Setting up an interview with Joe and Chris Beard in Highland Park
In Rochester in the fall of 2000, I contacted Joe Beard about a documentary.. He was interested, and we set up the initial interview a few days later. In the intervening days, his hand was broken in an auto accident--and thus I was introduced to the vicissitudes of movie making. In this project I was assisted by Eric Likness and Stuart Larson, and with their help in March 2001 I finished a 30 minute documentary, "It Was Always the Blues," which we thought of as a "pilot" since our hope was to interest local public television in Joe Beard's story.
When that station was not interested, I proceeded anyway. In the meantime, I had gotten to know Joe as a friend, and since "It Was Always the Blues" tried to cover as much of Joe's involvement in the music as possible, I wanted to make a documentary that was more a total portrait of him. "So Much Truth" is the result. In the final stages of editing, Julia Rabkin went through more than an hour of footage on the time line with me, and she had a great deal to do with the way it finally looked.
on the blues
"So Much Truth: The Life & Music of Joe Beard" documents two sides of Joe Beard's remarkable life: his work in Rochester, New York as an electrical contractor and his career as a blues musician and recording artist that has taken him around the world. The footage includes two acoustic performances of songs that Joe learned in town where he was born and grew up, the hill country town of Ashland , Mississippi . The video documentary was produced and directed over a period of four years, and completed in November 2004.
Both this documentary and my class on the history of the blues grew out of a trip through the South in 1999 that took me to Kerrville, Texas and then back to Rochester. I stopped briefly in Clarksdale, Mississippi on the way down, and decide to explore a little more of the region on the way back in mid August. On the way we stopped at Lemon Jefferson's grave in Wortham, Texas and at Charlie Patton's grave in Holly Ridge, Mississippi.
My interest in video was, at first an outgrowth of my blues course. The first video I completed was "Highwater Everywhere." This sets documentary images of the devastating 1927 Mississippi flood to Charley Patton's classic blues "Highwater Everywhere, Pt. 1" Starting the Joe Beard documentary was the next step forward, and accelerated my interest in shooting and editing video, and soon I was videotaping all sorts of other things besides matters related to Joe Beard and the blues (information about those videos can be found on "Life in general") .
Julia Rabkin and I editing "So Much Truth"