This talkative documentary retraces the steps of pioneering musicologists Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins 60 years on
‘Relevant today more than ever,” says one interviewee in Southern Journey (Revisited), pointing out his Easy Rider pin badge. “Man went looking for America and couldn’t find it nowhere.” But this roving, loquacious documentary does its damn best to pin down the
American soul, going on a road trip through Virginia, Kentucky and Mississippi in the tracks of ethnomusicologists Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins on their 1959 “Southern Journey” in search of the south’s musical traditions.
Directors Rob Curry and Tim Plester are ostensibly about the
music. Their first porch stop is with a Salem,
Virginia woman whose dark, purposeful eyes are a spitter for her grandmother: Appalachian balladeer
Texas Gladden, who was doorstepped by Lomax 60 years ago. There are heart-stopping performances, and we are apprised of the odd informational gem, lsuch as the fact that the beat for MC Hammer’s Can’t Touch This is drawn from Mississippi’s fife and drum music. But the film quickly spirals into a broader survey of southern culture, as the tension and culture wars of the 2018 midterm
elections smoulder in the background.