>> From The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Stephen Winick: Welcome to The Library of Congress. My name is Steve Winick, and I work here at the American Folklife Center. And we're conducting an interview, my co-interviewer is Mary Sue Twohy from SiriusXM Radio, and our guests are the filmmakers who made the series, American Epic, which showed on PBS, and I will let them introduce themselves. >> Allison McGourty: I'm Allison McGourty, one of the writers and producers of American Epic. Originally from Scotland, now living in Los Angeles. >> Bernard MacMahon: And I'm Bernard MacMahon, I'm director and co-writer of the series. >> Stephen Winick: So we understand it took about a decade for you to go from inspiration to the series, itself. So the series explores the early days of commercial recording, particularly that burst of activity that occurred with 78 RPM disks all across the country and particularly roots music. So can you tell us some of the inspirations for making this film? >> Bernard MacMahon: The period was of great interest to us because in 1925 in America the vast majority of music was being sold to wealthy people in the cities, that was the audience. And in '26 radio took off in America and record sales dropped overnight. All those people in Chicago, Boston, and New York started listening to the radio. So the record companies thought we're going to be out of business and they came up with the novel idea of why don't we try and sell music to poor people in rural America. But they're not going to be interested in buying the show tunes and the classical music and the big band that we've been recording, we're going to have to record what they like. So they devised a plan and that was to advertise in local papers across the whole of America inviting people to come and audition and thousands of people came and the auditions were open to all Americans -- African Americans, Mexican Americans, Hawaiians, Cajuns, Native Americans. And many of the guys, some of the guys organizing the sessions were song publishers so they, like Ralph Pierce, they insisted that people bring their own songs they'd written. And they had just invented at that time, the year before, the first electrical sound recording equipment, the first microphone, the first amplifier. And they were recording everything direct to disk on a pulley-driven lathe because they couldn't trust the electricity to turn the turntable at a constant 78 RPM. And it took about three-and-a-half minutes for that weight to slowly fall and hit the floor, which is why today the pop song is still three-and-a-half minutes long. And that explosion of recordings is what our film is about, it charts the journey of that machine from New York to Oahu, tells the story through 10 families that participate in those recordings. And then for the fourth film we rebuild that machine from original parts scavenged over 10 years and it's the first time anyone has seen it in almost 80 years. And we asked contemporary artists to record on it. So I think the thing that attracted us about this story was it hadn't been told before and it combined all the things about America that we loved -- its entrepreneurism, it's incredibly rich culture, its music and its freedom of speech. >> Stephen Winick: Great. Well, thank you. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Can you tell us a little bit about your background before creating American Epic? >> Bernard MacMahon: I'll pass that to you first. >> Allison McGourty: Well, I spent five years at the BBC in Documentaries and Acquisition and also the BBC World Service, and prior to that at Reuters Television, so I was always interested in storytelling and history and journalism. My dad was a newspaper man. My sister was a journalist. And then and I played music growing up, so I'd buy music as a kid. I played the clarinet and my sister played the flute. And my dad would come on holiday to America and bring back records from the Smithsonian and The Library of Congress and Louisiana, so I grew up listening to jazz and Blues and old-time American music. And then when I started working with Bernard in about 2003-04, we started working together on a record label that then quickly segwayed into a film company with this project. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and I just tagged along in her wake. [laughter] >> Stephen Winick: So another interesting aspect of this film is there are some names that people will recognize associated with this film. You have executive producers who are T Bone Burnett, Jack White and Robert Redford. So how did those big names essentially get involved in this production? >> Allison McGourty: Well, I knew Bob Dolan's manager, Jeff Rosen, and once Bernard had gotten some really important findings, some film footage and photographs that we knew had never been seen before and published before, we thought who better to take it to than Jeff Rosen who would essentially know if we had a story here and if it was worth telling. So he was the first person we went to and almost became like a mentor to us in the beginning and helped us. So he's thought it was a terrific story. I made an introduction to BBC Arena, to Anthony Wall there, who came on as an executive producer immediately and was a super nice guy, really helpful. And he said you must take this to T Bone Burnett, so he made a phone call and literally we find ourselves the very next day flying to Los Angeles for the first time. And we walked into the recorder studio with our findings, our folder and photographs and walked into the studio where there was two figures leaning over a sound desk, just finishing off, tweaking a record. And one was T Bone Burnett and the other one was Elton John. And Elton said, well, I've been hearing about this project, you mind if I sit in and listen? So we went, oh, we'd be delighted. And then we sat down with Elton and T Bone Burnett, told the story of everything we'd done, where we'd been. At that point we traveled from Cleveland, Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico. I've spoken to hundreds of families. And then Bernard, take it from there? >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, I presented this film idea to them. And I think Elton said at the end of it, he said that you should become an executive producer on this, right up your street, and he said if you want me to do anything just give me a call, and passed on his numbers. And then a few days later I had a call from T Bone and he said I've been talking with a film guy for a few months about he wants to do a music related project and I brought him a lot of ideas. He didn't seem interested in any of them. And I mentioned that you had come into the studio the other day, he wants to meet you. So we went down to Santa Monica and it was Robert Redford, and so I presented that to him. >> Allison McGourty: And he loved it. He said this is, I think this is America's greatest untold story. And he gave us his offices so we could kind of finish our writing there, so we essentially -- >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, it was like, it was almost because you're presenting the whole idea of the film, just like having a screening in front of a really tough audience before you shot a frame, you know? And then when we came up with the idea to actually do kind of a proof of theory film, which a full film is essentially -- I've always had an issue with historical films, where a feature is based on supposition of what may have happened. And I think that the practical employing of the ideas or what took place is really important to understanding what actually did take place. And if you actually do something, for example you could a film in 100 years' time about the Apollo missions, but if you were to actually rebuild that rocket and go to the moon there would be innumerable things you'd learn about what they must have done that aren't in any books and that no one alive would remember. And that was the purpose of the full film was to rebuild that machine and then record on it, and this was basically how, the way we communicate today at the end. And every, all the sound on these cameras here, all that technology comes from this machine that no one had seen before. Now, and so I felt we approached Chad White, I think we wrote to him because we thought he would be a good person to come and arrange and produce those sessions. I got the impression he liked working with analog here, which we did. And so I think I wrote him an e-mail, I think it was e-mail and I dropped him a line, I think I said something like I have a photograph of some house from 1929 and film footage of Sleepy John Estes from 1938. I think he wrote back in a minute. [laughter] >> Stephen Winick: It's a good book, yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, yes, I mean in his world that's catnip. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: So at the very beginning of American Epic, setting the scene in the 1920s, you hear the voice of Robert Redford and he says, when America first heard itself. I love that phrase, can you describe just what that means? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, it's coined by a dear friend of mine, Charles Shala Mari @. I said, can you sum-up in one sentence what this film is about? I talked to him about it many hours. And he goes, let me think. The first time America heard itself. And, of course, as always he was completely on the money. I like, I'm fascinated and we both are with the beginning of things. I mean my first love was early American cinema where the language is being invented, from the teens, the '20s, the early '30s. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: As you go through silent and the early talkies, because that's where as a filmmaker you learn the language of film. And similarly in music, this is the point that everything is being invented. But really the phrase comes from the fact that, as I told Charles, up until this point the vast majority of America were not communicating with each other. The people living in the Appalachians and in Louisiana and in New Mexico, there really is no communication. We didn't have talking pictures, there isn't coast-to-coast radio, so these records when they first appeared were a method that a woman picking cotton in Mississippi could communicate her ideas about her life to the rest of America. And it was the first time in the history of the planet that the poorest people in the country were given a platform on a nationally distributed medium to express themselves. And it was for entirely commercial reasons, they just wanted -- the guy, the record men like Ralph Pier @ wanted to publish songs, to own the words and the music. So they insisted if you showed up that you brought stuff you'd written yourself or at least did the courtesy of adapting songs and sticking a few of your own words in it, but basically it meant for the first time all of this incredible autobiographical material. The other factor was that the crisis that the record companies were facing from radio in the cities was so serious that they needed to move really quickly. And so they were going into territories, Cajun being a perfect example, where they couldn't understand a word they were singing. French people couldn't understand what they were sang. It's perfect French, but the pronunciation is so strange. But if they found after test sessions there were a few thousand people that wanted to buy that record they'd go back again and record more. And so they weren't editing or affecting the content of that material, they were letting people do what they wanted to do, and as long as it sold they carried on recording more of it. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so, yes, you had this freedom of speech, this platform for people to come out, and these are people -- I mean imagine if you were working on a plantation or Dockery and suddenly you're in this tiny rural community, you can't leave and suddenly you're on a record that is being distributed around the whole country and that people to this day are still covering. