Ken Burns gave us 19 hours on jazz. Martin Scorsese oversaw 14 hours on the blues. There have been umpteen films about the history of gospel music, R&B and its crossover to pop, and numerous recent documentaries about rap and hip-hop.
But until now there hasn’t been a major film dedicated to the first purely original American music, spirituals.
The Spirituals Project, a local institution based at the University of Denver since 1991, was the starting point for a film that explores the history of spirituals and the lasting cultural significance of the sacred songs of the slaves.
“Without the spirituals, there would be no gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, hip-hop or rap,” according to Denver filmmakers Larry Bograd and Coleen Hubbard, a husband-and-wife writing-producing team.
Their film, “I Can Tell the World,” premieres on Rocky Mountain PBS at 9 p.m. Thursday on KRMA-Channel 6.
The documentary grew out of a collaboration between the Spirituals Project founder Art Jones and Denver’s Shadow Theatre Company, which had presented the Project’s multiracial, multiethnic choir performing a play Bograd wrote, “Spirit of Frederick Douglass.” The work combined readings, speeches and music and was directed by the late Jeffrey Nickelson at DU’s Gates Concert Hall.
After the performance, Bograd won a commitment from an anonymous benefactor to fund a documentary.
The notion of a film for PBS was a dream Jones had nurtured for years.
As a psychologist, an African-American, a historian “and just being a citizen,” Jones said, ” all the parts of me came together” in the desire to spend more time learning about the spirituals.
After much fundraising and nibbles from PBS producers, Jones encountered “one roadblock after another.” The project stalled in 1996.
Now, with Bograd, Hubbard and their unnamed angel, the dream was alive again.
As a kid singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses” at summer camp in Colorado, Bograd thought those were Jewish songs. Similarly, young people today assume songs like “We Shall Overcome” are references to the civil rights era. Taking on the film project, Bograd and Hubbard began to explore the real history of the songs of pain and hope.
The effort was interrupted by Bograd’s open-heart surgery in January 2006.
“It’s sort of a running joke that I’m not the most spiritual person in the world,” he said. “But after that experience, I was a lot less sardonic than I might have been.”
Bograd, a learning consultant, and Hubbard, a teacher- writer, began following the choir in spring 2007, tracing the hidden meanings as well as the redemptive power in the music of the slaves, using Jones’ 1993 book, “Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals,” as a reference.
Hubbard shaped the story, finding a narrative in the tales of several choir members, why they joined and what the music meant to them. Those interviews provided the structure to talk about the transformative power of the music.
“Art always made it abundantly clear that the music is universal,” Hubbard said, “that everybody, no matter what race or background, has had a time of turmoil where that music can heal.”
The film was finished in May 2008 and screened at the Rhode Island Film Festival. Everything about the work was “serendipitous,” Jones said.
At a convention of African- American professional musicians in Chattanooga, Tenn., Bograd had the experience of being the only white person in the room, showing the movie to 300 black people.
“We had a certain amount of trepidation about being white filmmakers … but by the end of the screening they all were crying. That to me, that was the sign that we had transcended race enough to make a movie that was honest.”
KCNC morning team.
Alan Gionet will be sprung from weekends to weekday mornings when KCNC-Channel 4 debuts a new morning team in March. Anchors Brooke Wagner and Gionet will be joined by meteorologist Jennifer Zeppelin and traffic reporter Lynn Carey.
Super ratings.
Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast on CBS was the most-watched program in U.S. television history, according to the Nielsen Co. More than 106 million viewers watched the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts, surpassing the audience of 105.97 million for the 1983 finale of “M*A*S*H,” Nielsen said.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
