Tag: Black Snake Moan

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Hill Country Hero

Kenny Brown (Photo: Michael Donahue)

As he poses for a new photo, leaning against a tree with his guitar, tall and slender guitarist Kenny Brown looks pretty much like he did in old photos of himself in his twenties performing with blues legends.

“I’ve weighed between 130 and 160 since I got out of high school,” says Brown, 68.

But then he adds, “Somebody told me the other day — we went down to the coast — something about my skin looking so good. That’s the only person who ever told me my skin looked good. Hell. My hair iscoming out. Growing out my ears and nose and falling off my head.”

Kenny Brown at the 1999 Thirsty Ear Festival in Santa Fe (Photo: Jennifer Esperanza)

Though his hair is falling “off his head,” Brown’s musical ability continues to grow. The latest proof? Brown is nominated, with The Black Keys and Eric Deaton, for a 2022 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album for Delta Kream.

“[The title] ‘Delta Kream’ came from a William Eggleston photo of a Delta Kream custard stand down in Tunica,” Brown says. “Eric Deaton plays bass and I play guitar. The way it happened was, Eric had done a couple of records with [The Black Keys’] Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye studios in Nashville. They were doing a Robert Finley record and they asked me to play on it.”

They finished that record in two days, but Auerbach asked Brown and Deaton to stick around for a couple more days. They recorded Delta Kream.

That serendipitous recording session was no fluke; Brown has a history of finding himself in the right place at the right time.

Junior Kimbrough and Kenny Brown at Kimbrough’s juke joint (Photo: Rita Weigand)

Must Have Been the Right Place
Brown recorded his debut album, Goin’ Back to Mississippi, in 1995 with Dale Hawkins in Little Rock, Arkansas, but his list of bona fides is long. Brown played on albums with blues legends R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Paul “Wine” Jones, and CeDell Davis, all of which were recorded for Fat Possum Records based in Oxford, Mississippi. That was also where Brown recorded his solo album, Stingray.

He performed in the 2006 movie, Black Snake Moan, which was written and directed by Craig Brewer. In addition to backing Samuel L. Jackson’s singing, Brown appears in the film as a blues band guitarist along with his buddy, Grammy-nominated drummer Cedric Burnside.

“I was always a big fan of Kenny Brown,” Brewer says. “I am a fan of that whole early Fat Possum era that he was a part of. I think why I love him and everybody loves him, is there’s a great craft in the way he plays. The older I get, the more I tend to appreciate that. It’s authenticity. He’s playing what he lives. He’s playing what he knows and you can feel it. It’s more than just hearing it. You can feel it. There’s only a handful of artists that can do that. And he’s one of them.”

Big Jack Johnson and Kenny Brown (Photo: Rita Weigand)

Raised on Radio
Brown’s mother was spot-on when she wrote about her child in his baby book. “She said that I was crazy about guitars, guns, horses, and cowboys,” Brown says. “I still am.

“The first time I remember hearing any music was getting in my parents’ car in the early ’50s,” the musician remembers. “I was laying in the car getting ready to go to church and hearing, I guess, a Johnny Cash song. I grew up watching the Ozzie and Harriet show with James Burton and Rick Nelson playing. There were some country shows that would come on like Louisiana Hayride.”

Brown also listened to a blues station late at night with a friend. “We’d sneak out in the car and lay down in the seat and turn on the radio and get that Nashville station,” Brown says, remembering that he didn’t need the car key if the car was put in “lock.”

Growing up in Nesbit, Mississippi, Brown remembers when he heard his first blues fife and drum band, a style of music with its roots in African drumming, military fife and drum corps, and blues influences. “I was out in the yard playing one day and I heard this music. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and it was getting closer and closer. I looked and there was this truck coming up the road and there was this fife and drum in the back of the truck,” Brown recalls. “That’s how they announced the picnics. Not everybody had phones [at the time]. They turned right across the road from my house. There was this guy who had picnics right across from the house.”

Brown didn’t get to go to them, but the picnics fascinated him. “I would lay in bed at night. Sometimes they’d play all night long and party all night.”

The music took root in Brown’s mind, and he got his first guitar when he was 10 thanks to a business venture with his brother. “You could order seeds from the back of a comic book. We ordered a bunch of seeds and we rode our bicycles selling garden and flower seeds to the ladies around us,” he says.

The Brown brothers won prizes for the amount of seeds they sold. “I got a little plastic guitar that would tune up and had a book with it. I think my brother got a BB gun,” he remembers.

Brown taught himself to play the guitar, which had “little catgut plastic strings,” by reading the book as well as listening to the radio “trying to figure out stuff.” He also took some lessons.

One day his mom surprised him with a real guitar. “A Kay archtop acoustic guitar with the F holes and stuff,” Brown says.

In another right-place, right-time moment, blues guitarist Mississippi Joe Callicott moved next door when Brown was 10. “His house was probably not 100 yards away. I could hear him sitting on the porch playing.” Brown’s brother said, “You ought to go over and see Joe.”

Brown and Callicott played “When the Saints Go Marching In” and other gospel songs. They also played blues songs, including “Frankie and Albert.”

Callicott gave him pointers. “He’d say, ‘Hit it like this, boy.’ And he was singing songs. All that got me really interested. I hung out with him almost every day.”

