Product Description
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Alan Lomax describes the program--
Today we give a platform to this vital folk culture and its
creators. These people witnessed the birth of the blues. They
lived them. This haunting music, laughing at lifes ironies, and
set to a dancing beat. This amazing mix of Europe and Africa is
America s most distinctive song style. It is also the product of
the folk culture of the Mississippi Delta. We visit picnics and
revivals. We meet the black pioneers who helped to carve
Mississippi out of the wilderness with their work on farm, river,
railroad and levee, creating a new music out of their loneliness
and their deprivation. Music that, once heard, can never be
forgotten.
The program features performances by Sam Chatmon, Jack Owens &
Bud Spires, Eugene Powell (Sonny Boy Nelson), Belton Sutherland,
Othar Turner, Napoleon Strickland, adn Joe Savage.
In addition to the original version of the film, this DVD
contains three hours of extra video, including two hours of
musical performances.
The DVD is NTSC all regions.
The American Patchwork version is also available from AMAZON
Review
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Capitalizing on a variety of contexts from picnics to revivals,
barrooms to riverbanks, The Land presents the views of Black
cultural giants, both men and women, who worked skillfully and
tirelessly throughout their lives as farmers, axmen roustabouts
muleskinners and railroadmen.
Although the film seeks ultimately to document the social milieu
that spawned the Delta Blues tradition, through careful planning
and construction even more far-reaching results have been
produced. First, in the opening scenario featuring Lonnie
Pitchford on "diddley bow" (a one-string guitar or fiddle), this
instrument is visually and aurally contrasted with the African
musical bow to establish an undeniably concrete link between
African and African-American musical traditions.
As the film progresses, the acute perceptiveness and sensitivity
of producers Lomax and Long is further evident in their skillful
juxtaposition of items from both sacred and secular Afro-American
cultural traditions, thereby documenting the behavioral and
aesthetic unity that characterizes virtually every aspect of
Black American culture, The preacher is contrasted with the
teller of toasts;i the intensity, phrasing, and mood of the blues
singer is juxtaposed to that of the singers of the a cappella
lined hymn and Negro spiritual in a rural. presumably Baptist,
Black church.
It is the exceptional work that incorporates such a wealth of
diverse materials, and yet succeeds in producing an effectively
integrated product. The Land includes: demonstrations of
instrument construction and tuning- fife and diddley bow; dances-
the slop, camel walk, and dog- popular during the 1950s; work
songs performed in context; and even a church service, complete
with uniformed ushers, funeral parlor fans, and a mourner's
bench. One special feature is the inclusion of a fife and drum
band, an extremely unusual Afro-American tradition. The Land is
by no means just a film about the blues"; rather, as its
producers intended, it ably and accurately documents a way of
life.
In the process of shooting both ongoing events and controlled
interview/performances, the producers of The Land succeed in
portraying Black performers with dignity and stature," and in
conveying "the sense of excitement that makes folk performers so
important to their own communities" (Bishop ). This film is a
welcome, major contribution to research in Afro-American music.
It will undoubtedly become a model for ethnographic films in our
discipline.
Mellonee Burnim Indiana University --Ethnomusicology vol. XXV #3
pp 565-567 Sep. 1981