American Epic is a documentary film series about the first recordings of roots music in the United States during the 1920s and their cultural, social and technological impact on North America and the world. Directed and co-written by Bernard MacMahon, the story is told through twelve ethnically and musically diverse musicians who auditioned for and participated in these pioneering recording sessions: The Carter Family, the Memphis Jug Band, Elder J.E. Burch, The Williamson Brothers, Dick Justice, Charley Patton, The Hopi Indian Chanters, Joseph Kekuku, Lydia Mendoza, the Breaux Family, Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Willie Johnson. The film series is the core of the American Epic media franchise, which includes several related works.

The film series was created, written and produced by MacMahon, Allison McGourty and Duke Erikson. It was first broadcast on May 16, 2017, in the United States and was narrated by Robert Redford. The film was the result of ten years of intensive field research and postulated a radically new take on American history, namely that America was democratized through the invention of electrical sound recording and the subsequent auditions the record labels held across North America in the late 1920s, which were open to every ethnic minority and genre of music. The films contained many previously untold stories, a vast amount of previously unseen and extremely rare archival footage and dramatically advanced audio restorations of the 1920s and 1930s recordings.

MacMahon decided all the interviewees had to personally have known the long-deceased subjects of the films, and these interviews were conducted on the location where the musicians had lived, accompanied by panoramic tracking shots of the geographical locations both present and vintage to give a sense of the wildly varied North American landscape and its influence on the music.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, pp. 3-5 During pre-production, when MacMahon presented his vision for the films and the archival footage to Robert Redford at their first meeting, Redford pronounced it "America's greatest untold story."

The film series received a number of awards, including the Foxtel Audience Award at the 2016 Sydney Film Festival and the Discovery Award at the 2016 Calgary International Film Festival. It was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. On April 23, 2018, the Focal International Awards nominated American Epic for Best Use of Footage in a History Feature and Best Use of Footage in a Music Production. Many critics have cited the American Epic films as being one of the best music documentaries ever made.

Episodes

Development

Inspiration

Director Bernard MacMahon said, "America has fascinated me since I was a child. My big love is American cinema, especially early American cinema, and I've always been fascinated by that period in the 20s when the technology and artistic language of the film were being invented." He commented that at the same time he became fascinated with the 20s music recording artists. He revealed the American Epic films were inspired by an advert in a magazine in 2006 for a blues festival in the Lake District, featuring Honeyboy Edwards, Homesick James, and Robert Lockwood Jr. - three men in their nineties who had grown up in the 20s at the height of the Delta blues era.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, p. 119 According to MacMahon, "A voice inside me said, 'I need to take a camera crew and film there. Someday I'm going to need this.'"

"So we arranged to bring a [film] crew to the country inn where they were staying and filmed them talking about their youth and the music they had grown up with, including their memories of the formative genius of the Delta style, Charley Patton." MacMahon recalled, "It was an amazing experience listening to these men who had lived through all the changes from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century…watching them sitting together, trading stories and talking about the music and the Delta and how both had changed, and getting a sense of their outlook and the way they related to each other was a very profound experience." MacMahon said that when he screened the footage for his producer and screenwriting partner, Allison McGourty, she said, "This is great…We need to make this into something larger." MacMahon decided the films would "explore the vast range of ethnic, rural, and regional music recorded in the United States during the late 1920s."American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, p. 1 A story he considered would bring together music, social issues, freedom of speech and technology. He also viewed the story as fundamental in culturally, creatively and technologically shaping and influencing the modern world. MacMahon said this was the first time America heard itself. He posited that these 1920s recordings "allowed working people, from Native American farmers to a woman picking cotton in Mississippi, to have their thoughts and feelings distributed on records throughout the whole country. On the modern digital platform, we take that freedom of speech for granted. Back then, it was a revolutionary idea."

