Me and the Devil Blues

Blues in the Mississippi Night: Charles Burnett drew on his childhood fascination with the blues for <i> Warming by the Devils Fire</i>.

Blues in the Mississippi Night: Charles Burnett drew on his childhood fascination with the blues for Warming by the Devil’s Fire.

Charles Burnett on bringing the blues (and The Blues) to life.

by Sam Adams

Evidently still smarting from the criticism of Ken Burns' genteel jazz history, PBS has spread The Blues around; beginning Sunday night, a feature-length documentary by a different director will air every night of the week. Recruited by Martin Scorsese, whose inaugural Feel Like Going Home follows modern-day bluesman Corey Harris from Memphis to Mali, most of the series' directors adopt a straightforward documentary approach: Marc Levin's Godfathers and Sons surveys the history of Chicago blues and Chess Records; Mike Figgis' Red, White & Blues recounts the British blues boom of the early 1960s. The resulting films, despite their varied authorship, quickly start to blur together, especially since it's not uncommon for the same archival performance -- Son House's "Death Letter Blues" or John Lee Hooker's "I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive" -- to turn up in more than one episode.

It's precisely such redundancy that director Charles Burnett set out to avoid, which is why his Warming by the Devil's Fire is the series' clear standout. Set in the 1950s, just as blues is giving way to rock 'n' roll, the film follows 12-year-old Junior (Nathaniel Lee Jr.), whose parents have sent him back from Los Angeles to Mississippi to get "saved" by his preacher uncle Flem. Unfortunately for them, if not necessarily for young Junior, he's met at the train by his uncle Buddy (Tommy Hicks), an amateur blues historian and professional high-liver, who takes it upon himself to teach his nephew a few things about life on Earth first. What unfolds is a chronicle not just of the blues, but of the Southern black history that is inextricably part of them. As Buddy says to his young charge, "This the South -- the South that created the blues. You either laughed or cried." Warming by the Devil's Fire invokes Robert Johnson and W.C. Handy, but also Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys and Joe Turner.

Burnett's approach, he says by phone from a brief stop in Cleveland, was inspired by his research for the film. "Having seen so many documentaries, you sort of wonder what you can do that's any different. How can you add to them?" In fact, Warming by the Devil's Fire is characterized as much by subtraction as addition, a welcome stripping away of the accreted weight of blues scholarship (such as, for example, The Blues' companion 300-page book and 5-CD box set). "If you listen to blues people give their definition of blues, it's a very simple definition," Burnett says. "It's not theoretical. It's not academic. So I wanted to do something that reflected the common person's experience of the blues." Plenty of Burnett's own experience is represented as well: The Vicksburg, Miss., native moved with his parents to L.A. at a young age, and just like Junior, Burnett was returned to Mississippi to get baptized.

Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (1977) is a landmark in the history of black independent cinema, has always shied away from simplistic definitions of good and evil: In 1990's To Sleep with Anger, even the devil has his reasons. So it's no surprise that the stated tension between "the sacred and profane" in Warming by the Devil's Fire doesn't break down quite so clearly. Though Buddy takes Junior to his first juke joint and sets up his first quasi-sexual experience -- slow-dancing with a woman to Bessie Smith's "Muddy Water" -- he also educates him about Jim Crow, Reconstruction and life on the chain gang. Like Adam and Eve's, Junior's fall from grace opens new horizons, a world of experience whose understanding is all wrapped up in the blues. "It's a chance for him to experience all these temptations -- not temptations, but human experiences he's been closed off from," Burnett says. As in To Sleep with Anger, where a middle-class black family's attempt to cut themselves off from their Southern roots paves the way for disaster, Warming by the Devil's Fire warns that shutting out the passion and pain carried by the blues is as futile as trying not to breathe. In Buddy's shotgun shack, Junior is literally surround by the blues; later, he imagines Charley Patton "growing out of the ground like cottonseed, bursting up with his guitar."

Though one critic derided the film's imagery as "stilted," Warming by the Devil's Fire is more perceptively seen as a modern fable, a form with which Burnett is intimately familiar. One thing he learned from the blues, he says, is the possibility of taking an old form and making it new, and doing it without ostentation. "It's that idea of taking something and making it your own -- personalizing it, putting your own stamp on it. The blues is such a simple format, but there's such a huge range of expression. That's what I do whenever I try and do something so evolved: I go back and do it simple."

Warming by the Devilís Fire airs Wed., Oct. 1, 9 p.m. and Thu., Oct. 2, 11 p.m., WHYY-TV 12.