The song that sparked Martin Scorsese’s love of the blues: “I’ll never forget the first time”
It’s difficult to break out of your box in Hollywood. Becoming a star, renowned for a certain aspect of the industry, usually means that you are categorised under that banner forevermore. Even an artist as astute as Martin Scorsese.
Scorsese is routinely cited as one of the industry’s greatest living directors. Looking back through the best films of the last 150 years, and several of those circling the top spots have the suffix “directed by Martin Scorsese” attached to them. Yet, he is rarely recognised outside certian circles for his other great devotion: music.
Yes, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and even The Departed a colossal movies worth every bit of your admiration, but some of Scorsese’s finest contributions to the cultural landscape have come via his love and appreciation of music.
He’s released seven documentaries about music and the artists that make it in his career, and all of them have stood the test of time. Perhaps his most famous is The Last Waltz, a concert film focusing on the final performance of The Band, but featuring Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, to name a few.
Scorsese has added two documentaries about Bob Dylan to his filmography and also compiled pieces of two members of The Beatles with a concert film for Paul McCartney and a retrospective on George Harrison. With that in mind, you’d be forgiven for thinking that rock and roll was Scorsese’s primary focus, but the filmmaker is a bonafide culture vulture, and like all good music scavengers, once picking clean the bones of rock music from the 1960s, one naturally finds themselves gnawing on the marrow of the blues artists that inspired them. But the director had always been a fan.
In 2003, he made good on that appreciation and directed The Blues: Feels Like Going Home. The seven-part series traces the blues genre back to its earthier roots, and the series finds the director in more anthropological form, delving into the history of the work that later formed jazz and rock. What he provides is context, especially as he traces the history back to its original intent, capturing the genre in a style that is excitingly reverent to the sound and to the musical form.
It seems there was one song which sparked his love for the blues, “One day, around 1958, I remember hearing something that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the sound of that guitar. The music was demanding, ‘Listen to me!’ I ran to get a pencil and paper and wrote down the name. The song was called ‘See See Rider,’ which I already knew from the Chuck Willis cover version. The name of the singer was Lead Belly.”
Lead Belly is one of the most prominent blues artists of his generation, and he clearly connected with Scorsese: “I got up to Sam Goody’s on Forty-ninth Street as fast as I could, and I found an old Folkways record by Lead Belly, which had ‘See See Rider,’ ‘Roberta,’ ‘Black Snake Moan,’ and a few other songs. And I listened to it obsessively. Lead Belly’s music opened something up for me.”
Scorsese was able to share his affection for all kinds of music through his work, but rest assured, he always really wanted to be in a band rather than behind the camera: “If I could have played guitar, really played it, I never would have become a filmmaker.”
