DOC NYC ’13: Harlem Street Singer

Reverend Gary Davis was a man of God, but his finger-picking attack sure was fierce.  Eventually embraced by the Blues Revival, the Reverend Davis had spent years performing on the streets of Harlem.  He also took on students, including future neo-roots artists like David Bromberg and Stefan Grossman.  Davis’s loyal students and admirers piece together his story and trace his elusive influence in Trevor Laurence & Simeon Hutner’s Harlem Street Singer (trailer here), which screens during this year’s DOC NYC.

Davis was a real deal bluesman from North Carolina, who recorded some real deal blues sides, before dedicating himself to songs of praise and worship.  They were still drenched in the blues, making him rather tricky to classify.  A modest man with an idiosyncratic teaching style, Davis accepted any student bold enough to sign-up with him.  In addition to Bromberg and Grossman (who discuss their teacher throughout HSS), Davis also provided musical instruction to Roy Book Binder, Dave Van Ronk, and Woody Mann, who also serves as the film’s musical director and co-producer.

Davis was legally blind since birth, grew-up in the Jim Crow-era south, and lived most of his life in poverty, yet HSS is a defiantly upbeat movie.  According to those who knew him, Davis just played his music and preached the Word (indeed, the two were always closely related), regardless of his circumstances.  Of course, there is a lot of music in the film and it is consistently great.  Laurence & Hutner scored a coup with the inclusion of previously unseen footage of Davis laying it down at the Newport Folk Festival and they do not keep viewers waiting for it, using it to kick off the film with a big statement. 

Keeping the apostolic flame burning, Mann leads a tribute ensemble that periodically plays some dynamite Davis covers.  Mann and Bill Sims, Jr. have the unenviable role of handling the guitar and vocal duties respectively, but they both sound fantastic, getting first rate support from Dave Keyes on piano and Brian Glassman on bass.  It is a killer quartet that ought to get a ton of gigs together if HSS receives the attention it deserves.

Few docs are as wildly entertaining as HSS, but it still does justice to the seriousness of Davis’s life and times.  Hopefully, someone from PBS has it on their radar, because it is as good as anything that has been on American Masters since Cachao: Uno Mas and is considerably better than most.  Highly recommended to general audiences beyond established blues fans, Harlem Street Singer screens again as part of DOC NYC this Thursday morning (11/21) at the IFC Center, so consider calling in sick for it.

Down the Tracks: Dylan’s Ancestral Roots

Down the Tracks: the Music that Influenced Bob Dylan
Directed by Steve Gammond
Eagle Media

Bob Dylan didn’t come out of nowhere, but for some, Hibbing, Minnesota is probably close enough. His music did not come down from the pure blue sky either. His well established country, blues, and roots influences are now documented for a popular audience in the recent DVD release Down the Tracks: Music that Influenced Bob Dylan.

Diehard Dylan fans might have mixed emotions about Tracks, because its subject and inspiration is never heard from directly, only appearing in still photos and limited archival video (sans audio), presumably due to clearance difficulties. However, Tracks takes viewers on a brisk tour of the Americana music the Lomaxes, father John and son Alan, spent their careers recording and preserving. In fact, John Lomax appears with Dylan influence Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, in clips from the rather stilted and patronizing cinematic recreation of their initial meeting in the Angola State Prison Farm.

A number of early blues pioneers get their just due in Tracks, both as artists and formative influences on Dylan, including Leadbelly, Blind Willie McTell, Rev. Gary Davis, and Mississippi John Hurt, briefly shown in performance at the Newport Folk Festival. At times Tracks also mixes in contemporary performances of a classic song that Dylan surely would have heard, with the best being Po’ Girl’s rendition of Hurt’s “My Creole Belle.”

In addition to bluesmen, we see and hear some of Dylan’s country touchstones, most notably Hank Williams, and the original folkies like Woody Gutherie. One of the more intriguing aspects of Tracks is its relatively straight-forward description of the so-called “Popular Front, Communist-influenced folk tradition.” We hear Guthrie dissembling on the political intent of his music, but twenty minutes later another commentator seems to contradict him, explaining in the folkies’ voice their aim to “create a patriotic, American, wholesome feel for what we’re doing and that will help play down and placate and pacify those who feel we’re too close to the Communist Party.”

Though Dylan clearly idolized Guthrie, later discussions of the titular subject’s work create a picture of a more nuanced artist, like the1966 Playboy interview from which author Michael Gray paraphrases his belief in lasting power of traditional song, arguing the converse for protest music: “Traditional music won’t die—it can’t die . . . It’s political music—those are the songs that are going to die—they’re already dead.”

While Tracks might not leave fans feeling anymore intimately acquainted with Dylan, it offers several good jumping-off points for the artists who came before him. It would be very cool if some of Dylan’s sizable audience became intrigued by Rev. Gary Davis on learning from Folk Revival producer Joe Boyd a tidbit like: “[for] a lot of the New York folkies, to the degree that they had real skill on the guitar it was very often because they had taken lessons from Gary.” Though relatively brief (just over ninety minutes), Tracks shotguns in quite a bit of American roots music, for an interesting, if indirect tribute to the inscrutable singer-songwriter.