Never before commercially distributed in the United States, Blues Under the Skin (1973) is a blended documentary/narrative film about the authentic Blues of the Mississippi Delta in the 1970s and the sociological background for the genre and subject matter at its heart. In this handsome 2K restoration from Kino Lorber, documentarian Roviros Manthoulis investigates the lifestyle of the 1970s Black rural South and the sounds that came out of it, as the title states, piercing under the skin of the genre, and seeing what can be drawn out from underneath it.
Blues Under the Skin vacillates between two modes of expression. The blend of documentary and fiction aim to tell the same story. First and foremost, this is a legacy project that utilizes the era’s best players of traditional Delta Blues to tell their own story. The secondary function is as a fictional film about a couple that tells a parallel story about the Blues.
When we explore the roots of Blues, and even at the time of this film’s creation, in 1973, the century-long history of the form, we’re exploring the roots of all popular American music. Rock, jazz, rap all derives from this format. What specifically makes Blues music Blues music though, is what the movie evokes: it’s in the simple 12-bar structure, the flattened “Blue-notes” that create the distinct sound, and the expressive call-and-response lyrics, each of these attributes expressed and repeated as song-structures which have formed what we now know as our popular formats of American music.
The documentary side of the project enlists a who’s who of 1970s Delta Blues talents — let’s go down the list: Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Furry Lewis, Mance Lipscomb, Brownie McGhee, Amelia Cortez, Jimmy Streeter, Roosevelt Sykes, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, Bukka White, and Robert Pete Williams. Even at this time, the genre was receding against the backdrop of the new formats it inspired, but if we look under the surface and listen to its legends, we might come to find the influence of the Blues is endemic in all of the music we now listen to.
The documentary is then counter-balanced with the story of Hattie (Onike Lee) and Freddy (Roland Sanchez), a sad story about the social realities that made love difficult but subject matter for the Blues easy to come by. Most notably, Amelia Cortez draws our compassion with a deeply sympathetic performance as Freddy’s mother. It’s touching stuff, and well-played, as a balance against the anthropological study of the film.
Blues Under the Skin is a French made-for-TV documentary by Greek director Roviros Manthoulis about a group of legendary American musicians. The documentary-feature blends its subjects with careful subtlety and this many years later — when the film was produced the Blues were a century old and now they are a century and a half old — it likely strikes an even deeper cord as a record of a rural culture defined along the Mississippi Delta, since washed away in the banks of its deep influence. Once we get “under the skin” of the genre, we arrive with a distinctive and formally unique production that deserves this half-a-century-later restoration; it’s a good text on music and sociology, uncovered in two segments against the backdrop of America’s great formative musical tradition.