True Believers: The Musical Family of Rounder Records
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The richly diverse tracks of Rounder Records provide vibrant music in Robert Mugge's "True Believers: The Musical Family of Rounder Records," one of three films made by Mugge over a 10-day stay in Louisiana.
In what might have been a series of disconnected musical vignettes, Mugge weaves a rare series of performances into the enlivening history of Rounder Records to provide an exhilarating entertainment.
Rounder Records makes no effort to lead the mass-consumption charts, concerned instead with little-noticed but worthy varieties of the music of America -- the folk music that comes in such different packages. Mugge introduces the three Rounder founders but does not overdo facts.The music itself gives the film its kick. And it resounds.
Major delights are top-flight bluegrass from young Alison Krauss, adept on violin as in singing; more bluegrass from the Johnson Mountain Boys; a lilting Mexican folk song of the 1940s from Tish Hinojosa; wildly pungent, accordion-flavored zydeco from Beau Jocques; and more energetic Creole stuff from Steve Reilly and Bruce Daigrepont. With great piano riffs, Marcia Ball struts her brash, sure singing; Bill Morrissey's ballads are fresh and true, and his final number about the joys of heaven is a comic delight. Irma Thomas is a great find, a blues singer of top rank -- a discovery by Rounder Records, "the little label that could."
The bright, clean sound of the exceptional recording and fluid, colorful camerawork enhance every moment of this choice bit of Americana.
Camera (color), Bill Burke. Reviewed at Denver Film Festival, Oct. 15, 1994.
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