"GRITS! It comes on the plate with breakfast."

  - Southern Waitress (responding to an uninitiated customer asking, "What's this white stuff?")

IT'S GRITS! - The Southern Classic Documentary on

the South's most universal and iconic food... and on

the people who eat them..    "Stan Woodward takes us on a 'magic carpet ride' through the South and into the heart of it's grits people."     - Craig Claiborne.

Recently saved from rapidly deteriorating film original through a National Endowment for the Arts Film Preservation Grant allowing digital restoration and remastering back to it's original elegance in black and white. 

"A timeless film. A capsule of life in the American South that takes you back to the 1970's" - Dr. Bernie Dunlap, President, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC

"I have recently had the pleasure of re-running 'It's Grits!' which I keep on my shelf of 'Great Cook Books, etc.' and my audience was, as always, much amused.

I think it is a work of art....The trouble with this country is their ignorant lack of understanding that grits (is? are?) one of the greatest cereals on earth. Damn yankees!"

                                        - Craig Claiborne, June 22, 1981

... HOW ABOUT SOME BURGOO!

    BURGOO!  Legendary Stew of the South -2 hr Feature

          Also Available: 1 hr PBS version

  " Burgoo , like it's stew cousins - Brunswick Stew, Carolina Hash, Puddin' Pot, Frogmore Stew, Turtle stew, and Sheep stew - is borne forth in Southern rural communal cooking today by stew-masters and stew crews who are keeping alive ancestral recipes with secret ingredients cooked in passed-down huge black iron wash-pots at the same time they are socializing, leg-pulling, and keeping alive the tradition of "cooking for a crowd".  Today -when so much of the ways of the South are being transformed by shopping malls and fast food made necessary by the rush on everybody's lives and the vast obsessions with internet and smart phones and eating on the run - traditions deeply rooted in and honoring the generations of an agrarian past are robustly being maintained mostly out of sight from our busy citizenry today.

" Burgoo is the story of cooking with memory in the pot. Turning the grueling 12 hours of unceasingly hard work shared by teams working in shifts into an occasion for gatherings. This stew of Kentucky with its humble roots has grown to be revered all the way from Kentucky farmers, hunters and horse groomers to the elite of the Kentucky Derby andall the way up to the Kentucky Colonels. Thus Burgoo, like grits,

brings a unity of experience and bonds all folks in Kentucky together. Kentuckians are thus made one by Burgoo. It is practically the State Food of Kentucky."

                                              - Stan Woodward, Producer

     SAMPLES FROM STAN WOODWARD'S DOCUMENTARIES FOUND UNDER "THE WORKS"

      NOTHING TO PROVE: Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues  ... a Southern Americana Classic

      Nominated for Best Blues DVD at 2011  Blues Music Awards Sponsored by The Blues Foundation

              Now Available in Three Versions :

        The Original 2-Disc Version                The Feature Length Version                       The PBS Version

               NOTHING TO PROVE:                Mac Arnold Returns to the Blues            Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues 

    Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues                          1hr 28 m                                                       56 m 28 s      

         Part 1 - The Legacy:  1 hr 26 m      (The rise of Mac and his band,              (Mac Arnold & Plate Full O'  Blues

         Part 2 - Mac is Back: 1 hr 26 m       Plate Full O' Blues, Phase 1)                 Phase 1- The South Carolina Story) 

NOTHING TO PROVE:

Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues

(Original Two Disc Version)   

$22.00 (Plus S&H)

MAC ARNOLD RETURNS TO THE BLUES:

FEATURE LENGTH VERSION

$20.00 (Plus S&H) 

MAC ARNOLD'S RETURN TO THE BLUES:

THE PBS VERSION

$20.00 (Plus S&H)

           " Stan Woodward's Final Film,   Nothing to Prove: Mac Arnold's Return to the Blues,  is a definitive

            and collectible masterpiece of Southern Americana filmmaking."

      For those who have bought Stan's other Southern Folklife documentaries, his final one is an epic story

     of  21st century grass-roots "downhome blues" and one man's intent on seeing to its authentic revival. 

     A South Carolina farmer and former bass player with the Muddy Waters Chicago blues band returns to his musical roots and marries them to his life and his own down-home blues songs "written in the dirt and sweat of rural farm-life, which harkens back to where it gained its origins," as Mac Arnold says.  Upon Mac Arnold's return to the mainstream blues he blends his own style, using a gascan guitar made by his brother as a replica of the guitar Mac first played on, with the sound from his days with Muddy Waters and other blues greats he played with, like John Lee Hooker, Tyrone Davis and James Cotton. Winner of awards from the nationally recognized Blues Foundation and his own state's Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, Mac's story is captured step-by-step as folk heritage fim-maker, Stan Woodward adds another volume to Southern Americana storytelling on film.

               BRUNSWICK STEW: (The Virginia Tradition)    Two Versions priced the same - $20.00)

                                     1 hour Classroom version    -   BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Treasure

                                     1:56 Feature Length version-   BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Folk Heritage Tradition

     CAROLINA HASH: A Taste of South Carolina - 1 hr PBS                

 The tradition of barbecue wrought a stew that is now inseparable from the historical foodways and folk heritage cooking in South Carolina...and it is not found so in any other state in the union. South Carolinians call it hash.  And it has to do with the early marriage of the cooking of the slave population and the small farms that sprang up as settlement of the interior of South Carolina occured ... and it has to do with ...PIG

  THE MORRIS CHRONICLE:

When Stan Woodward meets Morris Peeples he enters the presence of a man of great wisdom and regality as he is taken on a remarkable journey where past meets present in the fields of fraternal union at the Hatiola  plantation-turned-hunt-club.       2 hr Feature

    SOUTHERN STEWS: A Taste of the South                                  

    The fraternal order of stewmasters, their black-iron pots and a look regionally at all the communal stews cooked across the agrarian South. "Its just amazing that a film like this has never before been made, and it is a real treasure that preserves traditions that could soon disappear in the American South."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

     THE OLGERS CHRONICLE

      An old country store with an unusual museum inside and an unusual proprietor and Southern raconteur named Jimmy Olgers - of which there is nomatch in all the South - who draws visitors "by the thousands" to little ol' Sutherland, VA and to the porch of Jimmy's ancestral past, who become immediately enthralled and drawn into Jimmy's world - a world of poetry, storytelling, singing, yarn-spinning, and, alas, the charm of the National Turtle Day of Sutherland. And some special ones are invited to Jimmy's "little house in the woods", where he cooks for them ... old style.          2 Hr Feature

                    LATEST and FINAL PRODUCTION!

                                                                 AVAILABLE in three different lengths:

                                                          Original Feature... 2-volume DVD:     Vol. 1 - Mac is Back

                                                                                                                                Vol. 2 - The Legacy

                                                                       Order ($25) via FILM BABY:      

                                                         PBS Feature...    1 Hour 56 Minutes

                                                        and...

                                                          Classroom Version...    56 Minutes 40 seconds

                                                                         Order either via:        PAYPAL