NOTHING to PROVE: The Story of Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues ... A Two-Disc DVD Album

   Disk 1-The Legacy  - TRT 1:26:00 ... Disk 2 - Mac is Back  -  TRT 1:26:50

               "This - the final documentary in my work as a Southern culture and folklife documentary filmmaker - ends many wonderful years of traveling with my camera into the largely unknown and unseen locations where Southern culture and folklife are in their finest flower, but do not rate the attention of the cameras of the commercial mass media.

                " When I returned to the South I saw an immediate need to begin documenting the folklife and traditional arts and artisans in such need of the kind of documentation my style of filmmaking is capable of capturing.

These storied traditions so easily can go left untold. There are few sponsors interested in providing financial support for this work, and nominal funding usually comes from state arts and humanities agencies. Yet the South is loaded with stories about people who, like Mac Arnold, serve to maintain a heritage or tradition that is still around and kept alive because they are the "keepers" of that tradition. And these "keepers" become what, in folklore, are called the cultural markers that feed into the base of knowledge that helps to define the South... and that helps us better appreciate and understand the people who help form the character of this much misunderstood region.

                " NOTHING to PROVE is a classic example of a story that so easily could have gone untold. But when I stumbled onto Mac just as he was announcing his decision to return to the blues after many years, I knew that to tell his story I would have to attach myself to this very gifted man and stay with him every step of the way back to the musical art form he loves and had been away from for a very long time. I would have to commit to documenting the process wherever it took Mac and his band of musicians ...and I would have no way of knowing what course that might take. My story of Mac's return to the blues is thus told in the "first-person". I am there with my camera and Mac capturing moments and reflections by Mac as he takes each step up the ladder back to the mainstream blues. After the three year climb, the viewer comes to know Mac as a person and as a musician with important ties back to the history and formation of the Chicago blues ... and along the way we begin to run into many famous blues legends of yesteryear who welcome Mac back into the fraternity of blues "sidemen" who played with blues greats like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Little Milton, Howling Wolf, Tyrone Davis and the James Cotton Blues Band during the grand era of the Chicago down home blues.

                 " But what makes this blues film take off is the way Mac awakens new audiences - and especially YOUNG ONES - to the blues and the sound of the days when Mac played bass with Muddy in Chicago.

This is contained most fully in the two-part Director's Cut of the story of Mac Arnold's Return to the blues."                                                                                        - STAN WOODWARD, Producer