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> If that isn't freedom of truth with speech I don't know what is. So that, I think that's why it's the first time America heard itself, and it actually became a model as to how the world heard itself because the rest of the world picked up on that. >> Allison McGourty: And they were writing songs about their everyday lives, their love lives, local politics, stories of -- >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Allison McGourty: You know, murders in their local town, and it was a method of -- >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Allison McGourty: Sharing their stories with the world. >> Bernard MacMahon: And the thing that's different is The Library of Congress I mean organized these, you know, with John Lomax these amazing recording trips. These are noncommercial trips. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And there's a huge amount of value many years later of being discovered from the songs and things that were recorded in these trips. But this I think was an even more or a much more exciting thing because these were commercial recordings, people wanted these to be heard by as many people as possible. They drew amazing adverbs depicting the lyrics of the songs. The idea was to get this in front of as many people, and so it really meant that you had Blues musicians listening to country musicians, country musicians listening to Blues musicians, Hispanic musicians listening to Cajun musicians, everyone was hearing everyone else for the first time. So it kind of -- it basically made American music and communication way richer. >> Stephen Winick: So is there a way that particular challenges involved in making what's essentially a visual film about sound? >> Bernard MacMahon: Almost impossible because when we started there was literally no archive at all. I would say half -- the figure, at least a third of the subjects of our film there was no known photograph of them when we started, so that meant there might be -- there may never be a photograph of them. We researched over 100 musicians and groups that recorded and whittled it down to 10 for the film, but, yes, it was an enormous detective job and so. >> Allison McGourty: I remember [inaudible] it looks here like we've got a really good radio show? >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. [laughter] >> Allison McGourty: Because they were so [inaudible] at that time of any of the artists that we wanted to tell the story of, so finding enough material for Bernard to make the film with. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, so it involved going through, now I'd say probably, I would say it's the biggest archive in the world of material relating to that era in terms of the stills that we have and the audio and the private tape recordings of these people speaking and all the documentation, along with the machine, itself. But I think it started actually as a kind of just a fascination with trying to track down some of the people, you know? So I think one of them was, I love this song Henry Lee by Dick Justice, yes, and so I started running -- I wanted to find him. >> Allison McGourty: It was on the charts at the time. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, it was in the charts. >> Allison McGourty: Nick Haive @ and PT Hovery @. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so I just started running stories in all the -- he was believed to come from West Virginia so I just started running stories in local papers in West Virginia in the mining communities because that was all that was known of him, that he might have been a miner from West Virginia. And then must have run about six stories and I ran one in the paper called The Logan Banner and that resulted in the editor calling me and saying, an old man has left his number, and it was a guy called Bill Williamson, a lovely man. And he said, I know Dick Justice's daughter and she's quite elderly, but here's her number. And so I called her up and she was really shocked to get a call from England about her dad, and she had no idea that her dad's songs had been covered and were known around the world. And she talked about him going down in the mines and how the musicians had auditioned over the telephones to record companies because they couldn't get to the standard auditions everyone else went to. And she said, she revealed she only had one picture of him, which was this embossed plaque that's in the book. And I think we arranged a car to travel 100 miles to this little community to pick-up the picture and take it to the nearest place that could photograph it. And I called Bill back to thank him and he said, well, my dad was also in the group and they were called the Williamson Brothers in Curry @, and I knew them, they did the first every John Henry recording and he had all these incredible stories. And I think we started looking for some more people and after that Allison said they should be made into a film, this is the last time these people are going to be alive that can tell the story. And then with our producer and co-writer, Juke @, we started in earnest to really track down the musicians we personally felt the strongest connection with. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, I mean one sort of heartbreaking moment in the film is when you're talking to I guess it's Dick Justice's son and he says, you know, I never even knew that my father had recorded these songs, I knew he played the piano and sang in church but you'd think I would have heard him sing one of these songs at some point in his life and I never did. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, yes, one of the things that was most beautiful about doing this film, something I never expected, was that we would be going into communities and meeting families that didn't know about these records but they knew about them playing music, maybe locally, or that they had an interest in music. And so you would often sometimes be playing these records to people for the first time. And so what was amazing to me was that we were bringing something that they really wanted, too, and they were giving all this amazing memories and stories, sometimes I think the oldest interview was 104. So we were catching these people before they moved on to the next world. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And that was the most pleasing part was to give all the research that you had put together, including the music to that and then telling you the background of what they knew about it. >> Mary Sue Twohy: One of the themes of American Epic is how recording technology has changed the world in terms of radio for one and then of course, you know, the technology of recording music. >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, yes, I mean that's -- the film is like is multifaceted, it deals with a lot of things, I think is equally important and the technology is as important as the content, in fact it defines the content. And we in this moment here our conversation is being shaped by the limitations of being recorded and sitting on a chair with a mike and what have you. And there the thing about this recording machinery was this machinery, when you work with this recording system it favors small groups, vocal led groups sound good on it, and guitar bass things particularly. The microphone likes it. So our sense of it is that the emergence of the small group, be it a popular group, a country group or even a jazz group is because that was sadly given that machine. And whereas opera and that kind of music was much bigger in the acoustic era when you were singing and shouting into a horn because you needed huge amounts of volume. This, in '26 when this machine was invented it allowed you to capture very subtle nuances, and so performers that were singing very quietly and performing delicately could be captured on it. And then people actually started to exploit that that sounded really good and the intimacy of this. And so, yes, I think it fundamentally shaped the way all music is to this day and now recording technology that's followed on from it. But most really hardcore engineers consider the technology today in many ways inferior, in recording technology the purer it is, the less parts you're moving through between the signal coming in and the end product the better and this is very simple. So people that are really big audio buffs would love this amplifier for its simplicity. But, yes, I think it shaped the way we communicate. And this is the really interesting thing in relation to say what we're filming here today, Hollywood had been resisting for years putting sound on motion pictures but they relented in '27 with and I think one of the factors in this was that this machine was putting electrical sound recordings all around America in the cheap, in the poorest homes, where the people would listen to them on little wind-up record players. And I think this amongst other things is one of the factors that allowed Western Electric to go back to Hollywood and go, how can you not have sound on talking pictures? You have the whole country listening to electrical sound recording, you know? So it's impossible to even overstate how important this machine is to how we communicate today. >> Stephen Winick: So you talked about the small group and one of those sort of iconic small groups from that era was the Carter family. So what do you think is -- there've been a lot of books and other things written about that particular group, what do you think is your take on the Carter family that's different in this film? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, that's it's a female group. We're not taking anything away from A.P. Carter in the film, but if you listen to interviews with Sarah and Maybelle, and we've been through everything that exists as far as we know, they found a lot of songs themselves and a lot of the early repertoire was theirs. And essentially it's a female duo, I mean A.P. is often no present on a lot of the recordings. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And they often joke that he would just wander off in the middle of a recording session and just look out the window. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so the Carter family struck me as a female group and that in itself in 1927 and in the country medium is an unusual thing. And it's a pretty immense produced female group, it's like a strong powerful female group. So I think that was the shading on the story. I'm now literally -- the way we approached these stories was just we wanted to let the families that knew these people tell these stories in their own words. And our sense was that historians in places like New York, some of who may have never have visited the Appalachians, like my Kentucky friends always tell me it should be pronounced, there would be all these theories and concepts about what would happen. And so after we traveled extensively in America we felt the appropriate thing to let families themselves tell the stories. And my feeling was I just wanted -- we just wanted the viewers to feel what we felt was when we spent time with these people. And if you're with the son of somebody that has grown up their whole life with this person, not only do they have a lot of their father or their mother in them, they often speak like them, they often think like them. And this is the closest way for another person to touch the beating heart of that story, when that person is long past away. And so our sense was let them tell the story. And so really the stories as they are really how they see them is an accumulation of how they depict that. And so I think our sense of the Carter family story was that it was very much that he was the driving force in terms of getting them the session, but it was a female group essentially in terms of records and its performance. >> Stephen Winick: Interesting. >> Mary Sue Twohy: How did you find the connection between Elder Birch and Dizzy Gillespie? >> Bernard MacMahon: Want to do this? >> Allison McGourty: Yes, but you do it. >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, all these stories come out of a particular record. And I