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Product Description ------------------- Alan Lomax describes the program-- Today we give a platform to this vital folk culture and its creators. These people witnessed the birth of the blues. They lived them. This haunting music, laughing at lifes ironies, and set to a dancing beat. This amazing mix of Europe and Africa is America s most distinctive song style. It is also the product of the folk culture of the Mississippi Delta. We visit picnics and revivals. We meet the black pioneers who helped to carve Mississippi out of the wilderness with their work on farm, river, railroad and levee, creating a new music out of their loneliness and their deprivation. Music that, once heard, can never be forgotten. The program features performances by Sam Chatmon, Jack Owens & Bud Spires, Eugene Powell (Sonny Boy Nelson), Belton Sutherland, Othar Turner, Napoleon Strickland, adn Joe Savage. In addition to the original version of the film, this DVD contains three hours of extra video, including two hours of musical performances. The DVD is NTSC all regions. The American Patchwork version is also available from AMAZON Review ------ Capitalizing on a variety of contexts from picnics to revivals, barrooms to riverbanks, The Land presents the views of Black cultural giants, both men and women, who worked skillfully and tirelessly throughout their lives as farmers, axmen roustabouts muleskinners and railroadmen. Although the film seeks ultimately to document the social milieu that spawned the Delta Blues tradition, through careful planning and construction even more far-reaching results have been produced. First, in the opening scenario featuring Lonnie Pitchford on "diddley bow" (a one-string guitar or fiddle), this instrument is visually and aurally contrasted with the African musical bow to establish an undeniably concrete link between African and African-American musical traditions. As the film progresses, the acute perceptiveness and sensitivity of producers Lomax and Long is further evident in their skillful juxtaposition of items from both sacred and secular Afro-American cultural traditions, thereby documenting the behavioral and aesthetic unity that characterizes virtually every aspect of Black American culture, The preacher is contrasted with the teller of toasts;i the intensity, phrasing, and mood of the blues singer is juxtaposed to that of the singers of the a cappella lined hymn and Negro spiritual in a rural. presumably Baptist, Black church. It is the exceptional work that incorporates such a wealth of diverse materials, and yet succeeds in producing an effectively integrated product. The Land includes: demonstrations of instrument construction and tuning- fife and diddley bow; dances- the slop, camel walk, and dog- popular during the 1950s; work songs performed in context; and even a church service, complete with uniformed ushers, funeral parlor fans, and a mourner's bench. One special feature is the inclusion of a fife and drum band, an extremely unusual Afro-American tradition. The Land is by no means just a film about the blues"; rather, as its producers intended, it ably and accurately documents a way of life. In the process of shooting both ongoing events and controlled interview/performances, the producers of The Land succeed in portraying Black performers with dignity and stature," and in conveying "the sense of excitement that makes folk performers so important to their own communities" (Bishop ). This film is a welcome, major contribution to research in Afro-American music. It will undoubtedly become a model for ethnographic films in our discipline. Mellonee Burnim Indiana University --Ethnomusicology vol. XXV #3 pp 565-567 Sep. 1981