Cowboys, Beggars and the ‘Deep Ellum Blues’: Playing Authentic to Silent Films

Abstract

It was on a cool October evening in 2007 under outdoor heaters outside a café in Pordenone, Italy, that composer and writer Neil Brand suggested to me that we might collaborate on playing to a silent film. As a film scholar and musician I was intrigued by the thought of putting these two separate spheres together. His suggestion was that we play to either W. S. Hart’s 1916 masterpiece Hell’s Hinges or his 1921 film White Oak. His reason for approaching me is that I play in a jugband/skiffle group called The Dodge Brothers, along with well-known UK film critic Dr Mark Kermode. Neil had heard us play and was familiar with our material (and our limitations) and thought that together we could bring something to the Hart films. What attracted Neil to us, apart from the guaranteed national publicity that Mark brings, was that we draw much of our repertoire from what Greil Marcus, paraphrasing the poet Kenneth Roxroth’s ‘old free America’, has called the music of the ‘old weird America’, or what I would call the ‘old weird American song-book’.1 These are folk and popular songs which range from the old timey proto-country songs of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Dock Boggs and Charlie Poole to the country blues of Furry Lewis, Charley Patton, Bukka White, Geechie Wiley and L. V. Thomas. Much of this music dates from before the First World War but was recorded by these artists in the 1920s and 1930s.