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Martin Scorsese had an idea for a series of several films made about the blues. There has never been a
project like this, where seven directors actually worked on one subject and produced seven
feature-length films. Each film has a very distinct point of view. Each director selected his
territory in the history of blues himself. There were no stylistic or content limits. I think Marty
really had a splendid idea when he started this thing.
I knew he was a blues fan, and he wasn't sure if I was one as well, so we started to
talk about our favorite bluesmen first. I thought it was intriguing to be able to finally dedicate
some time to my blues heroes. After all, I didn't know that much about them. Sure, I had every record
I could ever find of Skip James, but I didn't know much about his life. And although I knew J.B.
Lenoir's music for thirty years, I realized that if I had to tell anybody how he had lived, I
wouldn't know what to say. I knew the music and just loved it. So the film was a great opportunity to
really dive into the stories of these people and find out more about them myself.
I think my first memories of the blues are, rather, memories of spirituals. We didn't
even have a record player at home when I was young, and the radio only played German music and
classical music, but in school I once heard a record of so-called Negro spirituals. That was a sound
I had never heard before, and its emotional honesty truly took me by surprise. I listened to it over
and over again and soon knew some of the songs by heart, although I didn't speak English, so I didn't
know what it all meant. I was just guessing. That was my first contact.
Later on, the first bluesman I actually knew by name was John Lee Hooker, and his
albums were the first blues LPs I bought because he had impressed me so much on the first hearing.
Blind Lemon Jefferson, too, B.B. King . . . I soon started to know more about this music, but I only
developed a better knowledge of the blues when the English bands in the sixties started to cover all
the old bluesmen and play them electrically. I was guided by Van Morrison, the Pretty Things, the
Animals, and the Rolling Stones and discovered the original versions of the songs that had inspired them.
The blues is utterly emotional music, with a very simple pattern inside which
musicians can take enormous liberties. I liked that supposition of a structure that is simple, inside
which a lot of freedom can play out. The blues really deals with all kinds of troubles, with all
kinds of worries and sorrows, with hardship, so even a young white fellow like me could easily
identify with its subject. It's the best music to hear when you're down and when you need comfort.
It's very strong rhythmically, really at the roots of both jazz and rock and roll. I was a jazz fan
when I was sixteen, eighteen. I played tenor saxophone, heavily influenced by John Coltrane, and
only later got into rock and roll and the blues.
Music has played a paramount role in my enthusiasm for the craft of filmmaking. It
all started when I made my very first short 16-mm silent film. I had no money to record any sound,
so I had these silent images when I sat down for the first time in an editing room at film school
to put these shots together. I had my tape recorder with me. I played some of my favorite tracks to
these images of mine, and that was the greatest fun I've ever had. In terms of filmmaking, that
was the greatest discovery for me: how to put images and music together! As soon as you start that,
even if you think you know your images or that music, when you put them together, a third thing
emerges that's more than the sum of both. And that precious moment when you first see your imagery
and hear the music together with it, that for me, ever since that short film, is why I like to make
movies in order to get to that moment of joy. At times I think that's the whole reason I am
in this moviemaking business to begin with. I just do not understand any director who'll have that
taken away from him.
My musical taste is pretty wide: I love classical music, and I like Latin and
African music. But when it comes down to it, my favorite music is really blues and rock and roll.
That I'm so attached to American music, from early blues recordings of the late twenties up to the
sixties, probably has a lot to do with the fact that I discovered this music for myself. It was
something that belonged to me, a territory I found for myself that nobody had shown to me and that
nobody had imposed on me. I had chosen it myself! Then these English kids came out of nowhere,
when I was sixteen, seventeen years old. Bands like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles were quickly
known, but the better ones, in my book, were the more unknown Them (with Van Morrison), or the
Animals, the Pretty Things, or my all-time favorites, the Kinks. These kids, they were "my
generation," just like the Who were saying it. They were just as old as I was, a couple of them
maybe a year or two older, and most of them were art students who had invented that music from
scratch. I identified with them that was my own generation, and the music they made was
really my music.
I once heard a song by Skip James on a compilation album sometime in the sixties,
just one track, but it stood out. It was more haunting than anything else around it, and I knew I
had to find out more about this singer of whom I just knew this one song. It took me awhile until
I tracked down another album. His other songs all had that same quality, different from anybody
else's voice. His guitar and piano playing, too, were very elaborate and didn't sound like
anything else I knew. So I think he was the first hero of mine. I felt here was the first guy who
I picked myself, and I really got attached to him.
