Gary Davis

  • Grossman’s Guitar Workshop – Legends Of Country Blues Guitar Vol.3 (1994)

    1991-2000Grossman's Guitar WorkshopPerformanceUSA

    Much of the extremely rare performance footage presented in this video has never before been publicly seen and documents the diversity of a music which was as personal as a fingerprint yet as universal as the blues itself. John Jackson, Pink Anderson, Rev. Gary Davis and the charismatic Josh White manifest different aspects of the rich Piedmont ragtime/blues tradition.
    In Memphis, echoes of the Mississippi Delta could be heard in the music of Furry Lewis. While the delightfully eccentric Jesse Fuller and the introspective Robert Pete Williams embody country blues which defies regional identity.Read More »

  • Grossman’s Guitar Workshop – Legends Of Country Blues Guitar Vol.2 (1994)

    1991-2000Grossman's Guitar WorkshopPerformanceUSA

    The blues “rediscovery” era of the 1960s brought to concert and sound stages many veteran artists who had participated in the “Golden Age” of country blues recording prior to World War II. The best of them retained much of their youthful power and brought with them the authority of experience. While these artists have since passed on, their recorded legacy is enhanced by these extraordinary performance clips.
    The first generation of recorded Delta bluesmen – Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, the Mississippi Sheiks – is echoed in the stark and powerful performances of Bukka White, Sam Chatmon, Big Joe Williams, Houston Stackhouse and Son House. Read More »

  • Grossman’s Guitar Workshop – Legends Of Country Blues Guitar Vol.1 (1994)

    1991-2000Grossman's Guitar WorkshopPerformanceUSA

    Blues music was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by rural black musicians. They shaped it with brilliant inspiration from disparate elements of black song. By the early 1920s recorded urban performers solidified the standard three-verse, 12 bar meter structure that has identified most blues.
    The blues revival of the early 1960s brought many of these survivors to the forefront of traditional music. The rare footage presented in this video is a treasure beyond imagining, drawn from a myriad of sources, depicting some of the greatest blues musicians who ever lived.Read More »

  • Lionel Rogosin – Black Roots (1970)

    1961-1970DocumentaryLionel RogosinUSA

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    Synopsis:
    Rogosin took the fight for equality to his homeland with his astonishing and powerful fourth feature Black Roots. The film, which is ripe for rediscovery, featured an extraordinary cast, including Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick; attorney and feminist activist Florynce “”Flo”” Kennedy; and musicians Jim Collier, Wende Smith, Larry Johnson and Reverend Gary Davis. All tell stories of heartbreak and despair while their songs blow the roof off the rafters. In an extension of the famed shebeen scenes in Come Back, Africa, the participants in Black Roots spoke openly about politics and race in a way that is still rarely seen on screen. In 1970, it was a radical and daring move by a great director. A deeply humanist film, Black Roots combines tales of oppression with hauntingly beautiful images of the faces of black men, women and children.Read More »

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