American Epic creators Duke Erikson, Allison McGourty, Bernard MacMahon.
Camera IconAmerican Epic creators Duke Erikson, Allison McGourty, Bernard MacMahon. Credit: Supplied, Lo-Max Records Ltd

English director, writer, producer and music fan Bernard MacMahon restraces the roots of American music in documentary series American Epic

Daniel JohnsonThe Courier-Mail

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It’s been described as “The Big Bang” that led to the birth of modern recorded music as we know it. With the advent and expansion of radio in the 1920s, record companies found themselves in their first fight for survival and relevancy, and were forced to leave the city studios to search for new ­talent, musical styles and audiences. They discovered untapped ­talent in the unlike­liest of places, from country singers in the Appalachians, to blues guitarists in the Mississippi Delta, gospel preachers in the South, and Cajun fiddlers in Louisiana.

American Epic, a four-part documentary series screening in Australia on Foxtel Arts, tells what its narrator Robert Redford calls “America’s greatest untold story”, and the creative vision for the films came from an equally unlikely source – English director, writer, producer and music fan Bernard MacMahon. “America has fascinated me since I was a child,” MacMahon says. “My big love is American cinema, ­especially early American cinema, and I’ve always been fascinated by that period in the 20s when the technology and artistic language of film was being invented.”

In his late teens, MacMahon was drawn to the raw and direct music of ­seminal American singer-songwriters such as Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, as well as other pioneering artists of the era such as Elder Burch and Alfred Karnes.

American Epic creators: Duke Erikson, Allison McGourty and Bernard MacMahon.
Camera IconAmerican Epic creators: Duke Erikson, Allison McGourty and Bernard MacMahon. Credit: Supplied, Lo-Max Records Ltd

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“I wanted to see these people and there weren’t photographs of them, so I started a long detective story to track them down,” MacMahon says. “As I started running stories in local papers across the US, I started finding these families and the stories were so amazing that my producer and co-writer, Allison McGourty, and co-producer Duke Ericson, suggested we should make a film about it. So I started work in earnest. The production took about three years but there were about seven years of research while working on other projects.

“There was this huge excavation and there was one opportunity to do it properly before all the people that had any memory of those times (passed on).”

Elder J.E. Burch (centre) with wife Effie (left) and daughter Cora (right).
Camera IconElder J.E. Burch (centre) with wife Effie (left) and daughter Cora (right). Credit: Supplied, Jackie Knaff

Early on, MacMahon met with Grammy and Oscar-winning American musician and producer T Bone Burnett, who joined the project as an executive producer. Burnett told MacMahon he had “a friend in the movie business” who’d expressed interest in working on a music-related project.

“I went to this meeting and it was Robert Redford,” MacMahon says. “I took him through the research and he suggested ­becoming an executive producer on the film, which was very helpful.”

Later on in the process, Redford offered to narrate the films, and MacMahon had no hesitation in agreeing, describing he veteran actor’s voice as “untainted but also very American”.

“He has a very low-key, understated way of speaking that suits this film. His voice has no baggage but it has enormous gravitas; it sounds like Mount Rushmore.”

One of the most touching moments in the series occurs when MacMahon and his team meet with an elderly man named Ted Bradley in the small town of Cheraw, South Carolina. In his youth, Bradley had been a member of musician and preacher Elder Burch’s ­congregation, and when the ­American Epic team produce an old photo of Burch, Bradley’s emotion is palpable.

“It’s the most beautiful part of making this film,” MacMahon says. “Meeting these families, and people in little towns, like Ted Bradley, for whom Elder Burch was this huge figure that he wanted to be like as a little boy.

“He hadn’t seen Burch since the ’40s so to come to him and be able to give him things … he hadn’t heard of the records, so to give him the music and the pictures and for him to tell you all these memories about this mysterious guy, it was the most wonderful thing. It was like the most benign form of landing on a foreign island and having these amazing things to trade between one another.”

The Carter Family.
Camera IconThe Carter Family. Credit: Supplied, Maida Vale Music

Similar scenes are repeated throughout the series and for MacMahon, being able to go to the sources, the places where the ­artists featured came from and where they wrote their songs, and talk to their ­descendants, gave him an even greater ­appreciation for the music.

“Things sound like the place they’re from, the music makes sense,” MacMahon says. “The Go-Betweens are never going to sound better than listening to them in ­Brisbane, sitting in some apartment overlooking the river, it all goes ‘click’. You’re never going to hear Miles Davis make more sense than listening to him in a New York cab, and the ­Carter Family will never make more sense than if you listen to the music watching the farm scenes from the 1920s from right where they lived.”

American Epic, Thursdays at 6:30pm Queensland time (7:30pm AEDT) on Foxtel Arts until Nov 23 and also available on Foxtel On Demand

Originally published as Quest for old americana