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his four sons), Brother Davis; the jazz of George Lewis, ‘Sweet Emma’ Barrett, and The Eureka Brass Band; the Cajun of Shorty Le Blanc and Hop Wilson, and such diverse string bands as Blind James Campbell & His Nashville Street Band, J.E. Mainer’s Moun- taineers, and the vaudevillian Willis Brothers.


And there’s more… Just typing the names makes me salivate. Watching the film, nugget after nugget, sets the pulse racing! Some segments are just fragments of a per- formance but it’s still enough to ignite a fris- son of delight. The DVD comes with alterna- tive commentaries. The first has comments from Dietrich Wawzyn with some of his views on the trip, the second has an off-the-cuff, informative (often amusing) running com- mentary by Chris Strachwitz. For me this is, without doubt, the finest music DVD of the last year. 75 minutes of pure gold!


www.arhoolie.com Dave Peabody ROSCOE HOLCOMB


The Legacy Of Roscoe Holcomb Shanachie SH 621


Lightnin’ Hopkins VARIOUS ARTISTS


Down Home Music – A Journey Through The Heartland 1963 The Arhoolie Foundation AF DVD 205


All things considered, this is one remarkable DVD. The original material was shot by Ger- man film-maker Dietrich Wawzyn during a trip that started in the San Francisco Bay area, then swung through the southern USA in search of American jazz and roots music. Wawzyn had the good judgement to contact Arhoolie Records founder and ethnic music enthusiast Chris Strachwitz who readily agreed to act as tour guide, assistant sound recorder, and lighting man. Strachwitz natu- rally guided Wawzyn in the direction of musicians he had already recorded during the first two years of Arhoolie… while also looking for more contacts which would yield later recording opportunities. Wawzyn made several films for German television from his footage (three of which dealt with blues, gospel, and hillbilly music) but at some point the original 16mm negatives were lost. A Journey Through The Heartland 1963 pulls together existing positive film and audio elements which have been skilful- ly edited by Maureen Gosling (who has also worked alongside celebrated music docu- mentary film-maker Les Blank) into a posi- tive treasure trove of historic musical items, each performed in their own evocative geo- graphic location.


As heard and viewed in this film, the music and places seem to come from a time further back than 1963. Many images suggest the ‘30s and the depression, rather than the ‘60s. But while these shots set the milieu and add interest, the real focus, of course, is the remarkable music: the blues of Black Ace, Lowell Fulson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance Lip- scomb, Whistlin’ Alex Moore; the gospel of King Louis H. Narcisse and the Mount Zion Spiritual Temple, Rev. Louis Overstreet (and


If ever anything warrants the label indispens- able, this is it. The 1 hour 40 minute DVD brings together all known footage of the wonderful Roscoe Holcomb together with previously unseen film including a surprising version shot in colour of him singing Single Girl. Briefly, Holcomb was a singer, banjo player and guitarist who played purely for his own amusement around his home in Daisy, Kentucky. When he was discovered in 1959 by John Cohen, Holcomb had never recorded commercially, never been on radio or given any kind of performance. Like striking gold, Cohen realised he had discovered one of the most amazing talents mined by the urban folk revivalists. Not an old recording artist presumed lost, but someone who had a store of music that he had never bothered to trans- late into performance.


Listening to Holcomb talk about the inex- tricable links between his life and his music as he extols the virtues of hard work is riveting. He had been a miner, worked in a sawmill where he broke his back, but worked most of the time in construction until he was too sick to continue. As he says, 10 hours a day for 15 cents an hour, but not complaining, in fact stating that the greatest thing in his life was work. It is an old man you are watching and listening to, yet at the time of some of these films, Holcomb was only in his 50s.


Daisy was in Perry County, with Hazard being the best known town in hard, coal min- ing country. Read Night Comes To The Cum- berlands by Harry Caudill for the definitive account of the region and to set Holcomb’s life into context. Roscoe says that sometimes he comes home and doesn’t feel right play- ing. It just doesn’t work, so he puts down his banjo. Then when he does feel right, the music is right in his body, in his soul. He talks about how he selects what to play and sing depending on his feelings: “It’s just according to what a man feels, what he’s got on his mind when he’s got a notion to play one. That’s the way I feel. To satisfy me, to pass the time away.” Not for money, not for fame, just for the sake of his music, as much a part of him as eating and sleeping. Just watch him, as well as listening. He is only vaguely aware of the camera, even on his TV appearances on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest. His music comes from within and he absorbs himself in it to the exclusion of all else. The music and the man are one being. Listen to Holcomb sing Single Girl, Wayfaring Stranger, Little Birdie, Omie Wise and others and you are temporarily in the presence of a phenomena that will never be repeated in the western world, music that has been learned aurally


from friends, neighbours and family and had no other function but to provide an outlet for the performer’s feelings and emotions.


Two great bonuses are a complete ver- sion of Bill Monroe singing Live And Let Live on the court house steps in Hazard, and later, the legendary fiddle player Marion Sumner, with Holcomb pounding out rhythm guitar as Sumner plays a couple of tunes that display why he was held in such local regard.


Music and social history, entertainment and education. What more could you ask for?


www.shanachie.com John Atkins OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW


Live At The Orange Peel And Tennessee Theatre Nettwerk Productions OCMS 0 6700 30864 9 3


Pretty standard concert DVD from Old Crow Medicine Show, featuring popular album tracks and some new items. OCMS are extremely popular with a young audience, but they still seem to play everything too fast. Ketch Secor, fiddle player, and Willie Watson, guitar and banjo, share the vocals in front of a line-up with usually, two banjo players, albeit not playing bluegrass style, but playing all the time, nevertheless. Their ‘big’ song is still Wagon Wheel, a reworking and virtual rewrite of an obscure Dylan song, but they have many crowd-pleasers – Tell It To Me, Raise A Ruckus and Reuben’s Train – all done in overdrive with Secor sawing away at the fiddle as the crowd go wild. When they occa- sionally slow things down it can be far more pleasing, and the Secor/ Watson composi- tions, Trials And Troubles and Next Go Round, are quite outstanding. Their singing is always spot on and whatever my comments about the speed, audience reaction says their for- mula, not my reservation, has it right.


One warning: unusually these days, this is a region-blocked DVD designed to play in the USA and frustrate the rest of the universe.


www.crowmedicine.com John Atkins


JENSEN & BUGGE Projekt Dialekt GO’ Danish Folk GO0610


Active young Danish fiddler Kristian Bugge, of Baltic Crossing and more, and accordeonist Mette Kathrine Jensen, of Zenobia, went to four places in Jutland with surviving distinc- tive local forms of folk dances and music – Fanø, Thy, Læsø and Western Jutland – and played with local musicians as a small band for dancers invited to a local hall. The four videos simply show the event in each place: the band sits playing and the dancers dance, intercut with an interview with one of the local musicians or a dancer.


The inspiration for the project is admirable, making sure it isn’t just the tunes that survive in the present-day folk revival but also their connection with their raison d’être, the dances, and presumably its main aim is to show these different local dances in action, partly as a document and partly per- haps to encourage others to dance them, or for players to get some sense of how the music fits with the dance. The steps and sequences aren’t really shown clearly or con- tinuously enough to follow, though, and the booklet contains just transcripts of the inter- views and a glossary. Dance descriptions on the video or in the booklet would have been a help. The viewer is in the role of wallflower, just watching the musicians sitting playing and people getting up to dance with varying degrees of amiable inexpertise.


Photo: Stephanie Weisand


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