The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966, Vol. 1

Starring:Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker
Studio: Hip-O Records
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
Unearthed some 40 years after the fact, this has to be one of the finest blues collections ever assembled on video. Thanks to a couple of young promoters who brought the musicians to Europe--where they were treated with a good deal more respect and dignity than in America--we get an extraordinary lineup of bluesmen and women: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace... the list goes on. Their concert performances (several in stagy but effective down-home settings) before a rather formal but appreciative German audience have them playing in some cool combinations (T-Bone Walker backing Memphis Slim, Otis Rush with Junior Wells), even introducing one another (Williamson on guitarist Lonnie Johnson, an elder statesman on the tour: "A very nice musician")--and all with great sound (mono, but still flawless) and visuals (in black and white). This is one for blues fans to treasure. --Sam Graham
Description
Reelin' In The Years Productions, in association with Experience Hendrix, bring you the American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 Volumes One & Two. The AFBF was an annual event that featured the cream of American blues musicians barnstorming their way across western Europe every fall from 1962 through 1966. Recorded live in a small TV studio in Germany, these historic and unseen performances have been lost for nearly 40 years. Filmed with superb camera work and pristine sound, each DVD contains 18 complete performances from the greatest blues musicians of all time. Captured during their heyday in an era of scant video documentation, these DVDs are truly one of the most unique and precious visual documents of the blues.

Amazon.com

Unearthed some 40 years after the fact, this has to be one of the finest blues collections ever assembled on video. Thanks to a couple of young promoters who brought the musicians to Europe--where they were treated with a good deal more respect and dignity than in America--we get an extraordinary lineup of bluesmen and women: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace... the list goes on. Their concert performances (several in stagy but effective down-home settings) before a rather formal but appreciative German audience have them playing in some cool combinations (T-Bone Walker backing Memphis Slim, Otis Rush with Junior Wells), even introducing one another (Williamson on guitarist Lonnie Johnson, an elder statesman on the tour: "A very nice musician")--and all with great sound (mono, but still flawless) and visuals (in black and white). This is one for blues fans to treasure. --Sam Graham

Description

Reelin' In The Years Productions, in association with Experience Hendrix, bring you the American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 Volumes One & Two. The AFBF was an annual event that featured the cream of American blues musicians barnstorming their way across western Europe every fall from 1962 through 1966. Recorded live in a small TV studio in Germany, these historic and unseen performances have been lost for nearly 40 years. Filmed with superb camera work and pristine sound, each DVD contains 18 complete performances from the greatest blues musicians of all time. Captured during their heyday in an era of scant video documentation, these DVDs are truly one of the most unique and precious visual documents of the blues.

Customer Reviews:

Get this if you have at least one eye or one ear!.......2007-05-07

What Professor Donoghue says is the scientific description of what this is, and I can add little to what he says except yes.

This is worth owning. Save your money or steal one if you must, but this is a precious jewel. The only hope is if they have more video and a more extensive version can still be issued since these are excerpts from a series of TV broadcasts that were done over four or five years.

I hadn't studied up on Sonny Boy Williamson II (what Alex "Rice" Miller preferred to be called) previously, but his performance of "Nine Below Zero" here has turned me into a permanent devotee. There is so much in his articulate but not overly showy harp playing and above all his singing and standing and gesturing that translate to total blues and the entire majesty of Black men of his generation and experience as I remember them.

Likewise, you will never forget the magnificent presence and performance of Howling Wolf. As in every time I have seen him sampled on one of these videos, he was a giant musically, emotionally, and in his sheer existence. The little of Wolf here is worth the whole price. It's interesting to see Wolf's protege,the now senior Hubert Sumlin, one of the patriarchs of blues guitar as a very young man introduced as "Little Hubert."

As a Hooker fan, this is the only place I've heard of Hooker as a harmonica player.

What offends me as an African American sometimes blues player and lifetime student of the blues is the sets and approach used to present the artists in many of the clips. Almost every one of these artists was an urban blusician of great accomplishment, even if we see folk with deep country roots. These people's native environments were the boss clubs in Black America of the 1940s through 1960s. Some of these artists like Lonnie Johnson had performed and were still performing with the great masters of Jazz like Ellington and Armstrong.

Unfortunately, many of the performers are presented in the producers' fantasy of the rural south early in the 20th Century. It is really embarassing to see the opening sequence where T-Bone Walker, the master of sophisticated West Coast Blues whose setting for many of his recordings was with a swing combo or even with great swing bands like Erskine Hawkins band, presented as a country singer, playing acoustically (on his electric guitar???) in their version of a front porch in the country south. Walker was the prince of urban electric blues guitar's most sophisticated beginnings and closer to his contemporaries of the post war blues like Charles Brown who then dubbed "the Sephia Sinatras" than he was to great country bluesmen presented here like Big Joe Williams.

Blues clubs I was lucky to be taken to as a child in New York, or visited as a teen in Chicago and Mississippi were not all filthy dives. The setting to see these performers in a black context was the kind of bar or theater where folks would be dressed proper in their best, even if they didn't have a dime. Those were some merry places.

It is sad to see what such great masters of music and culture had to go through to keep themselves living. It is sadder that television in the USA never ever thought of doing anything remotely like this while these great women and men were alive! Justice would have been a special like this done on each artist presented here, not just one or two selections.

Still, if you do not own this DVD, you need to buy it or steal it, but anyone with at least one ear and at least one eye needs to own it.

American Folk Blues.......2007-01-25

I didn't think that I would ever be able to see these great blues men and women preform .
This is just unbelievable to me to be able to see these people preform.
I love this DVD. I bought all 3 of them.
I would recomend this to any blues fan. This is the blues.

Ranked last in this Series of three........2007-01-05

Without question this is the worst album in "The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966. Volume 3, is by far the best.

Golden blues.......2006-03-06

We have heard their recordings and seen their photographs but any live performances we may have attended or video recordings we may have seen were mostly of them very late in their career, past their best. So this discovery of early sixties recordings of Blues greats is something of a treasure trove.

There is a distinctly amateurish air to these recordings. The introductions are very awkward and wooden, with the performers introducing one another with much line-fluffing and a remarkable amount of stage fright. You may be startled to hear the second act introduced as "Sunny Terrace and Bonny McGhee" but not to worry, you'll be delighted by the subsequent performance by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. And the clips are strung together in a disjointed fashion, rather than being a properly edited sequence. One clip starts with a presenter leaving the stage and we will never know what it was he might have said. Others begin with the audience applauding the previous, unseen performance.

None of that matters when the actual performances begin. John Lee Hooker gives a truly visceral performance and Otis Spann is on top form. But all the performers are worth seeing.

Modern viewers may be disconcerted by the totally white, unfailingly polite audience, including ladies in fur stoles. But that is part of the period charm of these recordings, for that's how it was in the early sixties. Don't be misled. We may have dressed formally and behaved with decorum but that didn't mean we were not moved. We were. The Blues resonated with us and became a vital part of the European music scene. This influence began before the time of these festivals. The biggest British music star of the fifties, Lonnie Donegan, took his first name from Lonnie Johnson (who appears on this DVD). The Rolling Stones, The Animals and John Mayall are obvious examples of a continuing influence on the next generation of musicians. And in continental Europe today, especially in Amsterdam, you will hear more blues being played live than in most parts of the US.

The sound quality on this DVD is fine. It will serve as a great introduction to The Blues, and is essential for those who are already fans.

I'd give this SIX stars!.......2005-09-25

This is an excellent number in this series of specials videotaped in Germany in the early 1960s and contains precious rare filmed moments of the masters of the blues when their only American television appearances were on occasional specialty regional shows like Nashville's "The!!!Beat" (also now on DVD) and the Johnny Otis Show in LA (which exists on audio, but I'm not sure about video).

But in either case, this is more than classic stuff. Sonny Boy Williamson brings his "wah wah" harmonicizing and rakish charm to "Nine Below Zero" and joins Muddy Waters on a laid-back "Got My Mojo Working." Lonnie Johnson, who played with the great Satchmo in the 20s, appears as a dignifed elder statesman here in his number and was still full of talent, as was Mississippi Fred McDowell.

What REALLY blew things away form me is seeing the wonderful, stripped down, down-in the Delta (or Peidmont, in ther case)performance of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. With just their respective Harmonica and guitar, the twosome play a down-home-foot stomping tune which brings the Black extras on their feet as if they were at a get-together in rural Mississippi on a Saturday night! It just doesn't get more authentic than this! You can almost smell the kerosene lamps!

The grand finale with most of the above mentioned performers and 20s Blues diva Victoria Spivey closes things off wonderfully with "Bye Bye Blues" that even gets the stiff, proper German audience to clap their hands in time to the beat instead of waiting at the end to applaud as they do elsewhere in this DVD!

But enough set-GET IT! And put some of JB Lenoir's performances at these concerts on future DVDs! (Are you listening Reelin in the Years?

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