[Harp-L] Honeydripper - the movie

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

Recently I rented a movie called "The Honeydripper" featuring soundtrack contributions by Mike Turk and Jerry Portnoy, as well as onscreen harmonica by Arthur Lee Williams (as Metalmouth Sims), an old-timer of the old rural juke joint scene.

The film is set in a small Southern town in 1950. Danny Glover plays Pinetop Purvis, the piano-playing owner of a juke joint called The Honeydripper. The featured entertainment is blues singer Bertha Mae Spivey (accompanied by Metalmouth Sims), whose glory days date from the 1920s and '30s. The public, however, prefers the juke box at the competing club across the street, and Pinetop is losing money and about to lose the club dues to unpaid rent and bills. By deceptively promoting a young itinerant electric guitarist (against his personal inclinations; for deeply personal reasons rooted in his past, he *hates* the guitar) as the famous "Guitar Sam," he hopes to pull in a big enough crowd to pay off his bills and save his livelihood.

Plenty else about that place and time is woven into the film, with arresting performances by a cast that includes Charles Dutton, Keb Mo', Lisa Gay Hamilton and several other magnetic actors and actresses (Yaya daCosta, Gary Clark, Jr. Stacy Keach, and Davenia McFadden among them), and some local people new to acting. In the extensive interviews on the DVD, some of the actors describe the role of juke joints in rural southern life back in the day - some of it surprising.

For anyone who likes the blues and/or blues harmonica, this is a fine film. I found it at my local BlockBuster.

Winslow