And then I remember in 1967, a new record came out by John Mayall, the godfather
of the English blues movement. I had all of his LPs. Mayall's band was like a breeding ground of
blues musicians in England. I loved this new album, Crusade, especially
one song on it called "The Death of J.B. Lenoir." When I first heard it, I just had the shivers.
That song was so moving and so personal, and there was such a great sense of loss. He was
mourning the death of a friend, and I had never heard of this man he was singing about: J.B.
Lenoir. So again I tried to find out everything I could, and I dug out a record of his. It
actually had come out in Germany. It was acoustic blues, songs about the American South. Very
powerful songs, very contemporary, dealing with the Vietnam War, for instance, and that was the
first time I heard anybody sing about that war. Other songs were dealing with the fights of the
black people in America for equality. When I originally heard the first notes of that first album
of the real J.B. Lenoir, I thought I had been mistaken. This must be a woman, I thought at first,
but it became clear after a while that this was not a woman. It was a man singing with the most
unique high-pitched voice, but not really falsetto. Very emotional on top of that. By then my
English was better, and I understood more of the words already. I understood that there was
somebody who was singing about things that nobody else was singing about. Over the years, I found
out that he had made music in Chicago in the fifties with a big band, using electric guitar and
a big-band sound. I collected five, six, or seven obscure albums by this J.B. Lenoir, and in my
heart he became my favorite blues musician of them all. Every now and then I would meet somebody
who knew him. I remember, for instance, years later I was driving with Sam Shepard in his pickup
truck across America; we were writing Paris, Texas together at the time
and Sam had a few cassettes, and at one point he put in a new tape and said, "I bet you don't
know this guy," and it was J.B. Lenoir. So he was one of the connoisseurs. All these J.B. fans
had something in common: They were convinced that this was one of the greatest singers ever, yet
he had remained strangely obscure. I found out that the first records I had bought in Germany
had never come out in America. And that these songs about the Vietnam War, his song addressed to
President Eisenhower from the fifties, his songs about Mississippi and Alabama, Americans simply
didn't know them. No wonder he remained so obscure and unknown.
Musicians, like Jimi Hendrix, knew him; J.B.'s most famous song, "Mama Talk to
Your Daughter," had been a moderate R&B hit. But nobody really knew so much about the man's
life. So when Marty gave me the chance to select my territory in the story of the blues, I knew
it had to be about J.B. Lenoir and Skip James. Later on, I figured it was a bit bizarre to just
pick my two favorite musicians; I didn't even know how to link them, so I realized I needed more
of a "theme." It hit me that the one topic in both of their lives was an overall issue in the
blues anyway, which is that a lot of bluesmen are torn between the worldly side of their music
and the spiritual side of it. It seemed like an important theme in the history of blues, this
gap between the sacred and the profane. The tension between gospel and blues is a strange
demarcation line that goes across the entire history of the blues. A lot of blues musicians
travel between the two lives; others could only live inside one of them and then at one point
in their lives would break with that life like Skip James, who one day stepped out of
the history of the blues and became a minister, never touching the blues again for thirty years.
And not just him a lot of blues musicians felt that they had to leave the devil's music
behind to play God's music. So when it finally came time to write some sort of treatment for my
film, I wrote that it was about the sacred and the profane. That might sound abstract, but it
was really about two men.
And while I was preparing the film, I realized they both had a forerunner, and
that there was a third musician I should really include: Blind Willie Johnson. I knew even less
about him than the other two. There is not a single photograph of the man, just one rather
graphic portrait that was an ad for a recording of his in the late 1920's. You can't really
judge from that what he might have looked like. So Blind Willie was a total mystery, but he had
written some great songs, one in particular, "Dark Was the Night," that I had at one point
selected and used as temp music for Paris, Texas when I first showed
the film to Ry Cooder. I had indicated to Ry that a bottleneck guitar style was what I would
love to hear on the film somehow. Ry was very taken by the idea. He knew that song really
well; actually, he had recorded it once himself. The theme of "Dark Was the Night" eventually
became the main musical theme of Paris, Texas. Blind Willie Johnson
only sang sacred music, never touched a single secular song, although his techniques
especially his bottleneck style are among the finest in blues history, to quote somebody
as competent as Eric Clapton. And of course as far as guitar playing, rhythm, or singing is
concerned, it's the same music. Later on, Blind Willie became the "narrator" of my film. That
might sound weird, as he died in 1947. But Blind Willie really saved my film. I was at a loss
as to which perspective I could tell our story from, until I remembered that Blind Willie's
song "Dark Was the Night" had been picked as one of the handful of songs that represented
contemporary twentieth-century music on the record that went out with the space probe Voyager
into outer space.
