Epic folk

A particularly spine-tingling moment in Bernard MacMahon’s four-part PBS documentary American Epic occurs near the end of Episode 3.

The acoustic bluesman Mississippi John Hurt, then in his early 70s, is giving an interview at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where for the second year in a row he has gone over big with a mostly young, mostly white crowd. As he discusses his 1920s recordings for Okeh Records, his subsequent decades of obscurity, and his then-recent rediscovery by the burgeoning folk audience, a familiar sound can be heard in the distance—the 23-year-old Bob Dylan performing “Mr. Tambourine Man” to an audience hearing it for the first time.

The message is as clear: Without musicians such as Hurt and the primitive, capitalistically deployed recording technology that preserved their music, there would never have been musicians such as Dylan. That such links compose a profoundly unifying chain is the documentary’s message in microcosm.

American Epic weaves a lot of music into its 3½-hour total running time. But, as the music is used to tell a story, few songs unfold in their entirety. Anyone with the curiosity to watch in the first place will be left wanting more.

Legacy Recordings has stepped into this breach with several American Epic collections that present generous helpings of the series’ seminal recordings, restored to what the PR calls “unprecedented levels of sonic fidelity.”

It’s not hyperbole. Scrubbed of the surface noise that resulted from the needle-to-disc sound-capturing method that was the only one available to recording-industry pioneers, the music shines forth more brightly than ever.

The packages available to date include the overviews American Epic: The Best of Country, American Epic: The Best of Blues, and American Epic: The Soundtrack and single-artist overviews devoted to Hurt, Blind Willie Johnson, the Carter Family, the Memphis Jug Band, and Lead Belly. There’s also a five-disc various-artists box (The Collection) and a two-disc compilation of contemporary acts recording new versions of old songs using the only authentic, first-generation recording contraption still in existence (The Sessions). A caveat: The packages contain overlap—the Memphis Jug Band’s “On the Road Again,” for example, appears in one version or another five times.

About that tune: It’s a sardonically comic tale about an enraged cuckold and prominently features a certain racial epithet that were it not sung by a black man (Will Shade) would probably have easily triggered listeners calling for an epic American boycott. The documentary’s executive producers, Robert Redford, T Bone Burnett, and Jack White, weave it throughout the soundtracks and thereby make a much-needed point about understanding art in context.

One drawback to the documentary is that its second episode, which focuses on black gospel’s role in forming and informing America’s musical identity, downplays the Christian faith that inspired the music, making both the music and the faith seem like little more than emotional Jim Crow–era pick-me-ups. In this regard, the American Epic best-ofs of the unmistakably devout Mississippi John Hurt (lyrical) and Blind Willie Johnson (intense) restore much-needed balance.

“You know,” says Hurt when asked at Newport what he thinks of the folk-music revival that was finally making him a star, “I read in the Bible [that] it says the older men teach the younger ones. I’m glad that that’s something they want. That’s right!”

He then punctuates the statement with a raspy chuckle, underscoring yet another American Epic theme: The meek shall have the last laugh.