Conjuring Brewer’s comment about authenticity, Brown muses about the heart of blues music, saying, “It feels so good. And it’s real music — comes from the heart. It’s hard to describe. People just get feelings for different things.”

Brown, who plays the “North Mississippi hill country blues” style, says, “The hill country stuff kind of fit. Maybe from growing up around here, I don’t know. People always ask me to describe ‘hill country.’ I just tell them, ‘Don’t try to analyze it. Just feel it.’”

R.L. Burnside, Kenny Brown, and Cedric Burnside (Photo: Laurie Hoffma)

“Some of That Stuff”
As he got older, Brown began meeting other blues players, including Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, and Lee Baker. “Sometimes I think I was better when I was 18 than I am now,” he says. “I guess ’cause I didn’t know anything. I’d just do whatever I could do. I was so hungry for it back then, I guess. I was a slow learner, but I just tried to learn from everybody I could. I never expected to make a living at it.”

A friend who had a rock-and-roll band hired R.L. Burnside to open for him. Brown introduced himself and said he liked what he was doing and wanted to learn “some of that stuff. He told me where he lived and I started going down there and playing.”

They played together at juke joints, picnics, and other events “for 30 years until he quit playing. For years, I’d just play around his house or go to picnics or juke joints.”

R.L. took him to his first juke joint, Brown says. “It was a juke joint way out in the sticks somewhere in Panola County.”

It was “just an old house in the middle of nowhere. Seems like we drove down one of the wooded roads that was like a tunnel for 20 miles. All the trees have grown together above you. We came to a house. There was nobody there for 30 minutes. As soon as we started playing, it filled up. I don’t know where they came from,” he says.

“We got to playing. And they were gambling in the back room. All Black people. I was the only white person there. It was the first juke joint I’d really been in. We were playing for a while and R.L. said, ‘You keep playing. I’m going in the back and gamble some.’ I said, ‘R.L., don’t do that. They’ll kill me out there.’ He said, ‘I think you’ll be all right.’ He lost his money and came back. I kept playing and people loved it.”

Brown went on to play gigs with other blues performers. “We used to play a lot of picnics and little juke joint house parties. Sometimes I’d get with Johnny Woods and pick him up Friday and start driving and go to different house parties and stay gone all weekend.”

Music was a side job at first. “I made decent money doing construction, being a carpenter. That way I could afford my habits — going to the juke joints and stuff to play.”

Photo: Courtesy Kenny Brown

Juke Joint Caravan, Hill Country Picnic
Brown began touring after he met George “Mojo” Buford on Beale Street. “Hit it off with him and we got to playing. We did a tour up to Canada and the East Coast and ended the tour in Clarksdale on Muddy Waters’ birthday.”

Brown invited R.L. to sit in with the band at the Clarksdale show. R.L. arrived with Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, where
R.L. was recording.

A couple of weeks later, Johnson called Brown and said they wanted him to play on R.L.’s record. They said, “We love his solo stuff, but we want it to rock a little more.”

They recorded R.L.’s album, Too Bad Jim, with drummer Calvin Jackson the first day. Then Brown played on Junior Kimbrough’s album, Sad Days, Lonely Nights. They were recorded at Junior Kimbrough’s legendary now-gone juke joint near Holly Springs, Mississippi.

“I love Kenny,” Johnson says. “I was lucky to be around a lot of great people, but I put Kenny at the top of the list.” Of Brown, whom he calls “a savage guitar player,” Johnson says, “We wouldn’t have Fat Possum without him. He was so vital in the creation of the label.”

Plus, in a nod to the seemingly mundane but practical details that can make or break a burgeoning music career, Johnson says, “He had a van. He had a driver’s license.”

After they made a record, they had to get out and promote it, Johnson says. “You got out there and beat the hell out of the road if you’re going to make it. And we did that. We toured nonstop.”

After they did the Fat Possum albums, Brown and R.L. were invited to play a gig in Canada. They needed a drummer. R.L. said, “I’ve got a grandson who plays pretty good.”

That was Cedric Burnside, whose Grammy nominations include Best Traditional Blues Album in 2019 for Benton County Relic.

“We would go out for two weeks at a time. We’d have me and R.L. and Cedric and T-Model Ford or Paul ‘Wine’ Jones. We’d have a vanload of people. A lot of times they called it the ‘Juke Joint Caravan.’”

And, he adds, “I think I counted up one time. I’ve been to every state and, I think, something like 12, 15, 17 countries.”

Brown began the iconic North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic 16 years ago. “I’d been traveling all around the world, seeing all this interest in this style of music. I think they began calling it ‘hill country’ music by then. People were loving it everywhere we went, but nobody was doing a festival here in Mississippi focusing on that type of music from the region.”

The first Hill Country Picnic was held in a pasture in Potts Camp, Mississippi. The stage was a flatbed trailer. About 1,000 people attended the picnic, which was organized by Brown’s wife, Sara. “All we did was send out maybe 100 emails.”

Brown later had a permanent stage built at the picnic’s current location between Oxford and Holly Springs. One year, Brown says, the two-day event, which is held the last full weekend in June (June 24th and 25th this year), drew 3,000 people from 38 states and 11 countries. “I wanted it to be like the old-style picnics where there was plenty of food and drink and good hill country music.”