The overall parameter of the entire series that Marty had discussed with the
directors was to shoot these films digitally. We all more or less agreed that DV-Cam would be
the ideal, very portable, very light equipment to shoot this. So I knew that most of the
film (or at least anything that was contemporary) would be shot on DV-Cam, and I was fine
with that. We had used similar equipment for some of Buena Vista Social Club
, and I knew it was good enough to be blown up to film in the end. But my film's
time period started in the late twenties, and the most glorious moment in the life of Skip
James was a legendary recording session that took place in 1931. Of course, there is no
filmed record of this whatsoever, only a few scratchy 78s on shellac. There is not even a
single image of Skip James from the time when he did that recording. So I decided to
reenact some of the lives of my heroes in order to show them: Blind Willie Johnson in 1927,
and Skip James in 1931. And I figured to go back to the twenties or early thirties and shoot
on DV-Cam was not a good solution. To reenact some of the lives of Skip James and Blind
Willie Johnson, I needed to find a different medium. I chose to do that on a hand-cranked
camera from the early twenties, a Debrie Parvo. I had shot on that camera once before and
knew it worked really well. I love the effect of the irregularity of the hand-cranked camera
movement. It is a really beautiful and authentic effect and transports you right back in time
so successfully, in fact, that when we showed a first cut of the film, most of the
people who saw it believed we had found all this original archived material and didn't really
understand that we had produced it ourselves. The hand-cranked camera enables you to make
this time jump and single-handedly, so to speak, produces the feeling of the era. And it's a
lot of fun to work with such an old camera. It was also a challenge shooting with a
hand-cranker: You're completely out of sync, because already the hand movement is never
regular, and we shot on sixteen frames on top of that. Most of the scenes we were shooting
involved playback! I first thought that playing in sync with these old recordings from 1927
or 1931 was a ludicrous idea and probably totally impossible, but we did a test and it
actually seemed possible to sync up our hand-cranked material to the music. But it was not
easy. Every second frame of our film, shot at more or less sixteen frames per second, would
have to be doubled up to get to around twenty-four frames, and then you still had to manipulate
it tremendously to achieve any synchronicity. Basically, you had to find sync moments for every
word, or every stroke of the guitar, so you could advance second by second and extract or add
frames, which you can only do now with digital technology. So our idea worked with a mix of the
oldest possible technique and top-notch digital technology, thus enabling us to produce scenes
that look as if they were filmed at the time.
The second half of the film concentrates on the life of J.B. Lenoir, in the
fifties and sixties, when I felt the hand-cranked camera would no longer be appropriate. To get
into the spirit of that period I decided we should shoot in 16 mm so it would look really
different. And then we found this incredible material that nobody had ever seen, these two films
actually shot of J.B. Lenoir in the early sixties.
These two 16-mm films were shot by a couple of art students, Steve Seaberg and
his wife, Rönnog, in Chicago. They had never made a movie before and didn't know much about
filmmaking. But they had become friends with J.B. Lenoir, loved the music, and loved the man so
much that they thought, We have to do something to get him known to other audiences. Rönnog was
from Sweden, and Steve was American. And Rönnog had the fabulous idea that if they would shoot
a little movie about J.B. and take it to Sweden with them, they could show it on Swedish
television. So they went about it and made the first film, actually shooting in a photographer's
studio. They put J.B. in front of a backdrop, never moved the camera, and shot four songs in that
one angle. Then they took these ten minutes or so to Swedish television. The Swedes looked at it
and were horrified: It was uncut material that the Seabergs presented to them, and the sound was
only on an optical track, which was not very good, so the Swedish television executives just
flat-out said, "We can't show this, and also you should know that we don't have color here in
Sweden, we only have black-and-white TV, so if you shoot something, it has to be black and
white." So Rönnog and Steve went back home to Chicago a little disappointed and put their
ten-minute color 16-mm film on the shelf.
But a year later, when they were going to Sweden again, they shot a second
film. This time it was in black and white and much more elaborate. It was about twenty
minutes long, was shot in J.B.'s living room, and had a lot of different setups, although
every song is only one shot. They covered about twelve songs with J.B., and as they
intended it for a Swedish audience, Rönnog and Steve were translating simultaneously
whatever J.B. was saying even what he was singing. Rönnog would translate in the
middle of a song what the song was about. It was quite unique and extraordinary. Who at
the time would do that go to somebody's house and shoot a movie with him? Again
they took it to Swedish television, and this time they were very sure of themselves, they
had made these elaborate setups, the film was in black and white, and the sound was much
better now, but Swedish television refused it again. By now they had color, and somebody
had recently covered the Chicago blues scene for them, without J.B. Lenoir, of course.
