Tuesday, February 11

Bluegrass Roots

Co-presented by the Bay Area Video Coaltion
With director David Hoffman in person

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, San Francisco

7:30 pm - $7 / $6 for BAVC and Yerba Buena Members, seniors, and students
General admission. All ages.

In 1965, fledgling filmmaker David Hoffman traveled to North Carolina to visit folklorist Bascom Lamar Lunsford. A recording artist in the 1920s (“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”, on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music), Lunsford had spent decades traveling throughout the Southern mountains—as a fruit tree salesman and beekeeper—and “collecting” the songs of balladeers and musicians he met. Many of these songs were preserved in recordings he made for the Library of Congress—where in 1949 he committed more than 300 songs to tape.

In Bluegrass Roots, Lunsford and his wife Frieda guide Hoffman on a tour of their “neighborhood”, with visits to the front porches and back yards of musicians living within a day’s drive of their home in South Turkey Creek. As often as not, Mr. and Mrs. Lunsford play accompaniment, or jump up and dance, helping put the musicians at ease in the company of the filmmakers and their equipment.

Originally titled “Music Makers of the Blue Ridge”, the film is a revelation—a stolen snapshot of a genuine folk culture, from a time before television and big box retail stores dominated the cultural landscape.

Viewers will thrill to 76-year-old Bill MacElreath’s clogging steps, and smile at Red Parham’s “hands-free” harmonica. And the precision living room square dance, performed by the teenage Blue Ridge Mountain Dancers, is documentary filmmaking at its most pure. Captured with a single camera from the middle of the floor, this sequence will grab you, spin your head around, and leave you breathless.