Yokohama BJ Blues

It's 1959 in a seedy bar in Philadelphia, and Billie Holiday is giving one of her last performances interlaced with salty, often humorous, reminiscences to project a riveting portrait of the lady and her music 4 months before her death.

Two quirky, cynical teenaged girls try to figure out what to do with their lives after high school graduation. After they play a prank on an eccentric, middle aged record collector, one of them befriends him, which causes a rift in the girls' friendship.

Chronicles the rise and fall of legendary blues singer Billie Holiday. Her late childhood, stint as a prostitute, early tours, marriages and drug addiction are featured.

Weekend-dad Kim-Andre is trying hard to be the perfect father for his daughter Mina, but must deal with his mother when she steals the trump card of his - a newly renovated Ford Mustang.

Tensions rise when the trailblazing Mother of the Blues and her band gather at a Chicago recording studio in 1927. Adapted from August Wilson's play.

Documentary about blues musicians.

The life of Blues and folk singer Huddie Leadbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly is recounted. Covering the good times and bad from his 20s to 40s. Much of that time was spent on chain gangs in the south. Even in prison he became well known for the songs he had composed and sung during and before the time he spent there.

From America's deep South, to Detroit and New York this captivating and enlightening documentary special traces the evolution of blues through pivotal moments in American history. Brewer discovers that there was no music called 'the blues' when its creators just stepped into a new feel of musical expressionism… just a means of releasing a lifetime of pain and oppression, from which music, momentarily, set them free.

A documentary short about Charley Patton included in the box set "The Definitive Charley Patton - 75th Anniversary Edition". The film contains interviews with musicians, musicologists, blues scholars and Delta historians and contains brand new footage of Dockery’s, the legendary plantation where Patton was raised and where many people believe the Delta Blues truly blossomed as an art form.

There are 4 juke joints left in the United States. On May 4, 2013, the last one in Alabama was raided and shut down. But Henry "Gip" Gipson, proprietor of Gip's Place, a gravedigger by day and hard drinking bluesman by night, had no intention of going down without a fight.

Harlem Street Singer tells the little-known story of Reverend Gary Davis, the great American ragtime, blues and gospel guitarist. Not only is he one of the greatest folk guitar players of all time, he also represents the sweep of popular music in America during the twentieth century. Harlem Street Singer traces his journey from the tobacco warehouses of the rural south to the streets of Harlem, and onto the 1960s folk music scene, a blind street musician and itinerant preacher who rose out of abject poverty to influence a generation of musicians from Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to the Grateful Dead.

The work of art in the age of genetic reproduction-- Based on the practice of lip-reading, this short animated film explores the visual "code" of verbal pronunciation by animating pairs of lips cut out from magazines according to the position of the mouth in pronouncing a sound of spoken language.

A nightclub performer, jealous about the talents of an aspiring singer, tries to sabotage her chances at a professional career.

Eric Clapton: Live at Budokan

Brian Hartley has finally found the girl of his dreams in Linda. Unfortunately, he can't convince her or himself that it's really true. When she catches him with another woman, she finally decides she's had enough and vows to never see him again. Frenzied from the loss, Brian breaks into her house to try to talk her into seeing him again, but Linda and her roommates Kim and Sharon instead bind him to the bed.

By the time "It's A Mean Old World" was filmed, Reverend Pearly Brown had been struggling to survive singing gospel music for nearly 40 years. While the rough sound of his bottleneck playing has the feel of a life spent scuffling on the street, the poignancy of his voice is a better measure of the gentle spirit and inner strength of the man.

In the late 1980s, Tim Duffy, a penniless North Carolina musicology student, became deeply involved in Winston-Salem's drinkhouse music scene, an off-the-grid hotbed of gritty traditional blues. He began the foundation after observing and living with the deep poverty of the Southern blues artists he befriended and championed.The foundation now helps hundreds of older Southern musicians with everything from financial assistance to tour support. The film travels back to the early artists that were the inspiration for Music Maker, and forward to the current artists carrying on the Southern roots tradition. The film features performances, archival and contemporary, of Music Maker artists on tour and in the studio, as well as interviews with the artists and Duffy on the foundation, music and the blues.

The search of several young, white men for blues singers who have been missing for decades coincides with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi in the 1960s.

Live, intimate, and raw, Sessions For Robert J is the essential audio/video companion to Eric Clapton's 2004 gold, Top 10 Me And Mr. Johnson, tribute to blues legend Robert Johnson. Filmed during tour rehearsals in London and Dallas plus a Los Angeles hotel room and the Dallas warehouse where Johnson made some of his final recordings, Sessions for Robert J finds Clapton performing all Robert Johnson songs with his touring band, acoustically with Doyle Bramhall II and solo-as well as discussing Johnson and his influence. A performance/documentary DVD with 14 tracks (from which the 11 CD selections are taken), Sessions for Robert J is blues heaven.

America's Blues takes a new angle on the Blues, focusing on, not only the musical impact it has had on all forms of Popular American Music, but also the influence it has had on art, fashion, language, film and racial equality.