Rönnog and Steve sadly went back to Chicago again, put the second film on the shelf, and
that was the end of their filmmaking career. Very disappointing. And nobody ever saw these
two films again.
How did we find the Seabergs? Via the Internet and through research, we
started to secure any photographs or footage that existed of J.B. Lenoir. Somebody knew
that at some point these young art students had shot some footage, but nobody knew who
they were, and finally we found somebody who knew their names. By now the Seabergs lived
in Atlanta, Georgia, no longer in Chicago; forty years had passed. They were still
artists, into acrobatic poetry, which sure is an elusive branch of the arts. They are no
longer in filmmaking after the two disasters, but they still had the two films. And they
had these memories of J.B.; they really had known him well and had become very good friends
with him and also with his family. J.B. had died very early, and they had stayed in touch
with his wife and his kids, so there was finally firsthand information on J.B. Lenoir. So
the Seabergs and their two movies became the backbone of the second half of my film.
But as The Soul of a Man is really about the music
and about the songs, and not so much a film that is dealing with the biographies of my heroes,
I really wanted to have the music speak for itself. I wasn't so much interested in making a
film with talking heads and people who remembered J.B. Originally I had shot lots of stuff,
interviews both on Skip and on J.B., but in the editing process I decided not to use any of
it. I used very sparse comments. Basically the only one who is commenting on Skip James is
his manager Dick Waterman, who worked with him the last two years of his life and who was
also a photographer. I felt it was better that people would hear about Skip and J.B. from
one source only. It was more intimate that way, and you'd get to know these bluesmen more
than if you'd hear lots of people talking about them. I have also shot extensive stuff with
J.B.'s wife and his kids, and I regret that none of it ended up in the cut, but it would
have been such a different film. And I can still make a whole chapter for the DVD of these
interviews and these witnesses about the lives of Skip and J.B. We have a great piece, for
instance, of a very old lady in Bentonia, Mississippi, where Skip grew up. She was in her
eighties, and she remembered that when she was a teenager, she had a crush on Skip. When we
shot it, I was sure this was going to end up in the film, but even that is not in. I also
found people who knew Skip in the fifties when he was working on a farm and didn't play the
blues anymore. We found people who knew J.B. in the fifties and sixties in Chicago. But I
finally just eliminated all these testimonies. There was no need for them.
With a documentary, even if you might have a clear view of the film while
you're shooting your material, when you come to the editing room, you have to start from
scratch. The film is still hidden in there, somehow, and you have to find the secret story
inside. It took us almost a year to find that story in The Soul of a Man
. Twice we went in the wrong direction. My editor, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and I
basically finished two entire cuts before we managed to find the good one that we have now.
Our problem from the very beginning was: There were these three bluesmen who had never met,
who lived in different eras, and played very different music. They were basically only
linked through the fact that I loved them more than any other blues musicians of the
twenties and thirties up to the sixties. That wasn't such a solid link, as we had to find
out painfully. The first version of the film we cut had me narrating it. We did that whole
thing and recorded and arranged my voice-over, and then we looked at the film, and I just
hated it. It was simply not the right thing to have this German fellow talk about his three
American blues heroes. Everything I wanted to achieve, everything I loved about them, was gone.
The very fact that I was confessing it, so to speak, with my own voice, made it all strangely
ineffective and pretentious. I wanted it to be a film just about the music, but had somehow
destroyed my very aim. All of a sudden, my own experience had become the center of the film,
which was the last thing I wanted.
