Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #75473 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-05-07
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Compilation, DVD, Full Screen, Letterboxed, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com
With traditions that variously intersect and parallel those of jazz, the blues has likewise emerged as a uniquely American musical dialect that has powerfully influenced music from the early 20th century forward. Whether tuned to the stark individuality of country blues, with its often-harrowing, adult themes of sex, death, and violence, or keyed to the livelier cadences and more boisterous moods of the urban strains that would later evolve into R&B, the blues have become uniquely pervasive.

This 85-minute documentary, part of a six-segment jazz and blues project funded by a multinational coalition of producers, benefits from a creative visual presentation and a smart selection of performers and interview subjects to explore not only the various regional and chronological styles of the blues itself, but also the music's alternately subtle and striking impact on other styles from swing and rock & roll to jazz itself. The blues' vital odyssey from the Mississippi Delta through the South and on to increasingly distant American cities is traced, as are the varying rural and urban styles of such masters as Son House, Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, and T-Bone Walker. Giving this portrait a broader, rightly inclusive sense of how the blues has threaded through African American culture are performances by nominal jazz and rhythm & blues masters including Count Basie , Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Rushing, and Dinah Washington, among others. Perceptive interview segments with writers including Albert Murray and the late Robert Palmer further illuminate a fertile terrain that has managed to regenerate itself through successive periods of rediscovery. --Sam Sutherland

Customer Reviews

Start "The Year of The Blues" by Watching This!
The first five minutes tells it all with fine editing of a diddely bow, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis into a mosaic of images and music that define blues and blues-based jazz for all time. You will find some new insight at which to marvel everytime you revisit this classic. One of the very finest blues documentaries ever made. You don't have to be a blues historian of even a fan to enjoy this fine DVD and gain new insights into the history not only of bluesmen or Blacks but America. The diaspora, the great migration from the deep South to the North was, at the time, the greatest peacetime migration in human history and its story is told in Bluesland. Toby Byron and his associates are to be celebrated for this excellent work of art.

This DVD sucks. Buy somethign else.
More stock footage woven between three old guys too busy talking about, to actually live the blues. The rare footage of Bessie smith, Billie Holiday, etc., etc. (almost all the greats are listed as having footage on here) is non-existent and pretty much adds up to a couple of promotional photos. Lame. To top it all off, it's even incfredibly short, but I didn't even notice that much. Poor.

Dont buy this II
Many DVD compilations put together stock footage, film of photograph, and whatever the maker thinks he or she can steal without copyright and calls it authentic. As you become knowledgeable of these things, you know you are cheated, because these usually come from larger film that is often available online on YouTube, or from not-for-profit sites, or on DVDs that can be purchased where you hear an entire performance. Any compilation that has so many disparate people who are not really of the same genre, much as I adore every person mentioned here and own dvds of their performances, is not going to be thorough and is not going to same anything but glib cliches. If you read the above praise of this, you find all sorts of misknowledge of Jazz, blues, African
American history, and the subjects of this DVD. As someone who writes and researches on the blues and African American music seriously, I detest the way that marketing gets in the way of information. The average non-specialist deserves accurate and useful information just as much as a specialist.

Check out my other reader comments and my listmania page for lists on blues, old time music black and white, banjos, swing jazz, Western Swing, turn of the century African American musics and much more non-music.