Research MacMahon began extensively researching the period, concentrating on approximately 100 performers who had made recordings in the late 20s and early 30s at the field recording sessions.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, p. 3 With very little information about the 1920s field recording sessions and the artists involved published in books, MacMahon elected to research almost exclusively in the field by tracking down eyewitnesses and direct family members to piece together the most accurate picture of the events at that time. One of the artists he was endeavoring to track down was Dick Justice. Suspecting that Justice was from West Virginia and a coal miner, MacMahon began running stories in the local newspapers from the 1920s coal mining communities in West Virginia that were still in print. After a number of failed attempts, he ran an advert in the Logan Banner that read, "British film company looking for relatives of Dick Justice." The advert resulted in a response from Bill Williamson who knew Justice's daughter, Ernestine Smith. Ernestine, who was in her late eighties at the time and still living in Logan, had a photograph of her father and dramatic stories of his life in the coal mines and his recording career. Bill Williamson revealed his father was the founder of another legendary group from the period, The Williamson Brothers.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, pp. 104-105 Inspired by what he'd discovered, MacMahon began to pursue other musicians of interest from the era. His production partner Allison McGourty encouraged him to use this research for the basis of a film. She reasoned that this would be the last opportunity to tell these stories before all the direct relatives and witnesses had died. MacMahon, on embarking on this vast research expedition, commented that "almost a century later, we wanted to see if we could still experience that music directly, among the people who made it, in the places it was played. We started by choosing some artists and recordings that we found particularly moving, then set out to trace them through space and time. At times it seemed a quixotic quest, but as we traveled, we kept being startled by the overlaps of old and new, the ways in which the music of the past continued to resonate and reflect the present. We had left our home in twenty-first-century Britain to travel across a foreign country and deep into the past, but over and over again, the people we met and the places we visited felt very familiar and very much in the present."

MacMahon and McGourty travelled extensively in 37 U.S. states for over 10 years researching the films. Some performers, like the Breaux Frères, had been misrepresented for years by erroneous photographsMacMahon, Bernard (September 28, 2016). "An Interview with Bernard MacMahon". Breakfast Television (Interview). Interview with Jill Belland. Calgary: City while others, like Elder J.E. Burch and the Hopi Indian Chanters, had no known photographs and no biographical information whatsoever.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, p. 83 These had to be found by carefully studying census records and recording ledgers, and by placing adverts in local papers to help locate living family members.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, p. 92 In the case of Burch, a solitary reference in a 1927 Victor Records recording ledger to Cheraw, South Carolina led the producers to travel to that town. When they arrived, they did not find anyone who remembered the preacher until they were introduced to Ted Bradley, a town elder who attended Burch's church as a boy in the 1930s. Bradley took them to Burch's church and revealed that Burch had been an emancipatory figure in the town, helping found the local chapter of the NAACP and unifying the black and white townsfolk at a time of extreme segregation.American Epic (documentary) Wald, McGourty, MacMahon 2017, pp. 87-89 Bradley introduced them to another contemporary, Ernest Gillespie, who revealed that his cousin had lived next door to Burch's church and that Burch's music had inspired him to pursue a career in music. That cousin was Dizzy Gillespie, a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz and one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. MacMahon researched other little-known musicians, like Joseph Kekuku, whom they confirmed to be the inventor of the Hawaiian steel guitar. They charted his journey from Oahu to the mainland and uncovered his touring itineraries which demonstrated how he had popularized that instrument throughout North America and Europe, resulting in it being incorporated into Delta blues, country, African Jùjú and even Pink Floyd. One of the biggest challenges was that the first electrical recording equipment from 1925 that made the field recording sessions possible had not been seen in almost 80 years. This equipment had huge scientific and cultural significance, as it was not only the origin of all modern electrical sound recording today, but also was used to record sound for the first talking pictures.

The production's sound engineer, Nicholas Bergh, spent ten years rebuilding the recording equipment from parts scavenged from around the world and the team located the first ever period images of the equipment from an archive of over 1,000,000 uncatalogued photos in the Western Electric archives. Most importantly, they located the rare film footage showing it in operation from a film collector in Belgium and a severely damaged reel in the British Film Institute. MacMahon summarized the research, stating the "process wasn't all sunshine and smiles—we traveled to beautiful places and met some of the most wonderful people we have ever known, but we also heard stories of poverty and discrimination, of hard times and troubled lives. The power of the music comes in a large part from its role as a comfort and release for people trapped in difficult situations. But the journey was always rewarding, not despite, but because of those connections. As we traveled, the songs became less and less connected to old discs and vanished eras, and more and more to living people and communities."

Production

Interviewees