Extra Credit

For my extra credit project in my F-121 World Arts and Cultures class, I chose to do a documentary film review. From the website www.folkstreams.com, I watched a documentary called Living Texas Blues. This is a three part series, but because it was so interesting I decided to watch all three. All three parts take place in were filmed by Alan Govenar and deals with the effects that music, especially the Blues, has on people’s lives. The first part of the series is called Battle of the Guitars. Battle of the Guitars is about a Blues band that plays music inspired by the great T-Bone Walker. I especially found this interesting because we studied T-Bone Walker in my History of Rock and Roll class that I took in the Fall Semester. Part one focuses on the Blues band of Pete Mayes and Joe Hughes. Their band has two Blues guitars, one bass, one saxophone, drums, and a keyboard. There are an all black band and the film focuses on their performance for an all black audience. They are somewhat of a tribute band to T-Bone Walker, even though they play mostly their own music. The whole band dresses in nice tuxedos as another way to honor their hero, who would come out onto stage in an all white tuxedo with flashy jewelry. T-Bone Walker’s most famous song is titled “Call It Stormy Monday”. This song tells of the struggles that he goes through, along with many others in the black community. It goes on to say “Call it stormy Monday, and Tuesday’s just as bad. Wednesday is worse, and Thursday’s oh so sad.” He concludes by saying that the weekends they go out and play, and on Sundays they go pray. Being from a different era entirely, I can’t express what this song means to those who heard it then, but it is obvious it carries some weight.
The second part of the series is called Cigarette Blues. It opens with a black artist in Texas saying “Cigarettes…they’re killers.” Then the documentary talks about a sculpture of a huge mountain of cigarettes that the sculpture made with cigarettes that he single-handedly smoked himself. He died from lung cancer, and his dying wish was to send that sculpture to the American Cancer Society in order to display it and teach people what cigarettes do to people. The artist from the beginning is then shown performing his song “Cigarette Blues” about a woman he loved who was addicted to cigarettes. The song concludes with the woman dying and the man saying he will never love another woman who pulls out a cigarette on him. This section of the film ends with a very powerful image of someone filling the cartridges of a gun with cigarettes, showing how they are as lethal as bullets.
Part three of the series is called Deep Ellum Blues. This is the story of a place in Dallas, Texas called Deep Ellum. There are two men in the film, one white and one black, who discuss their lives living on Deep Ellum. Deep Ellum is strip of train track with stores on each side where all the thugs and thieves go to hang out and cause havoc. Both men discuss how people like Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde were always at Deep Ellum, so it seemed likely that the Blues were always there as well. They go on to discuss how this part of Dallas was different than other parts of the nation because the whites and blacks were closer there than anywhere else. The reason for this was the Blues. In the 1930’s, they said that everyone was playing the same music…and that music was seen as an outcast. Music serves as a device of unity here. The men discuss how whites would play at one place and blacks at another, but once they were finished, they all came out and joined together to hang out and party with each other for the night. But when the daylight broke, they all scurried away from each other and went back to the way things were. But for that brief moment, they were all equal. Color did not matter, only music.
Music can be a powerful tool. This documentary has successfully showed how much something like music can affect people’s lives. It can pay tribute to a legend, show others the truth, or join different people as one. I think that many people only see music as a talent, but it has not always been like that. In order to truly understand music, you have to actually hear what is going on. The Blues is arguably the most expressive and deepest form of musical expression, and this music does justice to its greatness. This has been my response to the Extra Credit opportunity.