think we become -- if you saw a beautiful girl or a handsome dashing man walking along the street you'd become curious about them, you know? And it's that kind of, it's the music that draws you in. And so if you're interested, I heard this record, My Heart Keeps Singing, and I just thought it was one of -- just this beautiful, beautiful record. And I thought if we do a gospel piece in the film we have to put this song, My Heart Keeps Singing, in there. It was only a few years later that Taj Mahal explained to me why I loved that song. I grew up in a West Indian neighborhood in South London. And he said, this comes from Saint Kitts this song, this is a Caribbean song or this is a West Indian Song. If you didn't know the song, he says, it's the style of singing. And I listened to when I grew up as a child listening to Reggae, and I went, oh, my God, that's why I like this. It sounded like the songs that my Jamaican friends would play, their parents would play. And so I love this song and this voice in me said we need to put this song on the film, but we need to at least know something about who made it. And all that we had was on the record label, it said Elder J.E. Birch and Congregation. And I remember asking around, all the different people I could find that were into gospel music and nobody had heard of Birch. They knew him, they knew the name, but no one knew anything about him. And so I went to the Sony archive in the basement of Sony Records and went through their recording ledgers. >> Mary Sue Twohy: What was that like? I mean did you have to go in an elevator, down floors? >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, it's deep in the basement. >> Allison McGourty: Yes, exactly. >> Bernard MacMahon: And, yes, and it is these rows and rows of boxes containing the recording ledgers of each session, so at these sessions back in the teens even there would be someone with a typewriter that would be typing up the songs that were done and making notations about it. >> Stephen Winick: And thank God that they did that. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and eventually I found in this box, Birch, and it listed the songs and there was just one piece of information in the corner, it just said Turola @ misspelled, North Carolina I think it said, South Carolina I believe. But anyway and there was no indication what that meant, often it was a place, and there was no indication that Birch had come from there but it was all we had. And so I think one of the reasons that doing this for The Library of Congress is appealing to me is I want to say this, this project was only possible because of librarians because anytime we found an obscure town the first thing we'd do is call the town library. And librarians are the most universally helpful people at trying to find the person in the town that might know what you're trying to find. And librarians also seem to get very curious about the call from England about a member of their community they've heard of. So that's a big -- I just want to say that if it wasn't for the librarians of America there wouldn't be an American Epic because so many of things were unearthed because of a genial elderly old librarian that kind of -- but never heard of him. [laughter] And let's find out about him, somebody in London knows about him, you know? So anyway we went to Turola and nobody knew anything about Birch, and eventually we were told to speak to an African-American town elder. And we went over to the poorer part of town and we met this lovely man, Ted Bradley. And Bradley remembered Birch. >> Allison McGourty: He was lovely, too, wasn't he? >> Bernard MacMahon: He's a gorgeous man. >> Allison McGourty: He just had the shine about him. >> Bernard MacMahon: He really did, yes, he's one of the great flowers of America, you know? Wonderful fellow. >> Allison McGourty: We'd been there for two weeks. We first, it was our evening before we were leaving we were having a farewell dinner and we failed in our mission, we hadn't found any leads. And we walked into this restaurant that was only open a couple of nights and somebody put us in touch with one of the people that worked there, made a phone call and said, oh, you need to stay, this person knows him. And so we extended our flight and that was the next day we went over to the other side of the tracks and met Ted Bradley. So it was just in the nick of time. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and so -- >> Mary Sue Twohy: And he knew Birch? >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and he'd gone to that church and he described that the church was this kind of raw looking affair and that he was not a sanctified church member. And so he said he would have been punished by his parents if they'd known as a little boy he was sneaking into this church, but the music was so good he was drawn to it. And he mentioned that the music was so powerful that white people after they had been to their church would all sit in their cars and the trees around the little wooden Triumph church that birch had built with his bare hands and listen to the music all afternoon. And so it brought the white and black members of the town together. And Birch was one of the people that set-up the NAACP in South Carolina. And Turola became quite an emancipated town and I think that church was a big factor in spreading, connecting the races together. And so but we still didn't have a photograph of Birch, and we were then introduced to Ernest Gillespie and he was a friend of Ted Bradley and Ernest had also as a little boy snuck into that church and listened to all the stomping and the shouting. And he, when we met, he said, well, you know who was really influenced by this music, it was my cousin who lived next door, Dizzy Gillespie. And he pulled out this, he pulled out this autobiography by Dizzy, it was long out of print and no one has ever seen this connection in there, and said look in here and he talked about Birch's church being the big inspiration for him and going to hear, that's where he understood about rhythm and melody and spiritual transport through music through going to that church. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, I think that was kind of a really great moment in this film because it really is true that Elder Birch's recordings are known among the sort of record officiants and, of course, Dizzy Gillespie is revered among everyone who studies American music and the connection was there to be made but nobody made it before because he wrote about Elder Birch in his book. So it was great that you found that and were able to bring that out in the film. >> Bernard MacMahon: Exactly, yes, and I think it's just -- so I think what I liked about the story and the story for the audience was that in your own communities there are those little pieces of string that if you start pulling them could easily lead to a story like this. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And they're all over America, and this is an example of a guy that's just known for this one record but it transpired he was a pivotal influence upon the most important musicians of the 20th Century. Yes, I think so, and the Joseph Kekuku story is the same. >> Stephen Winick: Well, I was just going to ask about that because the Kekuku story has been somewhat known among ethnomusicologists and the like and many of them don't actually think he invented the slide in the sense that it's part of African music and so a way for it to get to the Blues that's more obvious than Hawaiian music would be just through African roots, although obviously the style of playing steel guitar or something that he did invent. So what is your take on that and on the slide question? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, it doesn't, the steel bar played on the guitar, but it doesn't exist in any form that I'm aware of before he started playing it. And the earliest record I found of it was in the '30s, a musician called C.S. Delorno @ wrote in a track on a guitar and banjo, published in Britain, and he recalls Kekuku talking about when he came up with the idea and how he propagated it. And that's by far the earliest writing about that. And then the first ever book in the teams of slide guitar playing is -- or steel guitar playing is by Myrtle Stumpf @, and she was one of Kekuku's pupils. So I'm just, I'm not aware of that and I'm not aware of anything that proceeds it that is played in a similar fashion. And then the other thing to remember as well with this is that there's no way to be absolute about these things, and I think that's a kind of a desire of historians is to be an absolute truth. Oftentimes you can have situations where two people are working on the same scientific problem solving or theory and on opposite ends of the world, and one may popularize that theory before the other. But in this instance it's pretty clear that after the World's Fair in San Francisco there were extensive tours organized all across America with Toots Paka that Kekuku played with. And the newspaper, if you go through the newspaper cuttings through the teens you can see this tour going everywhere and it's a big sensation. There's no musician that we worked with that we tracked down that has as much publicity as Kekuku has, which is incredible given how until this film came out he was largely completely forgotten. But that tour was organized by a big theater promoter at the time and it meant that thousands and thousands of people heard that musical style. And Kekuku toured Europe and around the world. He played in the Bird of Paradise show. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And I believe that is how people heard that music and I think that's how that playing got to the delta, people in the delta heard those, that -- when the Toots Paka's group toured there they heard that music and wanted to do it themselves. And really if you look at it, if you see someone playing it it's not that difficult to do. If you play guitar and you hear this incredible sound that is made simply just by flipping the guitar on its side and then running a belt across it I mean most people or musicians would go back and go let me figure out how we did that, you know? And it wouldn't take very long to realize you just need to raise the strings up and get a smooth object. So I think really those tours are what propagated it around America. And then I'm not aware of any other musical unit that was spreading that idea. Because by the early '20s, you know, Hawaiian music was one of the most popular forms of music in America, so there's no, any evidence whatsoever that points to anyone other than to Kekuku as being the person that propagated that. >> Stephen Winick: Right. So I probably did this backwards, but I should say that the Kekuku story is about Joseph Kekuku, a great Hawaiian guitarist who is said to have created what we call Hawaiian steel guitar and also steel guitar in general coming through that and that's I think undisputed. The only question among ethnomusicologists has been whether another form of slide playing existed with the guitar, which would have been essentially bottleneck slide playing on one string as opposed to across all the strings, and that's something that ethnomusicologists kind of argued about. So I probably did that backwards, I should have had you tell the Kekuku story first and then just bring up that point, but it is in a way a minor point in the sense that all that you are saying is it is undisputed that he started what we think of as steel guitar. >> Bernard MacMahon: That would be fascinating if someone presented a recording or serious documentation showing somebody using a smooth bar on an upturned guitar prior to Kekuku. If such documentation exists it'd be fascinating to see it. There's no doubt he invented -- I've always found the distinction between the steel guitar played on all the strings and the bottleneck, I don't see a huge difference, myself, between them in terms of the concept is the same. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: But, yes, I'm just not aware of anyone doing it. Who do they cite as being the person that -- >> Stephen Winick: Well, essentially what they cite is the fact that slides are used in African music on a whole range of stringed instruments, including musical bows, and the diddly bows were known in the south, and so a more obvious way of getting to the bottleneck slide in southern, African-American music would have been straight from Africa as opposed to it coming in from Hawaii, but there's no way to prove it because, as you say, I don't think any recording of it, specifically a guitar, being played with a slide exists before Joseph Kekuku's recordings, so. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and all the countries, which is in the same regions is clearly Hawaiian based of the steel guitar. >> Stephen Winick: Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: What was it like to hear the slide guitar on the recording? You had mentioned something about it just, it being a very good experience. >> Allison McGourty: Oh, it was wonderful. And Bernard discovered this record with Joseph Kekuku, I think one of the earliest recordings, I think it was from the late teens, wasn't it? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, as Delorno mentions in his article that Kekuku had made, he'd appeared on records with this group called Layton and Johnstone, which were an English, African-American group that went over to Britain and started making these kind of musical numbers, all dressed in tuxedos, and the King was a big fan of theirs. And they said that he played on three of their records, and everything he had said in his article I checked out panned out. And so I went and I searched these records and it took something like two years to find one of them, they were the hardest records to find. The internet is saturated with the Layton and Johnstone records from Britain, but not those titles. And eventually one showed up and we dubbed it and halfway through, the slide guitar, which is kind of incredible. So in the film we brought that to Oahu and because no one has ever heard Joseph Kekuku play and played it to the family for the first time, so the first time anyone in Oahu had heard what it sounds like. >> Allison McGourty: And to answer your question about what it felt like, when you hear the music in the place that it came from it touches you differently, it feels right. So it sounds different in Hawaii than it does in London, and we noticed that everywhere we went with all the different kinds of music in the place where the music was created you can tell, you can sense it's right, that's where it belongs. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Wow, so the landscape and where it originated was really truly important? >> Allison McGourty: Yes, absolutely, yes, so the rhythms. >> Bernard MacMahon: We called it geographonics. >> Allison McGourty: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: That that music sounds like the place it comes from and you can hear the landscape in the music and you can also only truly understand the music when you go to the place it was made. So as a Londoner you only ever really truly understand jazz, modern jazz when you're sitting in a New York taxicab and it's playing. That was the first time I understood jazz truly, I loved it but I didn't understand it. And the nature of American music, the Hopi songs I was fascinated by them, but when I went to Hopi, which is one of the strangest places on the planet I've ever visited, those songs certainly sounded like pop songs when I was there. I know they're scared songs, but they sounded catchy to me, and once I heard them at Hopi I started humming the songs. >> Stephen Winick: Interesting. >> Bernard MacMahon: And I didn't, I couldn't even follow the melody line of the songs originally, they disinterested me, but once I'd been there in that geography and playing that song as we drove around or wandered around Hopi I was like, oh, this basically sounds like this landscape. >> Mary Sue Twohy: That's fascinating. >> Allison McGourty: Yes, [inaudible] talks about that as well in the other film when he talks about the Cajun music and the [inaudible] that the music reflects the environment in which it comes from. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, Cajun music, which is a little strange to other people's ears is really commercial when you're in Louisiana because it sounds exactly like the place. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: So a little weird, a little strange, going everywhere and swamps and strange things crawling out of them. This slightly odd music sounds exactly right there, you know? Yes, and I guess that -- >> Stephen Winick: Oh, yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, so I think a lot of art is mirroring our environment and it's entirely affected by the environment, kind of responding, and so it's best I think. >> Mary Sue Twohy: San Antonio, Texas, that became kind of a hub for record companies in the 1920s, and that is where Lydia Mendoza @ and her family first recorded. You actually met with some of her relatives and got to visit with them, can you tell us a little bit about that experience? >> Bernard MacMahon: The Hernandez family, they're Lydia's grandchildren, and they live -- yes, they live in San Antonio. And the house, they're wonderful, it's Roger and Ann -- >> Allison McGourty: Ann McKinney. >> Bernard MacMahon: And their dad, Fernando. And the house is almost partly like a shrine to their grandmother. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Wow. >> Bernard MacMahon: So they had more photographs and memorabilia related to her than I think almost any other family we met in researching this film. And she had obviously been this huge larger than life figure, and when you were with them they almost spoke in hushed tones about her as if she could walk in the door at any moment and go, what are you saying about me? [laughter] So she was a woman that cast a long shadow and I really like that, that's why I kind of wanted the audience, I hoped the audience got a little sense of that in the films, was this woman, she felt like she just left the house and she died a long time ago. And so I found them really kind of really wonderful people to hang out with. And I think I like the idea, I love the idea of all these different stories being next to each other because I think American culture, that's what makes American culture really exciting is the Hispanics mix, the Cajuns mix, the Native Americans, the African-Americans and the Hawaiians. So kind of it was like it was almost like being hit by this emotional Tsunami traveling from these places because when you arrived to film it would often be the result of many meetings, many phone conversations, a really close relationship built with these people and then this explosion of them telling the story on camera. And you'd be just inundated with all this stuff and these new things they'd found, and then you'd go on to the next place and into their world. >> Stephen Winick: Well, one thing you might find cool is that Lydia Mendoza performed in this building in 1977 or '78, I can't remember the exact year, but she performed in the Coolidge Auditorium, which is right in the building where you're sitting here. >> Bernard MacMahon: This [inaudible] was she here for that? >> Stephen Winick: It may have been, yes, it may have been. >> Bernard MacMahon: The Jimmy Fox @ inaugural, so, yes, that was -- yes, she was -- I've forgotten the specific question about -- what was it about? >> Mary Sue Twohy: Well, we were just kind of talking about how it was meeting with her family and you described that, but I also want to know about the dresses? She made her dresses and did you see one on premise? >> Allison McGourty: Yes, she made the dresses and the family talked about how there was always sequins all over the place. And I met the family again this year when we -- when I went down to San Antonio for the ARSC Annual Meeting, and we invited the family in to talk and they got to see the cut of her story for the very first time. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Oh, neat. >> Allison McGourty: With the audience at that meeting, so that was wonderful and that brought a tear to their eyes, but they were just so thrilled to have their family honored like that and have people remember, yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, that's the best bit of the film is screening it for the families and then getting the approval of the people that it's about. I mean actually as a filmmaker that's the only, that's the thing you really care about is that they think it's true, you know? And actually those families are very, they're very open, you know, the story doesn't have to be sugarcoated, there's lots of tough bits to it. >> Allison McGourty: But what was it like in Sedona, I didn't come to that screening with the Hopi when you got their blessing? >> Bernard MacMahon: Oh, yes, so I had invited Lee, who is in the film, who is -- >> Allison McGourty: Suvant @. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, and he's a very, very senior Hopi and to come -- they were having -- the last screening at the Sedona Film Festival, and I thought, well, let's do this, this will be an opportunity to show Lee the film before it airs. And we go to this theater and I'm expecting it to be like 20 people there or something. And it's absolutely packed and the film director says, oh, we invited Lee to a few things, but he never comes, he won't come surely. And he shows up and he's very friendly and goes in. I was sitting next to him and the film starts and I was thinking thank God I put the Hopi story at the beginning of this film because [laughter] I don't want to wait for 40 minutes for his reaction. And I think about 10 minutes through he started laughing at something out loud and then he kind of leaned over and tapped me on the arm, like this. And the screening was up there and it was a very kind, wonderful reception. And then someone was asking us questions and they ran up to the back of the theater and put a mike in front of Lee. And this is obviously a very big deal he'd shown up, apparently he doesn't show up at these things. And I said, what do you think of it? And he goes I think it's wonderful and I give it my full blessing, you know? That was a very meaningful moment. >> Stephen Winick: Sure. >> Bernard MacMahon: And he was very kind, he let us use -- we showed him all the footage we were planning on using and gave his permission to use it, and so it was -- because I said, look, we've found some amazing things you see in the film. The performance on the steps of Congress I said are we okay to use this, it's your call? >> Stephen Winick: Where did that footage come from? >> Bernard MacMahon: We, this was like another detective story, like the whole film I suppose. I had basically -- I was fascinated in this record, it was one of the first electrical sound recordings of Native American music and I knew a tiny bit about the Hopi and I know a very little more since I did that film. >> Stephen Winick: And it was called the Hopi? >> Bernard MacMahon: Hopi Indian Chanters. >> Stephen Winick: Okay, and the title of the? >> Bernard MacMahon: The title of the record was Chant of the Eagle Dance and Chant of the Snake Dance. And the Snake Dance is the most sacred Hopi ritual and that is used to bring rain to the desert, so it is essential that song is for their survival. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And it's a private -- >> Bernard MacMahon: Entirely secret, private ceremony. So a friend of ours flew us to Flagstaff when we found out about a Hopi convention that was happening in Flagstaff where all the Hopi elders were meeting to discuss preserving their language. They were worried that the younger generation may stop speaking Hopi. So we went there and met them and I met a Hopi called Satilla, and I played him the songs. And he said, well, that's not the Snake Dance, that's the Eagle Dance, and the Eagle Dance is not the Eagle Dance, that's the Buffalo Dance. >> Mary Sue Twohy: So they're inaccurate labelings on the Victor recordings for the title of the -- >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, they're entirely what the Hopi wanted Victor to call them. [laughter] But the film, the one thing about the Hopi is they don't feel the rest of the world needs to know their business, it doesn't really help stuff for them, you know? So try to respect that and it's a little message that we don't have to look under every rock, you should let certain people be if they want to be, let them do their thing. They're certainly not in an area where they're bothering anybody, you know? >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: They've chosen to be in the toughest place on the planet or one of them. So, yes, so I wanted -- so I started searching around for this and eventually I tracked down that Billingsley @ was a white guy that traveled the Hopi and he had befriended them and lived the Hopi, and Congress were attempting to ban the Snake Dance and they felt that if they could ban the Snake Dance it would basically pull the heart out of Hopi. And that tribe, which was resistant to being integrated, were being messed with, they felt, Lee said if they could break the religion they'll break the tribe. And so they moved in Congress to get the Snake Dance banned because it involves carrying snakes in the mouths of dancers and they argued that it was barbaric. It's not barbaric to snakes or anything, it's just, as Lee puts it, it was a mechanism that they saw of destabilizing the tribe. And so Billingsley, rightly or wrongly, decided that if he brought the Hopi and toured America with them and showed their rituals. It would bring an acceptance that these rituals weren't a threat to anybody. And so they went to Victor and made recordings, which I think to make them more commercial they wanted it to be the Snake Dance, but obviously no white people had any idea what they were listening to. And so there was another dance. And then they brought them to Congress like a few weeks later, so they were on this tour. And I found newspaper reports of them dancing on the steps of the Capitol, and so really essentially it was purely a gut instinct that there might have been a newsreel camera there, and zero showed up until we eventually went through some archives in North Carolina that had thousands and thousands of feet of unused Fox movie time newsreel. This is where the unedited newsreels went, things that weren't cut into newsreels. And buried in there was footage from a Fox movie time newsreel. >> Mary Sue Twohy: That's amazing. >> Stephen Winick: That is amazing. >> Bernard MacMahon: So it was just an instinct, and I think someone might have been there with a -- actually I found a still, a picture of the crowd and the crowd was huge, which I show in the film. I found that and that in itself was a eureka. And then looking at it after it's like it has to be a camera, a movie camera. And that was still silent film, but I think the camera there. I was going through the thing with a magnifying glass and I couldn't see a movie camera, but yes. >> Stephen Winick: Did you shout when you found it? >> Bernard MacMahon: Oh, my God, and the footage you see is stunning. >> Mary Sue Twohy: It is stunning. >> Stephen Winick: It sure is, it's amazing footage. >> Bernard MacMahon: I didn't tell Leo I was going to show it -- >> Stephen Winick: Yes, it looks like it was shot yesterday except for being black-and-white. >> Bernard MacMahon: Because it had never been used since it was developed, it had never been in a projector before. It had never been transferred. So a lot of the footage in the film is like that, it's unseen. And so, yes, and so I thought when I interviewed Lee I had never even told him about the footage, I thought I'll just show it, I'll show him that and see what he thinks, and like he was very moved by it. He was obviously shocked because he'd heard about the event, but he didn't think they'd actually done the Snake Dance there, he thought they had done a fake ceremony. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: Thinking that white people wouldn't know the difference. And so he was moved to tears when he saw they actually had to do, they did the ceremony. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Wow. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so he felt that was something that the rest of the world should see that the Hopi shouldn't have had to do that in order just to continue doing something that they'd been doing for so long. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, so one of the connections for me that was really interesting just because it's not something you would necessarily think of was to find out that Charlie Mussel White @ was mentored by Will Shade @ of the Memphis Jug Band. [laughter] So talk about Jug Band music a little and how that sort of dominates part of that first film? >> Bernard MacMahon: I love it, I mean I'm obsessed with the Memphis Jug Band. I see the Memphis Jug Band as like the first black pop group. I think they're absolutely brilliant. I love everything about them. That was one story that was like we're doing then, I don't care if there's nothing, we don't know anything about Will Shade, we're doing this group, people have to hear this music. And it so obviously is a precursor of R and B, everything seemed that. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Allison McGourty: Even Skiffle. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, absolutely, yes, yes, I mean. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Absolutely. >> Bernard MacMahon: I mean that's what Skiffle, they called it Skiffle back in the '20s. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: I thought Skiffle was something my mom used to like, you know? But, yes, that's where that comes from. And we all know the Beatles were a Skiffle band or some of them were originally. Yes, so Will Shade. So then the question was how do I tell the story, there were no, there were like two pictures of Will Shade in existence and pretty much nothing else. There are a few fragments of an interview that Paul Oliver did, but he really was for someone that was like a huge big music selling artist with masses of records being covered by all these people there was very, very little known about him. And so I tramped with Allison around Memphis repeatedly trying to find anybody that knew him. I knew from the Center's records, I found in the Center's records that he didn't have children, so that really makes things very difficult. And there was nobody alive that remembered him, even though he died in 1996. So something happens in Memphis, things get swept away unlike any other city I've been to in America and you really got the sense after three visits even though in '66, which in historical terms not long ago it felt like this is gone, this has just been it's like Katrina has come in and just swept this away, any memory of this. All the houses where they lived were knocked down, the area he lived in. And so I was literally about to give up until my friend, Garth Cartwright, an author in Britain said, I think Charlie Mussoway @, a friend of mine, knew him. And I was like it just seemed too good to be true that a well-known musician would actually know this dude, after we tramped over the city. And I called Charlie and he went, my God, yes, two guys were my big influences in Memphis, you know, it was Will Shade and Elvis Presley. So Charlie would be going to this really, really poor neighborhood and learning to play from Will Shade and then he would go to a fun fair late at night that Elvis Presley had rented out. And I just thought, wow, the dichotomy between those two musical worlds, you know? [laughter] But, yes, so Charlie, and I just -- it felt to me like it was a wonderful, that became a story of mentorship. So a lot of these stories are emotional stories and the music is emotional. People can take all this information now and go into much detailed historical treatise and pull all the bits together, but to me I love the story of this music being handed down to this boy that was visiting his house. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And he was, he was a boy when he first met Will Shade. >> Bernard MacMahon: He was, yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Tell us about where you filmed Charlie when he was talking about Will Shade? >> Bernard MacMahon: All the people in the film are filmed on location in a place that is very significant for stories, there are no interviews that are like we are, just to give us a backdrop. Although we are in a space, not like a studio. >> Allison McGourty: Lydia was here. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, this is a perfect a place. But, yes, you're brought into a studio and are interviewed. We want to interview Charlie in a club that Will Shade would have played in on Beale Street and all the clubs had been knocked down on Beale Street, Pee Wee's, [inaudible] the Monarch, which was owned by Jim Canane @, who was a big kind of mafioso type guy in Memphis. Old Jim Canane is the place. In fact, there's even a song on our box set by Robert Wilkins called Old Jim Canane about going to that club and sniffing cocaine, very rough. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: And Will Shade and the Memphis Jug Band were the house band and we found the building, and we peered into the building it was a police station. [laughter] >> Allison McGourty: The irony. >> Bernard MacMahon: But for some strange reason the downstairs of the club was largely untouched with the same walls and brick, and the police stored their bicycles there. And the upstairs floor was the actual police station. When we went into the police station they were so bemused and intrigued of what the history of the club was that they let us basically empty out the entire police contents of the ground floor and set-up a makeshift studio there. So, yes, we filmed Charlie on the very club floor that Will would have played in in the '20s, yes, in the '30s. So, yes, all the films, all the places are shot like that, you know, in the church at Sharore @, on the steps of Maybelle Porter's Chop House. So really just as a filmmaker your hope is to bring people to the place on a film where the story happened to be talking to the family and just to have a sense, to create a sense of what it would be like if you went and met, spent an afternoon with Dale Jet @, sitting on his porch, and he's telling you the story, and he's effectively bringing out the photographs and the film clips and showing them to you. And that's all we wanted to do was to create that sense of you going into the place where it happened. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: With the people that knew those people, their blood, and they're telling that story. And if they don't have blood, you know, they're protegees, you know? >> Mary Sue Twohy: Exactly. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so, yes, and so I think with Charlie it's emotive when you're in that place, when you're in that room, the emotions are strong, you know? And you could feel it in the way he talked, the way he sings his song. He knows that Will was in that room, you know? >> Mary Sue Twohy: At one point he breathes in deeply and just sort of takes in the air of the room and all its history. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And completely enjoys that moment. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, it was absolutely real, history did that, you know, he was like -- he knew what it meant to be in there. And I think it was we had a very funny moment, I really wanted to put in the film but it just couldn't fit, was we wanted to go and visit Will Shade's grave and have Charlie leave a memento for Will on the tomb, a harmonica or some such. And so we get to the cemetery where Will is buried outside Memphis and there is yellow tickertape around the whole cemetery and just mountains of police cars piled up. And we're like what went on here? And they go, the cemetery is a crime scene. [laughter] And Charlie turned to me and went, only in Memphis it would be a crime scene. And I said to the policemen, I said what do you mean a crime scene? He goes, well, the owners of the cemetery have been doing illegal things with the bodies, removing them, reburying them. >> Stephen Winick: I remember this story, it's crazy. >> Bernard MacMahon: I said when do you think they'll open it? You know, it was like we expect this to be a crime scene for another couple of years for him to figure out all the stuff, like digging up corpses. And Charlie stood outside on camera and played his harmonica song to Will, outside the cemetery, and he just said -- he looked up and he said this is a Will Shade joke, he said he didn't come and see me enough when I was alive, he certainly ain't going to come and see me when I'm dead. >> Stephen Winick: But that relationship between Charlie and Will Shade kind of brings up another issue that I think is a sort of an undercurrent to a lot of the film, but you don't get very explicit about it which is the question of race, that there was probably more musical interplay among African-Americans and white Appalachian folks, for example, then is evident from the records, themselves, and yet there's also all kinds of racial tension and racial issues going on. And I mean an example that came up in the film was when Mississippi John Hurt wanted to hear his record and his neighbor played it for him and he stood outside the window and listened to it playing through the window rather than just going into her house, as would be normal now. So how do you feel that the story of race is told through this music, as well? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, the records are not in themselves an entirely accurate representation, they're a piece. Talking to the old musicians, that you may recall in the film we interviewed the three oldest Blues musicians I the world -- Robert Lockwood and Honey Boy and Holmes @. I think it was '98. And Lockwood made it clear that those musicians would have repertoires for white audiences, as well as black audiences, and that they were very fluent in country music and music that would appeal to white audiences. Obviously, there are white audiences that enjoyed listening to Blues, as well. And I think that those issues are implicit in a film and being in that environment. I mean there's a moment that I was discouraged by the broadcast they put in the film, which was when Charlie Patton's relatives go to Dockery and they meet Bill Lester, who is the owner of Dockery, and there is this interesting and uncomfortable conversation where the current curator of a plantation is telling the history of their relative to them on a plantation where the family worked. And I felt that that scenario was enough to tell you about the interesting and uncomfortable situation at that time. However, the most important thing that the film is really about, and it's certainly the heart of what I've, we've come to feel making this film and traveling across America and meeting all these people, I mean hundreds, is that music is the one thing that unites the races. Music is like the, it is the communication that transcends everything else, and it's music that actually brings people together and it's music that puts an African-American in a white person's home before any government decree or law or any book or newspaper. It's a record that brings those out and the record brings those ideas and those feelings into someone's home. And how we appreciate other cultures generally is first through music. I mean before Reggae took off with Bob Marley, most people could have written what they knew about Jamaica on the back of a postage stamp. It was music that made an awareness of the West Indies, that's how we hear about those cultures. And because generally film doesn't, from other cultures doesn't penetrate to the same degree popular music does. So I think music was actually something that brought these cultures together, and they're all listening and playing with each other. I'm always bemused by the kind of some of the really weird theories you read in books about this person and this person, it's not as clean as that, everything is bleeding one into the other. I mean you could certainly make a strong case that there's a lot of Irish folk music in Blues, and if you talk to someone like Taj he would absolutely agree with you. He would also probably say that there's a lot of Native American music in some of the delta Blues because there was a lot of Native American blood within the people, like Patton, that were making that music. So there really is a huge comingling, I mean every single African-American Blues performer was a massive fan of Jimmy Rogers, I mean they all had Jimmy Rogers records. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: You saw Jimmy Rogers' records were advertised in all the African-American newspapers at the time. So there's a big crossover. It's just the thing that fools people is it's not always the people that you would think, liking the things you would think. I remember years ago meeting some of these early Hip-hop artists from the '80s and they basically thought Gary Newman was a God, Gary Newman and [inaudible]. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: Now they're not into some white dude that's doing soul music, they're into a white guy that's doing some robotic schtick that is about as far away from African-American culture as you can get. And we tend to be drawn to things that are really different and look different from what we know. And so I think it was -- I just thought it was amusing that there was that, that there's always been a comingling of those cultures and those ideas. So I kind of think that was really it for me. The film is about saying all these radically different cultures are in the same country, that's why America is such an incredible and beautiful place. And we had actually the most wonderful luckiest experience of a lifetime to be able to travel in a really deep way through all these different bits of America. And I decided to go, when you get from -- when you travel from New York through the Appalachians, you know, down into Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Hopi, then over to Hawaii, the idea that one person in Washington, D.C., the President of all this, is mindboggling. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Yes, absolutely. >> Bernard MacMahon: It is staggering that all this is actually under this is one country. >> Stephen Winick: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: And that's an incredible thing. And, as we said, when you travel America you see parts of old Britain, where we came from, untouched. And you see people with old British cultures, you know? >> Mary Sue Twohy: Yes. >> Allison McGourty: Especially in South Carolina when I was down there. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: I hear, too, in West Virginia. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: I wanted to bring up, maybe this is a good time, the importance of gospel music. It's kind of central, essential -- can you talk to that? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, it's spiritual and I think that spiritual music has a power to it and an energy and a passion that you can't approximate in the secular world. And I think an example people will appreciate, I grew up listening to little Reggae music as a kid and since the Rastafarianism the religion has gone out of the music and it's become dancehall I just don't think the music has anywhere near the same commercial and global reach it once did. What people were drawn to, people didn't really understand Rastafarianism, but they were drawn to the spirituality of the music, the fact that the people singing it, whether it was Winston Rodney and Burning Spear, or Bob Marley, had this absolutely unshakeable passion and belief in what they are projecting. And that spiritual belief is even more powerful than being in love with your partner, it's a higher thing. And so I think these preachers in the south were fundamental to the emancipation of the African-American people, as they told me, and those preachers, those church services would last the entire day. I'm repeating what Ted and the guys there would tell me. And a lot of the time people at Birch would be up in the pulpit and they would be talking about issues, social issues that related to them and being proud and standing up for themselves. I mean Birch came back and he -- we met an old lady that was too old to interview for the film, she was like 98, wasn't she? >> Allison McGourty: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: And she remembered Birch in the '20s building the church, when she was a little girl, with his bare hands. And so he would be standing up and he would be the person that would be putting forward those ideas about how there was equality was needed, how people needed to stand up, how they needed to, and the church was their inspiration in that. And you can see, if you're trying to track these people down, when you're looking through the African-American papers, like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, all these people that Levy Bird and Birch is speaking to each other in these columns in the paper and those newspapers, most people were distributing those newspapers, like Levy Bird, in Turola, they were getting those papers sent and they were distributing them on street corners because they wanted their fellow people to hear those, read those words and find out what was going on in the cities. I think the church, it was incredibly important for those people, and I think in the kind of secular era we're living in now I think it's easy to forget how important that spirituality can be. And I think, Dizzy says in his book, I think he says something like the closest to the New Testament is those sanctified churches, which although churches look down when people are really losing and getting into it. But if you go, if you see those kind of performances you just get swept up in it. I mean when we filmed, when we got all the Triumph choir, members in the Triumph choir from around America to come to the little church, it was really difficult to film it because it's really hard to concentrate on shooting something when that's going off in front of you. It's so explosive, the emotion that you have to be constantly pinching yourself to remind yourself to stay on point. So I think gospel music is, it's in the very kind of rubric of all good contemporary music, that it's not a -- it's a commonly known thing that a lot of the greatest rhythm and Blues music came from people being in the church and singing in the church. And people sing better being in churches, people that have sung in churches sing better because they learned to sing out from a young age, so you project better. So I think even on a practical physical, therefore, the church makes better singers. >> Stephen Winick: All right. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Stephen Winick: So one of the reasons why we were keen to have you at The Library of Congress and to show your film here and to talk about the film was that there's footage from our collections in the film. And I'm going to tell a little bit of the story of some footage, which then you'll pick-up on and tell the rest of it. So this is footage of Honey Boy Edwards, whom you've already mentioned, who passed away a few years ago sadly. But this footage was made by Alan Lomax in 1942 when he was doing recording for The Library of Congress in Mississippi. And he brought along a silent film camera, color film, and he filmed some of the artists that he recorded. And out of this footage he put together a demonstration reel that he would take around and show to people about what he had done in Mississippi, and other people brought this demonstration reel around, as well. And over time this reel got very ratty and the color faded, and it was labeled and we don't know who did the labeling, it was back in the 1940s. It could have been Alan, himself, but it was probably someone else. And so the individual segments of this film were labeled and one of them was labeled, Charles Edwards, which was not Honey Boy Edwards' name, his name was David Edwards. And so we just assumed that this was film of some buy named Charles Edwards, which would not have been that significant necessarily in the history of American music. But at some point our curator of the Lomax Collection, whose name is Tod Harvey, whom you met a little earlier, Tod had this insight and it was actually I was the person he was talking to, we were sitting in the reading room and he said to me, why would Lomax film this guy playing the guitar but then not record his music, there's no recordings from anyone named Charles Edwards in the collection? And I said, you know, that's a really good point. And we both sort of said, you don't think they could be? Nah, couldn't be. [laughter] Because Honey Boy had gone on to be a Grammy winning artist and Blues Hall of Fame and one of the great Blues artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. So we, so I started, I wouldn't let this go, I kind of went and did a little legwork and I started reading both Lomax' accounts of his meetings with Honey Boy and Honey Boy's accounts because he wrote an autobiography. And the reason this was difficult to determine was that there was no other picture of Honey Boy known for 25 years after this event. Even Honey Boy in his own book had no pictures of himself to print. So his appearance had just changed a lot in those 25 years and it was not immediately obvious that this was him. But I started to read these accounts and the hat was right and the thumb pick was right, and the guitar was right, and I said this has got to be Honey Boy Edwards. So we bundled the film together, we got a good transfer from the original which looks beautiful, as you know, and we sent it to Michael Frank who had been Honey Boy's sideman and manager for many years. Unfortunately, Honey Boy had just died a year before we made this, we had this insight. But we sent it to Michael and Michael showed it to Honey Boy's stepdaughter and he communicated to us that her immediate phrase on seeing this film was, that's my daddy, and so that's how we knew that that was Honey Boy. And then we were really tickled when you used this footage in the film, so explain how you used it because you synched it up amazingly with Honey Boy's music, so explain how you used it and how you found out about it? >> Bernard MacMahon: We were, one of the things that got American Epic started was Michael Frank. A friend of ours, Garth Cartra @, who I mentioned earlier, had approached us and said you know that these three Blues men are coming to a festival in the Lake District to play and nobody knows about it, it's run by some wealthy guy and he just brings in Blues musicians he likes and doesn't do any national promotion, it's just the locals come. And he wanted to have these three oldest Blues musicians, and so I had found out that Michael Frank looked after all of them -- Lockwood, Homesick and Honey Boy. So I called Michael and said, could we come up and film them? Money will change hands if need be. And he said, sure. You know, I said, when are they free? He said, they're completely free, no one knows we're here. [laughter] Far from the gig. And so that's, I'm sure that's how I met Michael and spent this entire day with all three of them interviewing each of them for a couple of hours each and then I think an hour or so with all three of them together and we use a part of that in the film. And so then when you made this discovery, which is amazing. This is very strange having this interview because this is like the genesis of the project full circle, basically. >> Allison McGourty: Wow. >> Bernard MacMahon: So that's the very beginning of the whole American Epic research was that, doing that interview. I did that because I thought this needs to be filmed and one day I'll probably need it, that's why I shot it. >> Stephen Winick: And I'm really glad you did because Honey Boy is gone. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Stephen Winick: And, you know? >> Bernard MacMahon: And on top of it there's three guys, so the mountains of other stuff they talked about was just incredible. I'd just love to -- I think one day I'd like to put that up online so people can just watch it, it's really hilarious and they go all over the place. I mean all these musicians they knew, but anyway. So Michael called me and he told me that you'd made this discovery and that he knew we were going to do a piece, this is after you'd found it, and said I can speak to The Library of Congress and get permission for you to use it in your film. So I was kind of over the moon that this had turned up, and then I spoke to Tod. And it just seemed to -- it was like one of those moments it just seemed to good to be true, it seemed staggering that someone had shot this. >> Stephen Winick: It seemed too good to be true to us. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes. >> Stephen Winick: And Tod really had that great insight that it's got to be something other than what it appears to be. >> Bernard MacMahon: So it had something about it. As I said, you would have thought it had been done the same day he'd been recorded, but it wasn't. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And I don't know where I heard this, but I was told that when Lomax was shooting him he wanted to record him and that Honey Boy had said something to the effect, I'm making too much money on this corner, come back another time, and they arranged another time. But I don't know where I -- I have to say it wasn't germane to the film and I just don't remember where I heard this, but generally these things power out, I remember they stick in my mind. However, I got a hold of all the recordings that Lomax had made shortly after he shot that. I think, was it a week or two later? >> Stephen Winick: I think it was, yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: And I hired a lipreader to try and decipher what he was singing, couldn't do it, and then I hired another lipreader, couldn't do it, then I hired another lipreader, they couldn't do it. I got five lipreaders, all of whom I paid, until eventually I found a lipreader that identified two words that he was saying. And that, I went back to the tapes and I went, oh, my God, this is from Army Blues, one of the songs he recorded, he was actually singing one of the songs. And so an engineer, Peter Henderson, who said and I think it's Army Blues and I think the other one is called West Coast, was it Waterfront -- it was Water Blues or something, there's a fragment of that. Because he's taking different clips. >> Stephen Winick: Right, yes, he shot the camera. >> Bernard MacMahon: Two songs, the bulk of it is Army Blues. All right, Peter Henderson, who worked on a lot of the sound for American Epic, is a genius, won his first Grammy at 21, and he's a wonderful guy, huge important figure in this film in terms of like always guiding us in the right approach. And I said, Peter, you need to synch this. And he went, you've got to be kidding? [laughter] And he just, he said, this guy has never played the same song in the same way twice in his life. But he did a really amazing job of that. >> Stephen Winick: A real good job. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Yes, he does. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so basically he's playing the same song. And so it was incredible, it was like this really amazing moment. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, it's funny -- well, I mean that he was playing Army Blues, which was very much on his mind because when Lomax met him he was going off to be drafted, and the reason that Lomax lost touch with him for many, many years was that he assumed that he had been drafted but, in fact, he managed to talk his way out of the draft by claiming an injury. And that injury is a dent in his head that he got from being hit by a bottle of soda that was thrown at him, and that dent is one of the ways that people were able to identify that this actually was footage of him. So it all goes around. >> Bernard MacMahon: Oh, that's incredible, yes. And then what was wonderful there was all this other beautiful footage that you transferred of kids dancing nearby, which we also used at the end of the film. And there's something very touching about that, those young African-American girls dancing in the field. And I love old photographs of people happy decades and decades ago and wondering what happened to them. >> Stephen Winick: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: There's an innocence about it. Yes, it's very emotional. So for that reason we decided in the film that there were quite a lot of dissolves between stills from the '20s and '30s, and then we dissolved a footage of that same place. So we were all the time tramping around where we were doing the interviews, is take -- I remember our line producer would be constantly tamping his watch and we were trying to find the exact location of where that still had been taken so I could match the frame and that you could dissolve, so that people could see how places in America looked then and how they look now. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so that's kind of the metaphor for walking by and just or as you walked past every door and every street just thinking for a minute what that building may have housed 80 years ago, 100 years, who might have been in there and what they might have been doing. >> Mary Sue Twohy: It's a great segway to the question of how you melded archival footage, I mean you said one way, dissolve into the contemporary footage, but I'm sure there are other ways that you worked with both contemporary and archival footage in the film? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, we developed a new technique that we invented for using archival footage, that a couple of really sharp cinematographers have spotted. But most people just go, it looks really nice, and they don't actually know why. [laughter] >> Stephen Winick: That would be me. >> Bernard MacMahon: Now it's all scanned at really, really high resolution, sometimes as high as 8K. We went to great efforts to ensure that everything was original prints so that it felt as tangible as possible, like the music. But what we did with the archive footage is one of the issues you have with historical documentaries is, and you see this in all of them, they do something -- on a film the aspect ratio, which is the shape of the image, has changed over the years. And now we were in a sort of letterbox format for a film, but in the '20s and into the '50s we were dealing with a 4-3 aspect ratio, which is essentially more like a square. And so what filmmakers have done in documentaries since there were documentaries in the modern format is they punch into the footage, now that is to say they zoom into the footage so that that image fills the whole screen. And I'm not knocking it, if that's what you like, but you are basically losing a massive amount of what that original cameraman framed up. And I think in historical things and in everything context is everything, you need to see the whole picture. So I like total truth in documentaries, so I mean my view is just you have the people, the family talking, you see the real photographs and you show as much of everything as possible. So what we did is we did a technique called over-scanning, which is where we scan the entire film showing the frame. So this would normally be cut-off, so you see the curved edges of the frame. And then we would scan the leader of the film, which is like the black leader which is the celluloid or the nitrate before you get to the film, before you get to the actual images, and that would be superimposed at the side of the screen, so you actually have the grain of that film at the side of the screen. So basically the picture is never retracting and expanding as it would when you're moving from contemporary footage to old footage, it is always full screen. So you're not only seeing the entirety of the '20s picture with no cropping, in fact, you're seeing more than you would be seeing when it was projected because there would have been some cropping of those edges, but also the entire picture is breathing. And so we devised that technique to use this material so that we could constantly move in and out of the old and the new. And that was it really. And then the other thing is just a sense of momentum. We shot the whole -- I shot all the interviews, much to the chagrin of my cinematographer, on a slider or a dolly. That is a device that allows the camera to move from left to right. And so this gentle movement is happening, but the idea is to mimic the feeling of the way your head looks when you're staring at somebody. If you're in a situation of conversation with somebody your head is not held by a metal clamp so you're unmoving, and you are moving and your constantly looking around and at the sides of the people. So the sense was that not more, yes, so essentially it's to mimic the feeling as if I was standing on a porch talking to somebody, I would be looking at them slightly from the left and right and it's to mimic that feeling of being there, but it also creates a sense of momentum which interestingly enough blends the old footage with the new footage and the old footage better. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Interesting. >> Stephen Winick: Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: That's fascinating to me. >> Bernard MacMahon: That's just tricks of the trade I've never talked about before. [laughter] >> Stephen Winick: Well, I think we're probably running low on time, so we should talk very briefly about some of the related products that you've come out with in addition to the film, itself. One thing that really interests me is the box set, which you talked about the influence of the Harry Smith anthology in the film and this is sort of a similar concept. How did you conceptualize the set? >> Bernard MacMahon: Well, the set is 100, maybe 100, as I mentioned 100 groups or musicians were researched for the film across all these different genres of music. I wanted American Epic to have all the kinds of indigenous music in it that other sets before hadn't included. And so the Hispanic, the African-American, the Hawaiian, I wanted all those things to be in it because they're such an important part of the mix, and so are the Native American. And so in doing that and looking at the artists that should be in the film we came up with the idea of having what we thought were the hundreds of the most powerful songs, performances from that era. It was a method of having something people would really dive into and they could experience just how colorful this period was. And this is really a metaphor for how we should be proceeding today. I mean what they were doing then is what should be happening now. We should be embracing that level. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And actually the doorway has become much more restricted since that time in terms of what gets in and what gets in front of the public or what's available to the public. And so this was a method of saying here is hundreds of the greatest parts. And American Epic is a film, it's not -- it's what we would describe as nondidactic. It's not a scientific project, it's an emotional response to music and a culture that we love and it's basically the reason, it's the reason why we love America. It's two bricks in one American, putting on to film what we love about America, and we're doing it at the point when America really kind of explodes and comes into its own, which is the '20s, and the world is still kind of in the throw of what America developed in the '20s. And so those songs, when you watch the American Epic films, the visual metaphor we use to convey how the film is being approached is an old record album is kind of pulled off the shelf and we see the book open, and these were those old leather-bound books that people would put their records in. >> Stephen Winick: Albums. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, that's where the term album comes from, like a photo album except you had your records in it. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And years later, a few years later record companies got the idea why don't you put someone's photograph and have all one person's records in there. But before then you'd buy these leather-bound books and you'd put your singles, if you will, in that and that would become your record album. And so you see that book turning and you see the records and we zoom in on a record and we hear the story behind that record, some are an artist you might have heard or many you will never have heard. And the idea that we're suggesting is that there are hundreds of thousands of these records and here are 10 of these stories, go forth and explore yourself, because behind every one there may be a story like this. And so the book, the box set, is a method of going into 100 of those things and you can start to extrapolate from looking at the film what the stories are about those. So the box set has I think it has lyrics transcribed for all the songs, which many have never been transcribed before, and again in an emotional response as opposed to historical we have quotes from the artists or their family about every single one, that was incredibly hard to find that once you said, oh, we're going to do this for everyone. It was really difficult, and stills for most of them, I mean there's many, many people in there that music fans have never seen before. But the big breakthrough is the sound. >> Stephen Winick: Yes, I wanted to talk about that, yes? >> Bernard MacMahon: That's a huge part of American Epic. In a music film or any film sound is 50% of a movie, and yet sound is often a big neglected part of features, it's like a poor cousin, it's a thing that's generally tossed off at the end. And so here when we had the Western Electric recording system and Nick Burger and Ginny had got that machine working we recorded all the contemporary artists on it first. What was amazing was that I suddenly could hear how the old records might have sounded because I was hearing Willie Nelson or Elton John on that machine. I in my mind's ear hear how John Hurt was meant to sound, how those records might have sounded, because we were the first people in almost 80 years that were using this machinery that made those records. And so I said, spoke to Nick and said, look, how would you feel about doing some serious R and D work using what we've learned recording this to transfer these records? And Nick being the highly professional individual he is kind of put that off for months and months and months, but he was -- he was actually doing it, he just didn't want to say he was going to do it until he figured he could make a significant improvement. And he said, okay, I'll do it, but he'd actually figured it out. And so he was able to transfer these old records and bring things out in them that we never heard before, but the main thing is they were really musical, the transfer sounded really, really musical. They had a kind of musicality and nuance to them I'd never heard and there were songs, these songs were making me feel things that I had never felt before. And so we asked him to get involved in transferring all the disks for the compilation, as well as the film. And what I noticed I'd never heard before is that the trouble with the '20s music is that the disks they recorded to were often so gnarly and it's so difficult for people to know how to play them back that the problem you have is after four or five songs your ears get really tired and you can't listen to any more and you want to put a modern recording on that's made on tape or something. Here, on this box set, you don't have that affect anymore, you can just listen to the song, song after song, they just roll into each other because they have a musicality of flow to them but they also have a clarity. And so the engineers, Peter Henderson and Joel Teftella @, they did just insane amounts of work manually removing all the clicks from these records without putting them through processing and stuff like this. >> Mary Sue Twohy: That's amazing. >> Bernard MacMahon: So everything sounds very open, like there's lots of air, you can really hear the room, you can just when you hear the recordings you can hear the sound of the record, the performance as it echoes around the room that they're in recording it. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And you actually have before and after of the recording to kind of compare the improvement? >> Allison McGourty: Yes. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, I mean, yes, you can, we can play an example of one of these disks how they would sound like if you transferred them on a normal turntable and then we can play an example of how they would sound, how they sound like now when they've been transferred to the system. And, yes, so then -- >> Allison McGourty: And then we can play a reimagined version where we rerecord the song in the present day on the same machine. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, the contemporary, doing that. But, yes, so there are 12, I think 12 album releases, there's the box set, there's a soundtrack, and then there are 10 artists and genre compilations. So there's all of John Hurt's recordings, a selection of the Memphis Jug Band stuff. Yes, it's pretty -- >> Mary Sue Twohy: It's productive. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, it's very -- yes, yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And you have your companion book, too, a beautiful, beautiful companion book with all these photographs, it felt like a scrapbook that's kind of done up right. [laughter] >> Bernard MacMahon: And, yes. >> Stephen Winick: An award-winning book we should say. >> Allison McGourty: Yes, thank you. Yes, we wanted to let the reader feel like they were on the journey with us, understanding how Bernard did the research and what it was like to be traveling across America, meeting these people. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, that's like kind of the -- we get asked a lot about making the films, and so the book is -- I mean all the parts are meant to be really essentially somewhat exclusive, so that's really the insight of how everything was put together and it's an opportunity to tell a lot of stories you can't tell in a film, but yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: And Elijah Walt. >> Allison McGourty: Oh, he's wonderful, yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: You worked with him on the book. >> Bernard MacMahon: Elijah is fantastic. He's like a scientist with words. He's really, he was really helpful, he came in and went through the iteration before we went to see Redford with it and recorded it. And Elijah has got a wonderfully acute eye and ear for exactly what the sentence is saying. Because here, I mean you raised this thing about this, the question about the slide guitar earlier and where it came from, and I just presented the information that we found. I think it's not possible to be absolutely right on any of these things. >> Stephen Winick: Right. >> Bernard MacMahon: And so there are statements you have to make in a film where as emotionally to try to tell a story and people in the room is we have to steer the audience room to room. And Elijah was very helpful in having a line of iteration not to say more than it was meant to say. Yes. >> Mary Sue Twohy: That's key. >> Bernard MacMahon: It's really, it's very important. >> Mary Sue Twohy: We know this in radio. >> Bernard MacMahon: Yes, yes. Anything else? >> Stephen Winick: No. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Well, let's see. I think we covered a lot of ground. >> Stephen Winick: I think we've covered a lot of ground. >> Mary Sue Twohy: Yes. >> Stephen Winick: And I think we have to get you over to the soundtrack so that you can actually get your movie screened tonight. >> Bernard MacMahon: Okay. >> Stephen Winick: So, once again, these are the Producers and Director and Writer of American Epic, which was a series of films that became a series on PBS. Mary Sue Twohy from SiriusXM Radio, and my name is Steve Winick, I work here at The Library of Congress in the American Folklife Center. Thanks very much. >> Allison McGourty: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.