Farther from home, Brown plans to attend this year’s Grammy presentation on April 3rd in Las Vegas. “I hear all the time people are booking gigs and asking if they’re Grammy-nominated. I don’t know. I hate to say it’s not a big deal ’cause I guess it is. But I don’t know how much my life will change.”

For now, Brown says, “I’m doing a tour with The Black Keys this year. It’ll be fun. Decent pay.”

Brown, who lives near Potts Camp, says, “I’ve got a big barn over here next door to my house with a big living area upstairs I’m trying to convert. We set up some recording equipment in there. I’ve got a project I’m trying to get done there. There’s a record by a pretty big country artist that I played on that’s supposed to be coming out in April, but I’m not supposed to tell who. I’ve got some songs put together good enough to record them. And digging out some old stuff to record. And trying to get everybody lined up, find the right people to record them.”

He’s written original songs over the years as well. “I write ideas down all the time. Lot of times I get them during the night,” Brown says, “and if I don’t get up and write them down, they just keep flying through the air and somebody else gets them.”

Kenny Brown (Photo: Courtesy Kenny Brown)

Last Kind Word Blues
Brown has watched his old friends and mentors die. He was 15 when his next-door neighbor Mississippi Joe Callicott died. “His wife told me he rolled over and his last words were, ‘Kenny be a good boy.’

“I hated to see him go, but he had gone downhill some. None of us are getting out of here alive. Hell. It used to be I was the youngest one hanging around all these guys like Bobby Ray Watson, Johnny Woods, and R.L. Burnside. Now I’m one of the older guys.”

Brown once visited a psychic at a health food store. “He told me my purpose on Earth was to raise the vibratory rates of the human race through music. I don’t know how many people he told that to, but I was one of them. He didn’t know I played music. That was kind of a weird thing that he could actually tell that. He could have been making it up and it could have been all bullshit.”

But, Brown says, “We were on stage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one time. The place was packed wall to wall. T-Model and R.L. were doing the show. And every face that I saw had a smile on it. And I thought, ‘Maybe he was right.’”

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Editorial Opinion

Ruby Wilson

There’s a video clip from 1988 of Ruby Wilson singing “The Thrill Is Gone” at the Peabody Hotel with B.B. King and Rufus Thomas. When Ruby steps up to the microphone, B.B. steps back. “You think I’m gonna sing behind that, you’re crazy,” he says, getting out of the way.

And who can blame him? Wilson, who passed away August 12th, following a severe stroke, was a one-woman wall of sound. Her voice could be a precision tool or a wrecking ball, and when even B.B. King yields the floor, it’s not hard to see how she earned her reputation as the Queen of Beale. 

Ruby Wilson

Wilson, a 40-year veteran of Memphis nightclubs, grew up in Texas, where she worked in the cotton fields as a laborer, picking and chopping the stuff. Her mother was a maid and the director of her church choir. Her father was a self-employed handyman, mechanic, and friend of guitarist and Federal recording artist Freddie King. Between her two parents, Wilson was firmly grounded in gospel and blues traditions, and she started singing in public when she was only 7. By the time she was 15, she was touring as a backup singer for gospel star Shirley Caesar. At 20, she was singing with B.B. King, who called her his goddaughter. 

Following advice given to her by Isaac Hayes, Wilson moved to Memphis in the early 1970s and went to work in the Memphis City Schools system as a kindergarten teacher. She wrangled 5-year-olds by day and continued to pursue her career as a singer at night, performing at a club called the Other Place on Airways. She soon became a fixture on Memphis’ club scene, playing all over town in venues like Club Handy, Club Royale, Rum Boogie, Mallards, Alfred’s, Silky’s, Neil’s, Boscos, and Itta Bena, to name only a few. She appeared in several films, including Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, and performed on stage with Beale Street Ensemble Theatre, a summer stock company working out of Southwest Tennessee Community College. 

Wilson toured the world numerous times. She sang for presidents, prime ministers, princesses, and queens. She performed alongside artists such as Willie Nelson and Ray Charles and recorded 10 solo albums. 

She was also a survivor, who reclaimed not only her speech, but her ability to sing and perform following her first stroke in 2009.

The thrill may have gone away when B.B. King passed last year, but, as anybody who ever partied with Ms. Ruby on Beale knows, now it’s gone away for good.

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Flyer Flashback News

Craig Brewer’s Big Break

“Hollywood is like a stick of chewing gum. The flavor is refreshing — for a minute — but once all the sweet has been sucked away, what remains is a gooey, spit­slick blob even the most befouled degenerate would be loath to touch. Nevertheless, if you are a dreamer who wants to make movies, you might as well plan on getting Hollywood stuck to your shoe for a while. There is just no avoiding it.”

That’s how Chris Davis began his September 7, 2000, cover story about Craig Brewer’s trip to Hollywood to premiere his first feature film, The Poor & Hungry, at the Hollywood Film Festival. Then 28, Brewer was hoping his little $20,000 movie, shot in black-and-white and in a then-­revolutionary digital format, might create some buzz and get him a movie deal.

The film was named for the P&H Cafe, then as now, a venerable Midtown beer joint. It told the story of a reluctant car thief who falls in love with one of his victims, a sensitive soul who happens to be a cellist. It was a blue­-collar Romeo and Juliet tale that starred Eric Tate and Lindsey Roberts and a host of other Memphians, many of whom had never acted before. Wanda Wilson, who at that time was the flamboyant owner of the P&H, also had a meaty role.