So we threw that entire cut away and started from scratch. And now we were
going to do the opposite; we were not going to have any narration, we were just telling it
from inside the songs. Which we did, very elaborately. But that didn't work either. So we
threw that away and started a third time. This time we were successful. I realized that the
secret narrator of the film had always been there, we just hadn't noticed him. It was the
first of our three characters: Blind Willie Johnson. The fact that his voice was out there
in space on Voyager by now on the outskirts of the solar system made him the
perfect instrument to narrate our film. He had the necessary distance, so to speak; he had a
beautiful "objective" point of view. Plus, there was a certain irony in the fact that a man
who was long dead now became the commentator on the lives of his two colleagues who had lived
after him. That narrative perspective really worked well for the overall film. It gave it a
certain lightness that certainly my voice never had. I just knew I needed a good voice for
that! My first idea for that was Laurence Fishburne. He sure has a gorgeous voice. I knew
Laurence from long ago when he made Apocalypse Now in the late
seventies he was a young man then. I didn't have to twist his arm. He accepted the
invitation immediately. With his voice, talking from the impossible perspective of a man in
outer space, everything fell into place, and all the problems we had before with the structure
and how to find a story that would unify it all vanished into thin air. Everything I had ever
hoped for was there. In documentaries, you often have to run into a dead-end street, make a
U-turn, and come back in order to see the right passage for the film. You have to shape the
story from inside the material, and it's not obvious right away what that might be.
Once Blind Willie emerged as the narrator, the film's title came by itself.
Blind Willie wrote and recorded a song called "The Soul of a Man," and in a way that song
summed up the entire journey Skip's and J.B.'s, as well as his own. It defined the
search that the blues is constantly on in very simple words. And it finally brought out the
topic of the sacred and the profane that the film was still about, somehow. In short: It
was the perfect song to come from heaven or from outer space. What is the soul of a man? How
much can you tell about these people, how much can you try to know them, and what do you
then know if you know their music and their lives? Do you know the soul of these men? Have
they expressed it in these songs? The blues is a very existential medium, as it goes to the
core of things.
Wanting the music to be the center of the film, I soon realized that the
best way to let the music speak for itself was to rerecord the old songs and to find
contemporary musicians who would pick a song by Skip, J.B., or Blind Willie, and
reinterpret it. This would also help to make my three blues heroes contemporary again and
have an audience from 2003 listen to their songs and be attentive. I was hoping I could
interest a number of musicians or bands to play some of these songs. I looked for those
who had already expressed an interest in that work, maybe had already covered a song by
Skip or J.B. But I also approached some of my friends like Nick Cave and Lou Reed, who I
knew would be interested because they love the blues. In the end I think there are twelve
old songs interpreted by singers and songwriters and bands who work today. They all
recorded live, during the sessions when we shot the musicians, so it's not playback. One
of the highlights was Beck, because he wouldn't play a song the same way twice. He covered
two songs by Skip James, "I'm So Glad" and "Cypress Grove," and each time he would start,
he would play on a different guitar and in a different rhythm, and he would have a
different approach. I think he played twelve variations of "I'm So Glad," but each one was
different, and there was no way that you could intercut one with the other. That was
exciting. And scary.
All these performances were fantastic, really. Over almost one year, we
shot them in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and London. Bonnie Raitt was very generous
she gave us two songs. The one that she played on her own was extremely demanding.
She actually played in Skip's tuning. And that really breaks your fingers, because Skip
played in open D, which is very unusual and difficult to get your fingers around. So
Bonnie was really heroic. I was also very taken by the performances that Cassandra Wilson
gave. She actually sang three songs, two of which ended up in the film. "Vietnam Blues"
is my favorite song of J.B.'s. Her version of it was just very, very moving, and strangely
contemporary. Eagle-Eye Cherry put together the most unbelievable band of musicians,
including James "Blood" Ulmer, an awesome guitar player and singer himself. T-Bone Burnett
got together a big band with an amazing brass section, Jim Keltner on drums, plus two
other percussionists. T-Bone sang in J.B.'s high tenor voice, with a woman singer doing
the lower voice.
The most fun was probably the shoot we had with Lou Reed. He did a rare
Skip tune and a twelve-minute version of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," during which
he was smiling happily. The band did that entire song in a state of bliss. One take only!
I don't know how often that happens in Lou's life, but I'm very proud and extremely lucky
that I shot him for several moments laughing with joy!
A sad moment was our shoot in Chicago, because we just happened to arrive
in time to witness the destruction of Maxwell Street. We were there to shoot when the
bulldozers came in and tore it all down. None of it actually is in the film, because it
didn't make sense to use it, but it was a really heartbreaking moment, to see this
legendary place in the history of American jazz and blues just be obliterated to
be turned into offices, banks, and restaurants. In a sense this makes these films even
more important to me, personally, because they show that the music itself is so vibrant
that it will survive even the sort of callow indifference that would fail to preserve an
institution like Maxwell Street. And my awareness of how the music is still alive in our
culture today, still flourishing, really allows me to feel less blue about the loss of
Maxwell Street because no doubt the things that made Maxwell Street so remarkable
at one time are happening right now, someplace else.
Wim Wenders
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