Just Plain Folkstreams
Today's featured film on Folkstreams.net is Sweet Is the Day: A Sacred Harp Family Portrait. Director Jim Carnes's 2001 film documents the Woottens, a Sand Mountain, Alabama, family who have been practicing Sacred Heart "shape note" singing for 150 years. The Sacred Harp is a hymnal published in Georgia in 1844, and its music is written in four note shapes used to teach the songs to groups. The technique evolved into a tradition that lives on in various Southern communities and families like the Wootens, who Carnes hangs out with at home, in church, and at Sacred Heart conventions.
Sweet Is the Day can be viewed online, purchased, or rented for public screenings at Folkstreams.net, the self-described "National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures." Other recent films featured on the site include three 1985 shorts comprising a Texas Living Blues series. (One of these, Les Blank's Cigarette Blues, compresses a sculpture made out of cigarettes, an antismoking message, and a searing performance by Sonny Rhodes and the Texas Twisters into four short minutes.) Style Wars is a classic 1983 documentary about the now-classic era of graffiti and hip-hop culture in New York. And Yasha Aginsky's Les Blues de Balfa looks at Louisiana's Balfa Brothers, a legendary Cajun duo.
Folkstreams.net is an altogether amazing online cornucopia of folk music, art, and culture. It opens windows onto worlds you may never have imagined existed. Spend some time there and feel proud to be an American.