The Poor & Hungry had been nominated for Best Feature and Best Digital Feature at the fest, and Brewer was taking most of his cast and crew to Hollywood for the award ceremonies. Davis went along to chronicle the trip, and Flyer readers got to witness Brewer, a Memphian who has since become a bona­fide Hollywood film­maker with such films as Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan, and Footloose, making his first tentative foray into the shark­-infested waters of Los Angeles’ movie-­making machinery. Davis accompanied Brewer to a big­-time producer’s office, followed by a golf­cart tour of Paramount Studios; he hung out at the hotel as the Memphis cast and crew readied themselves for the big night.

“The hotel room seems to shrink amid the hair brushing, tooth brushing, lint brushing, shirt buttoning, drink pouring, and occasional raucous laughter. Various cast members wander in and out. John Still, the rough-talking actor who plays a rougher­talking car thief in the film, enters with a bang, eyes bugged out and talking a mile a minute.

“‘Guess who I saw today while I was driving? Heather Locklear! Boy, I thought really hard about just running into her car just so she would have to stop and exchange information with me.'”

In the end, The Poor & Hungry lost in the Best Feature category to a $35 million bio­pic about Marlene Dietrich, but Brewer’s film won Best Digital Feature. Brewer gave a touching speech about his father, who’d first suggested that he shoot in video and who’d passed away before the film had gotten made.

After the trip, Brewer, his cast and crew, and Davis returned to Memphis. But Brewer would never be Poor & Hungry again. His world had irrevocably changed.

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Film Features Film/TV

Films of the Southern Wild

Although I’ve been writing for the Flyer since August 2000, I’ve been to Memphis twice, I’ve been to the Flyer offices once, and I’ve never had a face-to-face or over-the-phone conversation with any current staff member. It’s strange to write for a community and a readership that’s so far away; sometimes it feels like the only thing connecting Minneapolis (where I live and work and write) to Memphis (where my writing gets published) is the Mississippi River.

Such is the life of the carpetbagging freelancer, I guess. But oddly enough, I’ve never felt like an outsider. And I have a hunch that Flyer readers and Southern cinephiles can identify with me whenever I think about my own strong, mixed feelings when it comes to the way the movies depict my part of the country. I’m a lifelong Midwesterner, and for better or worse, there isn’t much mythology about flyover country. (That’s why it’s called “flyover country.”) Most people are satisfied by Don Rickles’ take of Midwestern living: “Honey, let’s shoot that cow and turn in early.”

At least Rickles’ wisecrack was funny. Most of the movies I’ve seen set in the Midwest use a shot of rudeness like that. Far too often, though, they either go too far or not far enough. I may dislike and distrust Fargo, but one Coen Brothers misfire and a lifetime of answering stupid questions about it is nothing compared to all those times I’ve seen Southerners, or the South in general, trotted out as a cheap punch line in movies for the past quarter-century. At best, this is unfortunate. At worst, it’s divisive and harmful.

In today’s placeless, CGI-enhanced movie landscape, films with an eye for local color matter more than ever before. But what makes a movie “Southern,” anyway? Is it the way certain scenes seem to absorb and reflect those ineffable, geographically specific qualities of light, heat, and atmosphere? Is it the characters’ propensity for florid colloquialisms? Is it the accents themselves? Is it something as simple as the shots of the Holly Springs, Mississippi, water tower in Cookie’s Fortune? Or is the whole cinematic idea of the South a bunch of hogwash these days — an act of pure imagination invented by writers and actors and artists in the same way that Turner invented London fog.

I don’t know for sure. My notions of the South come from lived and vicarious experience: two visits to Memphis; a fine steak dinner at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi; a peep through the window at William Faulkner’s Oxford home; a couple of stops in Austin, Texas; a raft of books (Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, Sanford Levinson’s Written in Stone, and the film criticism of Alabama native Jonathan Rosenbaum); a whole lot of pop music; and a bunch of movies, the best of which respect their location and the people who might live in it.

So here, in order of their release date, are 25 movies that inform this Yankee’s sense of the South as a place and a state of mind. Just so you know, I limited myself to fiction films, and I included movies from Texas. Also, the exclusion of certain films does not necessarily entail a critical judgment. (I mean, sometimes it does, but you get the picture.)

1. Mystery Train (1989): The intersection of South Main and Calhoun/G.E. Patterson is one of the first images I see whenever I think about Jim Jarmusch or Memphis.

2. One False Move (1992): My most fervent hope is that the ghosts of now-closed video store clerks chant the name of this film while haunting the nightmares of anyone who’s ever used a Redbox.

3. Dazed and Confused (1993): “Okay, guys, one more thing. This summer, you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes. Have a good summer!”

4. Ruby in Paradise (1993): Look at the beautiful alternate-universe Ashley Judd in this movie in wonder.

5. The Neon Bible (1995): English filmmaker and memory maestro Terence Davies takes John Kennedy Toole’s perfectly average first novel and transforms it into an aching, factless visual autobiography of a place he’s never known.

