Jack White and Elton John both used loving recreations of ancient machinery to record to shellac for the American Epic: The Sessions film project
It’s been a full decade now since an Anglo-American team of documentary filmmakers, led by producer Allison McGourty and director Bernard MacMahon, set out on an epic journey to explore the huge variety of folk, rural and regional music recorded in the United States during the late 1920s.
That was the first time, thanks to new electrical recording technology, that Americans had heard each other in all their richness and variety. And it reshaped the whole concept of popular music.
What triggered that journey – culminating in a magnificent BBC TV series called American Epic, which had just started airing as this issue went to press – was a visit to a UK blues festival by the aforementioned MacMahon.
The director heard that three veteran blues musicians (David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, Homesick James and Robert Lockwood Jr.) were going to be performing. “I thought, ‘I really need to film these guys’”, he tells Long Live Vinyl. “They were all in their 90s, and clearly weren’t going to be around for much longer. And so I got together a good-quality film crew and did two-hour interviews with each of them. Some of that footage is contained in the blues section of American Epic.”
“What emerged”, says MacMahon, “was that these artists were the real deal. ‘Honeyboy’ had met Charley Patton back in 1931. Homesick talked about seeing Blind Lemon Jefferson play in Texas, and Robert was a protégé of Robert Johnson no less, who was also his stepfather. What a history!
“Allison (McGourty), my production partner, saw this footage and said: ‘This is great… We need to make this into something larger’. So we set out to make a series that celebrated the pioneers and artists of American roots music – encompassing the blues, gospel, folk, Cajun, Appalachian, Hawaiian, and Native American – without which there would be no rock, country, R&B or hip-hop today.