Product Details

• Format: Color, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Acorn Media
• VHS Release Date: September 11, 1999
• Run Time: 60 minutes
• ASIN: 1569382980
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #402,033 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Director-producer John Junkerman provides a vivid, organic portrait of American music and the survival of its root influences in this four-part odyssey down the Mississippi. After exploring the often surprising mix of nationalities and cultures that frame the river's northern reaches, the series reaches a satisfying conclusion in this survey of the richly varied roots styles of Louisiana, "where music is king," as the episode's subtitle asserts.

New Orleans's two-century legacy in American music could easily have dominated the entire episode, and Junkerman's team understandably lingers in the Crescent City to savor its hearty feast of brass band jazz (from the Soul Rebels and the Treme Brass Band) and R&B (from an ebullient Eddie Bo, the sultry and sweet Irma Thomas, and triple-threat jazz, blues, and R&B pianist, singer, and teacher Henry Butler). More tellingly, the episode makes room for the northern Louisiana country of Kenny Bill Stinson, and a surprising--and moving--encounter between former Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis and Bakersfield, California, country icon Merle Haggard, who pays heartfelt tribute to songwriter ("You Are My Sunshine") Davis, with whom Haggard duets.

The French Louisiana saga behind both white Cajun music and its African American, francophone cousin, zydeco is honored through the music of D.L. Menard and Christine Balfa, and Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie, respectively. Both Menard, an authentic country Cajun, and the more modern, urbanized Delafose salute their French antecedents, with Delafose mirroring the dilemma of zydeco players entrusted with preserving a culture paradoxically threatened by its own recent vogue among mainstream fans. The series ends with a poignant encounter at the outer banks of Delacroix Island, where Irvan Perez preserves the Spanish-language, ten-stanza ballads of the Canary Islands--a unique remnant of the region's earliest European links as part of New Spain. --Sam Sutherland