6. Ghosts of Mississippi (1996): Unlike Mississippi Burning, this is legitimate filmmking as historical inquiry.

Nightjohn

7. Nightjohn (1996): For those who feel like 12 Years A Slave is missing something.

8. Lone Star (1996): For Elizabeth Peña and Chris Cooper in love.

9. Sling Blade (1996): For autumn leaves and John Ritter’s performance.

10. The Apostle (1997): Nobody moves that book. Nobody moves that book. Nobody moves that book. Nobody moves that book.

11. Cookie’s Fortune (1999): “Because I fished with him” — As Leon Rooke might say, “they’s truth there.”

12/13. George Washington (2000) and All The Real Girls (2003): from the mixed-up files Eastbound and Down co-creator David Gordon Green.

14. Hustle & Flow (2005): Craig Brewer knew that the perfect time to cue up “Jesus is Waiting” is when a kindly pimp and aspiring hip-hop star (Terrence Howard) is at the crossroads.

15. The Devil’s Rejects (2005): Released the same weekend as Hustle & Flow, Rob Zombie’s masterpiece also has the best use of “Free Bird” in the movies.

16. Junebug (2005): Church basements and a winning star turn by Amy Adams.

17. Elizabethtown (2005): It’s all over the place, but it’s very good at showing how going home is a form of time travel, and it features the second-best use of “Free Bird” in the movies.

18. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006): T for Tommy Lee Jones.

19. Black Snake Moan (2006): Whoa.

20. Shotgun Stories (2007): My favorite Jeff Nichols movie.

21. Goodbye Solo (2008): Yes.

22. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009): In which Nicolas Cage tries to pour all of the Southern Gothic tradition into the body of a limping, crazy crackhead detective.

23. Winter’s Bone (2010): That Jennifer Lawrence might grow up to be something.

24. Bernie (2011): Mainly for Sonny’s explanation of the five states of Texas (minus the panhandle, of course).

25. Django Unchained (2012): Crazy, angry, ridiculous.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Black Snake Moan Available on DVD Tuesday

Being released today is the DVD of Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan. The nympho-chained-to-a-radiator feature, starring Christina Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson, underperformed at the box-office, making less than $10 million.

The film, a blues-soaked story about redemption, received mixed reviews. Read the Flyer‘s take here.

The DVD includes commentary by Brewer and deleted scenes as well as other features.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Roedipus Rex

If you’re not reading every review of Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, you’re missing out on an incredible cultural moment. No matter what you think about the film, the collected reviews say a lot about how the rest of the world views our little corner of dystopia. Take Rex Reed’s hazel-eyed hatchet job, for example.

“These are illiterate, joint-rollin’, snuff-spittin’, fly-swattin’, time-wastin’ hillbillies from Tobacco Road,” Reed says of writer/director Craig Brewer’s characters. “Ms. Ricci is Rae, the skanky town slut … [and] Lazarus [is] played like Uncle Remus by the traditionally militant Samuel L. Jackson.”

The Texas-born gossip and former Gong Show regular further complains that Brewer never “bothers to examine the scars from abuse that turn burned-out losers into born-dead boll weevils so early in life” and that the film is set in “a Hollywood movie’s idea of the kind of back-of-the-swamp hick town in Tennessee that nobody in Tennessee has ever seen or heard of.”

All this harsh commentary raises two serious questions: What in the world does “born-dead boll weevil” mean, and has Rex Reed ever been to Eads?

Big Time

Memphis is famous for many things: blues, barbecue, rock-and-roll, etc. Now the Bluff City is on the cusp of being famous for something else: fatties.

Yes, fatties.

Producers of the hit reality show Supernanny have been been in Memphis casting a new show for ABC that’s all about finding the fattest fatties in fat town and making them a little less fat.

Why are they casting in Memphis? Because we’ve got back. Casting producer Johnnie Raines told The Commercial Appeal that key markets were chosen based on what “we heard about heaviness in the city.” Phat.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Come Together

When you make a movie about a white “nymphomaniac” chained to the radiator of a black bluesman’s farmhouse, suffuse it with humor, and pitch it as a straightforward entertainment set in a world that sometimes feels as slightly exaggerated as a live-action Disney feature, perhaps you should expect critics to get a little discombobulated.

And so it has been with Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a bold, brash follow-up to his career-making pimp parable Hustle & Flow.

Early reviews have been as pulpy as the movie itself. The Hollywood Reporter deemed it “so jaw-dropping awful that it might just become a hit.” LA Weekly‘s Scott Foundas was colorfully conflicted: “Few detested Hustle & Flow, with its white-boy fetishization of pimp culture, more than I did, and though I can’t deem Black Snake Moan an advance … it does offer ample proof of Brewer’s facility with the camera, his understanding of Southern culture, and — once you cut through all the bondage and anal penetration — a sweet-natured temperament.”

Most perceptive, though, was an overheated rave from Film Comment‘s Nathan Lee, who dubbed Black Snake Moan “a hardcore exploitation flick that also happens to be the most impassioned spiritual parable in recent memory.” I think that’s about half right, and though Lee gets a little drunk on a Yankee fascination with Southern culture, he’s perceptive in pegging Brewer as making a different kind of movie.

Black Snake Moan is the story of three damaged souls who collide in an evocative rural Mississippi setting: Rae (Christina Ricci) is a young woman whose sexual compulsion is rooted in a history of abuse. Her gentle lamb of a boyfriend, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), is heading off for National Guard duty but is beset with crippling panic attacks. Farmer and retired bluesman Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) has suffered the indignity of watching his wife run off with his brother.

At some point in the movie, as everyone who’s seen a trailer or poster (which means everyone in Memphis) knows, Rae ends up at Lazarus’ house, barely clothed and chained to the radiator.

Samuel L. Jackson’s Lazarus is a chain wielding Good Samaritan out to ‘cure’ a troubled woman of her ‘wickedness.’

But if this conceit, as well as the film’s deliciously garish marketing, fits the “hardcore exploitation” description Lee provides, the movie itself doesn’t. It’s a bit of a fake-out on Brewer’s part, provoking a set of expectations based on the racial and sexual baggage we all carry with us and then delivering something different. And this intentional disconnect extends to the film’s title, which comes from a blues song Lazarus sings during a crucial scene. The words “Black Snake Moan” sound erotic and dangerous, but the phrase is really a metaphor for the internal demons that haunt all three of the film’s principal characters.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of critics seem to be writing from their expectations rather than from the movie itself. Unless I’m misreading a vigorous sex scene between Ricci and rapper David Banner (as small-time hustler Tehronne), there is no “anal penetration” in this movie, as Foundas claims. Nor is Rae a “crack whore” (per Lee) or Lazarus a “sharecropper” (per a positive review on Salon.com).

That doesn’t mean Black Snake Moan isn’t without its titillation. Ricci spends most of the movie in daisy dukes and a T-shirt cut off just below her nipples. By the time she ends up with Lazarus, the daisy dukes have given way to a pair of well-worn white panties, and, in an erotic fever, she wraps the chain around her bare body like a python. Earlier, Rae and a couple of buddies (Memphis actresses Amy LaVere and Clare Grant) play strip football in a pill-induced haze.

But while Brewer never pretends this outré material isn’t meant to be arousing, it also ups the ante on the “impassioned spiritual parable” that Lee correctly identifies. What Black Snake Moan‘s exploitation trappings conceal is essentially a bravely sincere version of the New Testament’s Good Samaritan parable. Lazarus walks out of his house one morning, finds a battered Rae on the road — half-naked, three-quarters wasted, completely alone — and brings her inside for succor. The situation that emerges is absurd, and the film recognizes this, teases out delirious humor, but also stays committed to these characters’ reality. Brewer makes the latent spiritualism of the story explicit in a simple theological discussion between Rae and Lazarus’ friend Reverend R.L. (veteran TV actor John Cothran). If Luis Buñuel had been an iconoclastic Christian rather than an atheist, this is a movie he might have come up with.

Once the chain comes out, some viewers may struggle to take this scenario as seriously as Brewer, especially since he so readily allows his audience to laugh at what’s happening on-screen. But Brewer, as Lee suggests, is making a new kind of movie, one that borrows from the established templates of contemporary Hollywood popcorn movies, regional indie cinema, and the retro-exploitation style of Quentin Tarantino and his imitators, but it also departs from each in crucial ways.

Black Snake Moan, like Hustle & Flow before it, shares the pulpiness and movie-madness of the Tarantino school but has more sincerity, less ironic distance. It shares the crowd-pleasing instincts of a mass-marketed studio movie but with a storytelling integrity those movies now tend to lack. The modest budget and regional specificity is in line with “indie” cinema, but Brewer’s insistence on imbuing his ostensibly “gritty” situations with a movie-movie vibrancy flaunts convention.

Craig Brewer

Instead, these movies echo the under-rated “working-class cinema” (in Brewer’s view) of ’80s movies such as Purple Rain or Footloose — working class not just in terms of what the movies are about but how the movies connect, which is directly.

The accessibility of Brewer’s movies stems in part from his fluency with actors, and he gets engaging, convincing performances here from all three leads. I couldn’t quite buy Rae’s erotic fits — writhing in the grass, uncontrollable, insatiable — but this is otherwise a fearless, compelling performance from Ricci, probably the best of her career. As Lazarus, Jackson delivers a few of the charismatic, crowd-pleasing line readings that are his trademark, but he also gets to act. Drawing on area blues icons such as Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and Big Jack Johnson to construct his look — graying, unkempt, with an inelegant, hunched-over gait — Jackson disappears into the role as fully as he has since maybe Jungle Fever. And Timberlake is completely stripped of his pop-star magnetism as Ronnie, reduced, effectively, to the boyishness at the core of his persona.

Around this nucleus, Brewer builds a rich cosmology of supporting characters, from such deeply likable normals as Reverend R.L. and pharmacist Angela (Law & Order‘s S. Epatha Merkerson) to colorful locals such as Claude Phillips (as juke-joint proprietor Bojo), who, following his scene-stealing bit as a tweaker Casio salesman in Hustle & Flow, is looking like the kind of classic bit player that populated the movies of directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges.

Even if you buy into Brewer’s vision, Black Snake Moan isn’t without its flaws. Some non-actors deliver awkward line readings (particularly Banner), and the movie doesn’t sweep you up moment by moment the way Hustle & Flow did during its terrific recording sequences, though there are times when it comes close, such as Jackson performing “Stagger Lee” at a packed juke joint. And Brewer struggles to visualize the past abuse at the root of Rae’s sexual compulsion, coming up with a blurry, nightmarish fever dream that literalizes her fears in an overly familiar way.

But, ultimately, Black Snake Moan is the better film — not necessarily more personal (because Hustle & Flow was plenty personal), but more intimate and more deeply felt. This gets back to the spiritual parable at the movie’s core. The exploitation iconography isn’t the only intentionally misleading aspect to Black Snake Moan. Not only is Lazarus not chaining Rae to his radiator for sex, as the marketing teases. He’s also not about to “heal” her, as he initially believes.

With Bible in hand, Lazarus tells Rae that he aims to “cure” her of her “wickedness,” but, crucially, Black Snake Moan never quite endorses this goal, and Laz abandons it, realizing it’s not his place to “judge” or “cure” but merely to care.

Despite its surfaces, Black Snake Moan is suffused with tenderness. Its finest moment is the juxtaposition of a sweetly sung hymn and a desperate confrontation. It is book-ended by trembling embraces. The first is all bare skin and sunlight. In a movie where most sexual activity is destructive, Brewer opens with as healthy and righteous and erotic a sex scene as you’ll see on the big screen this year. The last is even more intimate and suggests there is no “healed” in this movie’s universe. Pain and temptation and need are ever-present, but people can cling to each other to get through.

Black Snake Moan

Opening Friday, March 2nd

Multiple locations

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Q&A: Neimus Williams, Lincoln in “Black Snake Moan”

Overton High School junior Neimus Williams was a lanky, basketball-loving 15-year-old when he went down to Beale Street to audition for Craig Brewer’s film Black Snake Moan.

“There were too many people to count and they all had resumes,” Williams says, admitting that the odds of being cast in a speaking role seemed awfully small. But Brewer was smitten with Williams’ reading and cast him in the pivotal role of Lincoln, the young man Christina Ricci’s Rae surprises in a big, big way. — by Chris Davis

Flyer: Three weeks passed between the time you auditioned and the time you were offered the role. Had you given up hope?

Neimus Williams: I never gave up hope. I was at home when they called because I’d fractured my wrist. I was going to sleep when the phone started ringing. I looked over and saw [the caller I.D.] said “Paramount Pictures,” and I lit up like a Christmas tree. When I answered the phone, the person asked if they could speak to a parent or guardian. I told them nobody was here and that’s when they said they wanted me to play the part. Then I really lit up like a Christmas tree.

Did your friends treat you different when they found out you were in a movie?

No. But some of them wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “You ain’t in no movie.”

In your very first film, you’ve got a big scene with Samuel L. Jackson. That’s not bad work.

The first time I met Sam he scared me. We were shooting in Mississippi and I was with Craig going over lines when I looked over and saw him. I asked, “Is that Samuel L. Jackson over there?” and Craig said, “Yeah, go meet him.” So I said, “Hi, I’m Neimus,” and I guess I was looking away because [Sam] said, “Don’t look over there, look at me!” And he had this tone in his voice. It scared me.

Did Christina Ricci scare you?

I guess it was the fourth or fifth day when I first met Christina. We were shooting the scene where I go to Lazarus’ house with the basket. You know, where she jumps on me. And Craig had been teasing me all day, saying, “Oooh, Neimus, you’re going to be kissed a lot.” But she started out working at a young age, too, so it was really good working with her and seeing how she’d handled it.

Did you hang out with Justin Timberlake?

Yeah, we’d meet up between scenes or in the makeup trailer. That was the first time I’d ever met a superstar before. And there was this girl who didn’t think I was in a movie. Well, I called her and put Justin on the phone. There wasn’t anything else she could say.

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Fly on the Wall

Black Meme Watch

Even if you don’t like his films, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Brewer for knowing how to plant an image in the public consciousness. After the release of Hustle & Flow, it was impossible to turn on the television without hearing someone say, “It’s hard out here for a [fill in the blank].” With the opening of Black Snake Moan, watch for the emergence of a new catchphrase: “Chain [fill in the blank] to a radiator.”

It all began when the snarky entertainment and gossip Web site The Defamer suggested that Britney Spears would be back in rehab “just as soon as one of her concerned parents tranquilize her and schlep their daughter’s unconscious form back to Malibu, where she’ll be chained to a gold-plated radiator until she lasts at least two days in a treatment facility.” The Defamer followed that post up, noting that “[Kevin Federline] found the mother of his children undergoing the latest in rehabilitatory advancements, chained to a radiator in a Confederate flag cut-off.”

Trash-film guru John Waters jumped in on the action when he showed up at the independent-film Spirit Awards with a chain around his waist saying, “I wouldn’t mind if Samuel Jackson chained me to a radiator.” Finally, in a glowing review for New York magazine, critic David Edelstein asks all the Brewer-haters to search their hearts. “Wouldn’t you have chained Anna Nicole to your radiator if you could have saved her?” he writes. “Wouldn’t you chain Britney to your radiator?”

Spellcheck Moan

“Are you ready for The Sexorcist?” asks Boston Herald critic James Verniere at the top of his scathing Black Snake Moan review. Verniere says BSM is like the Erskine Caldwell novel “God’s Little Acre on Oxycontin and acid,” though his criticisms are somewhat diluted by the fact that he refers to Christina Ricci’s character Rae as Mae … five times. Somebody needs to chain that guy to a radiator.

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The Company

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Craig Brewer so badly wanted Kim Richards to play Christina Ricci’s mother in Black Snake Moan, he had his people search far and wide to find the retired, relatively obscure actress who seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth. He wanted to use Richards for one reason: He’d had a terrible crush on her since 1975, when the child star played the role of Tia, a magical alien in Disney’s sophisticated kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain.

“After shooting, [Kim and I] took a walk, and while we were walking I kind of put my arm around her,” Brewer says playfully. “And I remember wishing I had some way to go back in time and find that chubby kid I used to be and tell him everything that was going to happen to him.”

Success has its privileges, and, thanks to Hustle & Flow, Brewer now has the ability to indulge his inner child a bit as well as the clout to recruit A-list actors such as Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson. But after three feature-length films showcasing the work of Memphis actors, artists, and musicians, there’s still nothing that revs him up like talking about his adopted hometown and the underappreciated talent it attracts.

“Whenever I come home after working on a project, I can’t help feeling this sense of look at what we made together,” he says. “I get completely giddy with this feeling that [Memphis artists] are finally leaking out.”

Though set in rural northern Mississippi, the faces in Black Snake Moan look an awful lot like Midtown. Veteran stage actresses Kim Justis and Jo Lynne Palmer take a pair of delightful turns as an easily shocked waitress and an impeccably coiffed Southern matron. Fifteen-year-old Overton High School student Neimus K. Williams plays the pleasantly surprised victim of Ricci’s amorous advances like an old pro, while Brewer alums John Malloy and T.C. Sharpe say more with a stupefied look than most actors can accomplish with a monologue. John Still, the seedy chop-shop boss from The Poor & Hungry, plays a drunk and disgruntled ex-Marine. Jeff Pope, a horny trick from Hustle & Flow, pops up in Black Snake Moan as a suburban drug dealer, while Claude Phillips, Hustle‘s memorable junkie, makes an equally memorable impression as the owner of a stripped-down Mississippi juke joint.

Set to gritty blues riffs arranged by Memphis musician Scott Bomar and recorded by artists such as Jim, Luther, and Cody Dickinson, Charlie Musselwhite, Roy Brewer, Kenny Brown, Jason Freeman, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, all these contributions make up a part of the bigger picture. Like the stock players assembled by directors such as John Ford and Preston Sturges, Brewer’s local talent brings an abundance of quirkiness, color, and authenticity.

“It reminds me of my ancestors,” Brewer says of his local human resources. “Some of them sold eggs. Some of them got into milking cows. All the way back to the Civil War, they were always looking for something different. I can imagine them saying something like, ‘Well, it looks like ol’ Craig’s on to a new cash crop.’ Conversely, as Brewer takes long walks with his childhood fantasy and imagines Memphis culture as an exportable commodity, his actors refuse to become starstruck.

“I would really just like to be a steadily working character actor,” says musician and occasional stage performer Jeff Pope, whose character supplies the drugs that send Ricci’s already out-of-control character into a three-day blackout. “I remember when Craig invited us all up on stage at Sundance,” he says. “I felt overwhelmed, because I didn’t think I’d really done anything special.”

“I’m going to the Black Snake Moan premiere, and I’m going to wear a pair of zebra-striped shoes when I walk the red carpet,” says Amy LaVere, the throaty singer whose resemblance to rockabilly sex symbol Wanda Jackson landed her a role in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. “I’m wearing them in honor of Jim Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch,” she asserts. Like Pope, LaVere has always wanted to act but found music to be a more accessible mode of expression. Even now, recording and touring come first.

“I’m just not in a position to go to L.A. and find an agent,” she says. “I’ve got a new record coming out in May, and I have a responsibility to support that record to help recoup costs. So acting is something I can’t aggressively pursue.”

Still is an actor without an agent who refuses to attend cattle-call auditions. In the early ’90s, the voiceover artist best known for his work with WKNO-TV and radio decided to try his hand at acting and took classes so he wouldn’t sound so much like a radio announcer. Shortly thereafter, he landed a lead role in Brewer’s first completed film, The Poor & Hungry, and went on to play smaller featured roles in Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

“I just don’t have good audition skills,” Still says. “But Craig thinks I’m a good actor and he’s an actor’s director. He knows how to get the performance he wants from me.”

Freeman doesn’t appear on camera in Black Snake Moan, but his work is crucial to the film’s success. Freeman, a moaning roots musician who got his start busking on Beale before breaking out with his jug-grass ensemble the Bluff City Backsliders, helped to teach Jackson how to play his purple Gibson guitar.

“This isn’t the sort of thing I ever sat down and visualized myself doing,” says Freeman, who fell in love with the blues when an older brother brought home a copy of Muddy Waters’ Hard Again. “But it doesn’t completely surprise me either. I always knew I’d be — well, not famous but involved in interesting and creative things.”

“I’ll never forget when Claude Phillips first auditioned for Hustle,” Brewer says of the renovations contractor turned character actor. “I had somebody else in mind, but this guy really looked like an old sessions player for Stax. I felt his desperation when he was trying to sell this keyboard [for a bag of weed], and that’s when I realized that [the lead character] DJay could be staring straight at his own fate. Even if he had success as a rapper, he could hit the juice or smoke too much weed and end up in the same position. So I cast Claude … and everybody from Chris Rock to Spike Lee has asked me about him.”

“One time when we were shooting, Craig just hollered out, ‘I love seeing Memphis people in my movies!'” Phillips recalls. “And let me tell you, that was a real turn-on.”