Sure, it's a marketing tsunami, and the "Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues" branding on everything but Robert Johnson's grave is a bit much. But the films have been tremendous, and the music is even better.
After a pause due to the departure of our great friend and colleague Jan Herman, I am back at MSNBC.com with a look at the music of The Blues:
- The list winds on like the mighty Mississippi to include many of the greatest popular musicians and songwriters of the 20th century: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, B.B King, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, the Allman Brothers Band, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Bessie Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin, Ray Charles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Lee Hooker, Lead Belly, to name but a few. All of them were created by, and in turn helped create America's first great original art form - the blues.
ORIGINALLY SPRINGING FROM those largely excluded from the fruits and mercies of their own land, the blues at its best is a profound artistic expression of sorrow, frustration and - against all odds - joy. And the influence of the blues is almost ubiquitous: Muddy Waters wrote a song called "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll," but Muddy could have added jazz, R&B, soul, folk, even hip-hop to the remarkable list of the blues' musical offspring.....
And we are accumulating interesting responses to the series here on Blogcritics as well:
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues - "Godfathers and Sons"
Last night's episode of Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, called "Godfathers and Sons," was a fascinating failure: fascinating because it gave insight into what made Chicago special in the development of the blues, especially the electric blues, and had some...
Posted in Blogcritics on October 3, 2003 09:19 AM
Figgis & Eastwood do the Blues
The last two films in the Blues series are Red, White & Blues by Mike Figgis and Piano Blues by Clint Eastwood. Both directors are musicians and it shows in the films. You can occasionally see the frizzy hair of...
Posted in Blogcritics on October 3, 2003 06:49 AM
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues - Devils and Angels
There is no way anyone can accuse Martin Scorsese of imposing any kind of uniformity of style of format upon the directors he chose for the seven films that make up his PBS series The Blues. Thus far we've had...
Posted in Blogcritics on October 2, 2003 10:21 AM
.jpg?t=20130517094513)
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
this is interesting. maybe i'm not rememberin' this correctly, but i could swear that the buildup to ken burns "Jazz" was much larger than this....but there appears to be a much larger groundswell of blues support after only three nights of the show.
...which is fine by me (the burns thing was disappointing on several levels)
2 - Taloran
I loved the Ken Burns Jazz series. I am also very much enjoying the Scorsese series. I am a much bigger blues fan than jazz fan (20 years ago the opposite was true) but I found the Burns series more educational (thus far.)
3 - Eric Olsen
T, you're right about the educational side of it. Scorsese and his minions have made a big deal about the series being "impressionistic not pedantic," and that has certainly been true. The book and the CDs assotiated with the series are much more educational than the films themselves.
4 - jan herman
Hate to disagree with you Eric, but I find the films in the blues series getting progressively worse. I think the best one was Scorsese's on the first night of the series. The rest seem dull, though I love the music. They're missed opportunities to me.
-- Jan Herman
5 - Eric Olsen
Disagree away! What would you do differently, how would the opportunity be better fulfilled?
6 - Mac Diva
For the interest in the blues to spread to the hoi polloi there need to be tie-ins, Mark. Ken Burns' relationship with Starbucks' Here Music and a special Borders Books pamphlet and CD series kept the material out there. I suspect it may have penetrated to people who never gave jazz a second thought before.
A funny aside in regard to Burns is it was also the jazz films that got him kicked out of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
7 - Eric Olsen
MD, that is funny! Was he too sympathetic to the artistry of the descendents of the unpaid help?
I think the marketing difference just comes down to Burns himself. Over the course of doing his films he has learned to be a great marketer and merchandiser. I don't he's ever had anything like the volume of products The Blues series has, though.