I Dont Feel At Home In This World Anymore
Film, stories & images from the Mississippi Records and Alan Lomax archive
with live performance from Shelley Short (USA)
Sunday 11th September, Academy Cinemas, Auckland
Monday 12th September, The Pitt - Massey University, Wellington
Tickets from UTR and venues.
SYNOPSIS:
A film, music and aural presentation by Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records. Featuring archival film, images & stories spanning 1890 to the present day. The live footage performances are culled from rarely seen film shot during Alan Lomaxs North American travels between 1978 to 1985 and Mississippi Records own enormous library of folk blues, gospel, esoteric, international & punk music.
The core of the moving image show will feature video footage from the 400 hours shot by Alan Lomax between 1978 & 1985 (an era that seems to have been overlooked by archivists). Highlights include the first R.L. Burnside moving image, Skip James buddy Jack Owens, Otha Turner leading the Rising Star Fife & Drum Band at one of his picnics, Boyd & Ruth May Rivers, the Hicks and Proffitt families of Beech Mountain, North Carolina (from whom the song Tom Dooley originally came), Quad-Split camera footage of the 1982 Holly Springs Sacred Harp Convention, a funeral parade with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Pretty White Eagle Mardi Gras Indians, Ernie K-Doe at Winnies in New Orleans, One String guitar playing, & much more. This footage is remarkable in that it shows folk cultures in full blossom during a time when pretty much no one gave a damn about them & barely anyone was bothering to record them. As is always the case with vibrant cultures, the blues, country, folk & jazz that Lomax was filming was rapidly mutating to fit the times, so the footage has a feel very contemporary to the late 1970s & early 1980s, yet it is very foreign to our popular mass culture image of what was happening during that period.
Beyond the Lomax footage there will be rare film of musicians associated with the Mississippi Records label such as one man band Abner Jay, angel channeling Bishop Perry Tillis, and Rev. Louis Overstreet & his four sons. Each film segment will be introduced with brief stories about the musicians. There will also be a short slide show that tells the story of the underground music industry & Mississippi Records.
TRAILER:
