the home of Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown. In this session, we see Poppa Jazz talking. Son Thomas is playing next to his uncle Joe Cooper, who taught him to play originally, and Son overshadowed him in ability. We also see Cleveland “Broom Man” Jones, who plays a broom handle as a bass instrument. Mr. Jones grew up on the farm where I grew up, I learned, and had memories of those worlds, where he lived before he moved to the Delta.
39. This equipment is an Electro Voice RE-15 microphone and a microphone stand that I used for many years. These were virtually indestructible, both the mike and the stand. I still had this equipment when I was at Yale, and we used it for this particular shoot in Mississippi. We were traveling in an old station wagon that my parents loaned us. So we put all our equipment in the back part of it, and the four of us drove down from Memphis into Mississippi and ended in Vicksburg. We spent nearly a week on the road gathering nearly all of the footage for the four films that were to follow.
40. We cut to Beale Street before it was renovated. This was the heart of the black community prior to the Civil Rights Movement and the so-called Urban Renewal, which essentially disemboweled the black community and the business district of Beale Street, which was [home to] both black and Jewish merchants. When we filmed this travel shot down the street, most of the stores were deserted and boarded up. Today, they’re all renovated and back in business. We end up in [Lansky’s] department store with a hat salesman who is talking and rapping about the blues. His name is Robert Shaw.
41. This traveling shot is a valuable document of the way Beale Street looked before its revitalization in the 1990s.The rubble depicted here is now prime real estate in Memphis, and the street is peopled with throngs of tourists and 24-hour bars featuring blues music.
42. The last scene is in Lansky’s where Elvis and B. B King bought their first suits. The Lansky firm catered to musicians on Beale Street. There is a photograph [by Ernest Withers] of Elvis and B. B. there together. Robert Shaw is working there as a salesman and also as an incredible raconteur.
43. The music in this section is Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man”, a wonderful tribute not only to Muddy Waters but to Willie Dixon, the composer, who grew up in my hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi. He learned to ride horses in Vicksburg from Ray Lum, who is featured in another film on the Folkstreams website.
44. Shaw’s rhyme is an example of a toast, which is a form of oral expression popular across the African diaspora that is today manifest in hip-hop culture.
45. We move from Beale Street to the master’s living room at Calhoun College, and B. B. sings his signature song, “The Thrill Is Gone.” I was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. I was being processed out of the army in 1969. This song was one of the top songs on the air. It was made that way when B. B.’s manager Sid Seidenberg decided to mix in a string orchestra with the blues. That really gave it kind of kick that made this one of the first blues to go into the best-selling charts. For me, it summed up my sadness over Vietnam and the terrible fear about the future. It has always been my favorite of all blues. So when I was able to hear him sing it in this way, it touched me very deeply.
46. You notice here the call and response again. B. B. sings and then he pauses and plays the guitar He also uses his face in a very powerful way, with his eyes closed, to connect a highly emotional feeling that his blues contained. So he is really using his voice, his face and his instrument in very powerful ways.
47. Bill Oppenheimer, as I mentioned earlier, is on the keyboard here. Bill is from Mobile, Alabama. Because of his father’s death, he had to go back home before he graduated. He is a gifted keyboard player and blues musician in his own right.
48. B. B. King sings that the nightlife is his life, and this is very true. In his eighties, he continues to play over 300 nights each year on the road, traveling in his bus and going to concerts and clubs all over the nation. He is the greatest musician of the blues in the history of our nation. His life spans six decades, and in each decade he has reinvented himself, from the traditional blues to urban blues, and more recently playing with groups [and] figures like Bono and Eric Clapton. He is a hero to every musician who has played over the past 3 or 4 decades, including artists like Willie Nelson. I was at the Memphis Blues Awards one evening with Willie Nelson and B. B., getting ready behind the stage, and Willie Nelson turned to B. B. and said, “I stole a lot of your licks over the years.” And B. B. said, “I was glad to give them to you.”
49. There is a deep affection for B. B. at every level. At one point, I was with B. B. at a club in Boston and at intermission some of the audience came back to congratulate him. One was a beautiful black woman I was talking with, and she said, “My grandmother told me to come here and meet B. B., if I did nothing else while I was in school.” We began talking, and I realized that she was the granddaughter of Nate Shaw, the hero of Theodore Rosengarten’s classic, All God’s Dangers. So it was a small world, that this granddaughter of this truly great figure in history was meeting B. B. King, another equally great figure.
50. This is in the late afternoon, and what is happening, as we will see, is that we begin to lose our light. The cameraman, Dale Lindquist, realized that and began shooting B. B.’s face very tightly to try to capture some of the expression. In the end, the light went very dark. And you see what looks to be a tear—it may be sweat coming down his face. We essentially ended the film with the music continuing before the end of the song because our light had disappeared. So we basically pulled our credits into the film and let them roll as the music was playing because the visual image had essentially gotten too dark to use as part of the film. The solution of pulling the credits into the film was suggested by John Godone, who was the negative cutter in New York City and an amazingly adept person with whom we worked on all four of our films. It was a reminder of how much was done in the production of the film and how many little details that make the film a better piece of art are done with the people within the lab. J. G. Films is his company name, and DuArt is where we processed the films. Both of those labs are used in film today and are an institution. WF
[51] The J. G. Films partnering in our film with DuArt, which is run by the brother of Robert Young. The Youngs [are] a film family, and Robert Young did the film “With a Pistol in his Hand”: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982). It was a real a treat to work with people who were such professionals within the film world.
