MAC is BACK! The Story of Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues

Beginning in the spring of 2005, we received a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission's Folklife and Traditional Arts program to provide start-up funds for a folklife documentary that followed the return to the Blues by South Carolina's Mac Arnold - who was convinced by harmonica player, Max Hightower and two other serious guitarists and a seasoned drummer  to form his own band and revive the authentic down-home blues sound of the Muddy Waters Chicago blues of the 60's - a sound that Mac had a part in shaping as he took his "red clay" South Carolina Piedmont/Country blues bass beat into the mix when he played with Muddy in 1967-68.  We decided to pick up on Mac's story after the release of his first CD and follow him for a year to see just how he and the band would do as they tried to break into the Southern, regional and - with eyes on the prize - the national and international blues scene here in the 21st century. Mac and the band took off like a rocket, and it was all we could do to keep up, what with so many other projects in the works for us. Had it not been for enthusiastic support from the Community Foundation of Greenville as well as from Mac's patrons and fans, we would not have been able to keep the cameras rolling on Mac as he and the band won the Charlotte Blues Society'sa "Battle of the Bands" which landed him a shot in Memphis at the International Blues Competition - the world's largest blues festival seeking to recognize blues greats as well as encourage newcomers. Mac wasn't exactly a newcomer, although he had to "get back in line" and wait his turn to be recognized by the blues establishment. Never mind that when he was reunited with blues greats he had shared the stage with in the 60's Chicago blues days - Pinetop Perkins, Big Eye Willie Smith, Bob Margolin, Bobby Rush, Paul Oscher and others - there were big hugs and recalling of great times shared in that important era in Chicago.

We nominated Mac for the prestigious Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award in 2006...

and he won!

We have expended every dime we raised to date on production of this remarkable story and now we have to find the fiunds to complete post-production and editing ... of 170 extraordinary hours that capture this great Southern Americana story. WON'T YOU HELP???  With your  financial gift (tax exempt of course) to the Mac Arnold Documentary Project sent to the attention of Bob Morrise and made out to The Commumity Foundation of Greenville, 27 Cleveland Street, Greenville, SC 29601, we can get this documentary finished and shown on PBS. What this film will do promotionally is to put Mac and the Band over thre top by coming to completion just as the blues world has become aware of a Muddy Waters revivalist with his own distinctive South Carolina Red Clay Piedmont bluesy sound. WE NEED YOUR HELP!!!

RETURN of the ROCKFISH of WELDON  

Nowhere on the eastern seaboard is there a more dramatic natural event of nature's replenishing life than in the waters of the Roanoke River during the Spring of the year in the narrow cut in the river called "The Gap" - a name given to the spawning ground for the east coast rockfish by the "river rats" of Weldon, who until recently maintained a tradition of handmade bownet and fish-fight-net fishing techniques that had to be ended by law because of the near devastation of the Rockfish population in the 1980's. For thousands of years, east coast Rockfish have returned from the sea to the headwaters of the Roanoke River falls to spawn in the snow-melt Spring waters as they flow past Weldon and Roanoke Rapids. This documentary looks at this little-known story and the intimate bonding to the Rockfish that occured for the folk culture of fishermen who set aside an entire month of the year to leave work, camp in shanties and bownet the Rockfish - both for sport and augmentation of their subsistence. This story is told through the experiences and voices of the people who maintained what has now become a folk heritage method of fishing the river, the local officers of the NC Department of Wildlife - game wardens who maintained and preserved the Rockfish spawning habitat and population from total and irrtrievable devastation - and biologists and naturalists who help us realize what this part of the river offers the world that is not found like this anywhere else on the planet.                                                                    

These are the words of a local historian:   "Before the histroy of this nation - before its discovery and colonization, robust development based on trade, agriculture and industry, and its radical growth from an industrial revolution to an information and technology revolution - the rockfish swam from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean up what is known today as the Roanoke River to the turbulence of the waters surging through the great falls - a 130 foot drop from the piedmont to the coastal plain. Here nature makes the conditions right each April and May for the annual spawn of rockfish at the stretch of river named "Moratuck" (the river of death)  by the Native Americans who gathered here to fish each year. Today the folk who live along the banks of this primordial habitat for the rockfish are the river people of Weldon - the last of a breed of self-sufficient Southerners who's lives were shaped by and who grew up making part of their living from the run of the rockfish - a source of food and income, folklife and folklore,  tales of wonder and woe that distinguish the subsistence fishermen of the town  of Weldon - called The Rockfish Capitol of the World.  Your story must be about these people and the rockfish - a story of near extinction for the rockfish and the passing of a folklife tradition in this fragile habitat; a story of herculean efforts at preserving the spawning grounds that has proven successful; and a story of how the sons of the subsistence fishermen now have a new way and a far more lucrative way of subsistence on the river - serving as fishing guides for the thousands of sports fishermewho come each Spring to the boat ramp at Weldon."                                                                                                                                                                 

Completion funds being sought -  Work-in progress

HALLOWED GROUND

For four centuries - and virtually unknown to the majority of South Carolinians, much less the rest of the South - the most remarkable and among the longest continuously-running folk heritage traditions in America  occurs each year at the camp meetings at Indian Field and Shady Grove. These "sister" camp meetings are robust into the 21st century,  along with their neighnoring camp meetings, St. Paul's, Cattle Creek and Cyprus - the earliest of these dating back to 1786.  This documentary made possible by seed grants from the South Carolina Humanites Council grew out of Stan Woodward's earliest  documentation of the Indian Field camp meeting bicentennial in 2001. Footage was gathered to be entered into the permanent video folklife archive collection at McKissick Museum's Folklife Resource Center at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. But as Woodward learned from the black cooks who prepared food during the week of camp meeting at Indian Field that their camp meeting followed in three weeks, and that this Shady Grove camp meeting grew out of a land grant by an Indian Field Trustee in 1870, the links between these two traditions and how they continue to co-exist and the ways they are the same and the ways they are different from each other led to what has become a four year folklife documentation process. The decision to turn this story into a documentary for public television was made, and the project partnered the United Methodist Church of St. George, SC with McKissick Museum and Shady Grove camp meeting.  Since the documentation began at the Indian Field Bicentennial Camp Meeting in 2001, the project has increased its scope to include world class scholars in the humanities and folkore.   Grant funds are being sought from foundations to enable the completion of this story of an American folk religious tradition that became the spawning ground for churches in the 18th and 19th centuries in Low-country South Carolina.

Completion funds being sought -  Work-in progres

WORKS FROM THE WOODWARD STUDIO ARCHIVES

With a grant from the Folklife dividion of the National Endowment for the Arts, several short documentaries will be edited by Stan Woodward out of his Southern Folklife Video Archive. A sample follows:

THE COOPERATIVE GROCERY: In Search of Walt Wilson's Hash                                                                      During the production of the documentary, Southern Stews: A Taste of the South - a comprehensive look at the ritual cooking of ancestral stews in black iron pots among rural  communities throughout the South -  we arrived at the State of South Carolina looking for that state's version of Brunswick stew. While Brunswick stew was found to be the stew of choice in Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, what we found burbling in the South Carolina black iron pots at volunteer fire departments, church homecomings, family reunions and screened-in brick buildings on farms and on textile mill properties was a concoction called hash - said to be born and bred on the plantations and rice kitchens of coastal South Carolina.  Since this proved to be a folk heritage foodway indigenous to South Carolina, we sought to tell the story of this tradition in a separate documentary sponsored by The Museum in Greenwood, SC - a small city that is known as one of the "hash hubs" in the state.