"Mac Arnold is a musician who's musical roots arose literally from working the soil as a child at the heels of his father - a sharecropper who was driven and able to purchase land for his own farm upon which he raised a family of thirteen. Mac was the youngest.  Once you meet Mac on screen you will immediately see that this man was born with a spirit of joy and a love for people that translates today into his music and performances regionally, nationally and internationally.  Mac started learning guitar on rusty strings of screen wire taken from window screens in his home and used on a home-made guitar his brother Leroy made out of a used gasoline can and a 2 x 2 stick and with nails for the "tuners". Music lived in Mac and found its way out through a high school band and later through the bass played in an R and B band that became the warm-up band for any touring performances by Black artists moving through the Greenville - Spartanburg area "chitlin' circuit."  But all the while Mac would listen to the blues that would play over radio from Chicago... and he knew one day he would hop a bus to go where that music lived. He did, carrying his unique rhythm beat that came from the fusion of gospel, country, and rhythm and blues in the Piedmont region of South Carolina. Very quickly Mac would hitch pick-ups late at night with the likes of James Cotton, Tyrone Power, and eventually he would be asked to join the Muddy Waters Chicago Blues band... because Muddy recognized a special lick and bass beat he wanted to incorporate into his band.  From there Mac went to L.A.... for the blues was getting pushed off the record labels in favor of the new age music of rock and roll being marketed heavily by record companies following the pop music dollar. In L.A. Mac continued music in his own band as studio producer for programs like Night Train, studied video production and editing and became an editor on mobile satellite trucks that produced everything from music events to NFL football games. But in the late 80's when his mother grew ill and could no longer manage the farm, Mac returned to take over for her...and return to the soil he so loved to grow crops in from seed to the fruit of the field.  This became the subject of many of his songs when he was urged by harmonica player, Max Hightower, to return to the blues and teach all that he knew from those historic days in Chicago with Muddy and other blues greats to a group of very experienced younger musicians who loved the blues, but needed an old hand to lead them back in time to the true sound of the old "down home blues" - the music that rocketed off the strings of the delta blues-men who swept into Chicago in the 50's and 60's.    

Thus came into existence  Mac Arnold and Plate Full O' Blues...

... and "Nothing to Prove" is my personal story of following Mac's return to the blues, step by step, from 2005 to the present."

                                                                                                                               - Stan Woodward, Producer and Videographer