“Honeydripper,” the 16th and latest movie from director-writer John Sayles, aims to tell how the blues begat rhythm-and-blues and rock ‘n’ roll with the narrative richness of a historical novel. One with a rocking soundtrack, that is. The film opens next Friday at Neighborhood Flix Cinema & Cafe.
As a director specializing in Americana, Sayles long has sought to establish the relationship of setting — time and place — to the actions of multiple characters with numerous motivations. That’s been the key factor in “Eight Men Out,” “City of Hope,” “Sunshine State” and “Silver City,” for instance, and is natural for a director who is also a novelist and short-story writer (“Los Gusanos,” “Pride of the Bimbos”).
In “Honeydripper,” he wants to show how the coming of electric blues inexorably changed America. The film’s fictional story occurs in 1950 at a Deep South juke joint where an electric guitarist shows up to bring a new, exciting sound to a sleepy place.
The symbolic importance resonates with the beat. New music would follow, segregation would crumble as race relations evolved, urban ideas would encroach upon the rural.
Sayles wants his characters, in addition to having lives of their own, to serve as folkloric archetypes. That’s a tall order. But Sayles, who was himself born in 1950, understands his task well.
“I don’t think anything happens in a vacuum,” he says, during a telephone interview. “When I do a film set in a specific time and place, I really do quite a bit of research on everyday life there.”
He believes a significant, seismic shift occurred in 1950, when the solid-body guitar with amplifier became available. Suddenly, the guitar could be really loud — which meant it could challenge the piano, even the human voice, for attention in a band.
“We weren’t traveling in trains anymore — that was what the blues-harmonica sound represented — but rather in cars and airplanes,” Sayles says. “The speed and volume of life had changed, and now (guitar) technology had caught up with it. And guys who played the music realized they had to jump on this change or not make that much money anymore.”
All this, in a microcosm, is what’s happening in the film. It occurs at a place called the Honey- dripper Lounge in a town called Harmony, Ala., run by Tyrone (“Pine Top”) Purvis (Danny Glover), a 50-something barrelhouse piano player who is living with the tragic results of a violent streak. He’s modeled somewhat on the song “Stagger Lee” and somewhat on blues pianist Memphis Slim.
The featured performer at Tyrone’s club is an older woman named Bertha Mae (Mable John), whose tastefully stylized singing just doesn’t pull the crowds like it used to. Instead, the younger, hipper black GIs stationed at a nearby, newly integrated Army base — Korea is looming as a crisis — attend a livelier, noisier club called Toussaint’s, almost next door. It seems a long, slow slide to decrepitude and irrelevancy is in store for the Honeydripper.
But a young drifter arrives in Harmony, named Sonny (Gary Clark Jr., a rising young Austin musician). He’s carrying an electric guitar and takes a liking to Tyrone’s daughter, but before he can do much with either he’s arrested for vagrancy and shipped off to pick cotton by the tough sheriff (Stacy Keach).
Meanwhile, in a defiant last stand, Tyrone books the touring Guitar Sam, based on real-life New Orleans singer-guitarist Guitar Slim, who enjoyed a hit in 1954 with the electrified blues tune, “The Things That I Used to Do.” But when Guitar Sam doesn’t show, Tyrone persuades the sheriff to free Sonny for the gig — so he can pose as Sam. There are many other characters, too; Denver’s donnie l. betts turns up in the cast.
It’s not giving anything away to say Sonny saves the day with a rave-up, rock ‘n’ roll-prototype version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” itself a hit in 1947 for Roy Brown and again in 1948 for Wynonie Harris. (Elvis recorded it early in his rockabilly career, too.) Sonny even wanders out the door toward Toussaint’s, his guitar connected to the amp via a long extension cord.
Sayles carefully researched blues/R&B history in order to model his characters and their music on real figures. “My role models for Gary Clark’s character would be Chuck Berry or Ike Turner,” he says. “They were young and could see what was happening when technological change occurred and were able to take advantage of it.
“And Guitar Slim was famous for going out of his club with a long extension cord to the doors of other clubs to lead people back.”
