Tomorrow, August 3rd, would have been my father Frank De Felitta’s 103rd birthday. (He passed away in 2016, age 94). To honor this milestone of not being alive for eight and a half years, I thought I’d post an exceedingly rare and culturally important documentary he made for CBS television called “Music Of The South”. It’s also a very enjoyable watch.

Photographed in 1956 in the deepest backcountry of Alabama, the film is a one hour exploration of the roots of jazz, focusing on the music of slaves and field workers. Interviewed are several descendants of slaves, who heard the nascent jazz sounds in the fields as children coming from their parents and grandparents. Even if you aren’t especially interested in jazz or folk music, the opportunity to actually see and hear a descendant of a victim of “America’s original sin”  (Obama’s phrase) shouldn’t be passed up.

The film was commissioned by CBS as part of an educational show called “Odyssey” which aired on Sunday afternoons throughout the 1950’s and into the sixties. Integral to the making of the film was Frederic Ramsey Jr., a legend among jazz scholars who co-authored one of the first serious books about jazz, “Jazzmen” (1939) and who made scads of field recordings of blues singers and country musicians for Folkways records in the 40’s and 50’s. Ramsey’s passion for the subject is evident in this movie–he took my father and the television crew to the very heart of the poverty-stricken backfields of the rural south where he’d made friends with men, women and families who were–quite literally–living in another time, another place.

At the beginning of the program, there’s a live studio introduction of that day’s show–which for some reason carries the title “They Took A Blue Note”–along with a little Dixieland music to “set the scene”. (The doc itself really begins seven minutes in). Actually the Dixieland intro, which for me is unbearable and overlong, is there to show that Dixieland wasn’t the root of jazz at all–as it was supposed by many at the time to be– but rather the outgrowth of the folk music and slave songs that preceded it by a good many decades. The band, by the way, consists of some terrific jazz musicians: Kai Winding on trombone, Max Kaminsky on trumpet, Lou Stein on piano, Cliff Leeman on drums, Jack Lessard on bass and Sol Yaged on clarinet. I wish to hell they were playing something else, but there you are. Enjoy!