Even the most casual students of American music will be quick to tell you that it’s almost impossible to find a musical tradition that can’t be traced back to the blues.
From the lyrical repetition and call-and-response structure of countless pop songs to the 12-bar guitar lines that formed the foundation of jazz and rock ‘n roll (which in turn created many of the samples that fueled the genesis of hip-hop), America’s first art form produced many of the creative traditions and stylistic flourishes that we now take for granted.
As the blues artists of the early 20th-century continue to influence a new generation of musicians in both direct and indirect ways, a forgotten documentary featuring many of the genre’s most influential voices is returning to theaters this summer. Roviros Manthoulis’ 1973 film “The Blues Under the Skin” saw the music documentarian traveling through the deep south to document the origins of the blues through conversations with legends including B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Bukka White, and Roosevelt Sykes.
The film explored the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and the ways that the genre was inextricably linked to the institutions of slavery and segregation before entering mainstream American culture. While the blues was already a century-old art form at the time of the film’s production, “The Blues Under the Skin” was shot against the backdrop of a late 1960s and early ’70s music landscape that featured artists like The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Band, Eric Clapton, and the Grateful Dead, all of whom pulled heavily from blues traditions to write some of the era’s biggest hits.
The film never received a theatrical release in the United States and has existed for fifty years as a piece of lost media available only to the most diligent scholars and archivists who could track down a copy. But following a new 2K restoration, Kino Lorber is bringing the film to theaters this summer for a proper release.
IndieWire can exclusively reveal the trailer for the restored film’s theatrical run, which begins in select markets on Friday, July 12. Watch the trailer below.
