#Muddy waters electric mud pbs series
The series opens with the beautifully shot, Scorsese-helmed Feel Like Going Home, which follows contemporary blues musician Corey Harris on his quest to discover the roots of Delta blues while incorporating rare archival performances from such departed legends as Son House, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker. Part of what makes The Blues such a unique and striking achievement is that it frequently eschews the chronological survey style normally associated with PBS (e.g., Ken Burns's Jazz) for a more nonlinear, impressionistic approach that aims to convey the spirit of the blues, rather than beat one over the head with ceaseless facts and figures.
Six years in the making, the series comprises seven feature-length films, each directed by such cinematic notables as Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett, Richard Pearce, Clint Eastwood (his Piano Blues was unavailable for review as of this writing), and Scorsese himself. The latest savior of the blues is Martin Scorsese, whose fantastic new seven-part PBS series, simply titled The Blues (set to begin airing on Sunday, September 28), goes a long way toward ensuring that current and future generations don't lose sight of its founding fathers and mothers. And in the 1960s, when blues was usurped by newer forms of music, it took such pasty Brits as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Led Zeppelin to rescue it, reintroducing its sound and vibe to enthusiastic American audiences and creating new opportunities for the blues musicians who'd practically been put out of business a few years earlier.
It took Alan Lomax's 1930s field recordings of spirituals, worksongs, and rural folk tunes for the Library of Congress to preserve the history of the blues before it died off with its original purveyors. Still, the past 100 years of blues music have repeatedly been marked by the need for key figures to fight for the genre's survival and perpetuation.
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