The U.S. South has always had a strange pull on me. It's a place with a legacy of slavery, violence, bigotry, poverty, fundamentalist religion -- and is the wellspring for much of 20th century America's musical culture.

Country, blues, rockabilly, rock n' roll, soul, jazz -- all were born in the South.

I always liked this quote from Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, about southern music: "This is where the soul of man never dies."

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a 2005 film by Brit director Andrew Douglas, is a guided tour of this beguiling and troubled place, and it's one I've returned to a few times now.

Our guide is Florida-raised-but-cosmopolitan alt-country singer Jim White, who takes us from the swamps and Pentecostal towns of Louisiana up to the hilly coal country of West Virginia and Kentucky.*

* In a trip through the Deep South in the fall of '92, I had followed his as-yet-ungiven advice to stay off the Interstates and use the backroads. Saw some strange sights too, like a goat in someone's living room. But the most romantic one was a small, perfect, Egyptian-blue dancehall somewhere southeast of Eunice, La. that billed itself as Zydeco Heaven. :)

White desperately wanted to leave the South from age 13 onwards. "When you're growin' up in this, it feels like there's a blanket over the whole world," he explains.

But wherever he went around the world, the South would suddenly be conjured.

"I decided I'm goin' to come back to the South and be a Southerner as best I can -- I will never be a Southerner. I will be this imitation of a Southerner. But in a way, I feel that brings me closer to God. Because I've chosen ... it's almost like a form of divinity. I've chosen my divinity rather than my divinity choosing me."

Along this journey, you meet the ordinary and extraordinary people of the rural South, and get introduced to some of White's musical and artistic pals. But first, meet the travelling companion:

I liked listening to novelist Harry Crews talk about the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

"... Everybody in the Sears Catalog was perfect. Wasn't any bald heads. Everybody had all their fingers that was comin' to them. Nobody had any open or runnin' sores on their bodies. But everybody we knew had a finger missing, or one eye put out by a staple glancin' off a post. In other words, in our world, everyone was maimed or mutilated ..."

That rings true. If you work at a menial job in a dangerous place like a sawmill or coal mine, as two examples, you stand a solid chance of losing an extremity -- if not your life. White-collar urban people who work at keyboards don't get that.

The music comes from White himself, but also Johnny Dowd, the Handsome Family, 16 Horsepower, David Johansen, Trailer Bride, Cat Power and Lee Sexton among others (the album is available on Luaka Bop, the label owned by David Byrne).

The movie doesn't get overwhelmingly good critical reviews, as you can see at Rotten Tomatoes.

Those who didn't like the film talked about "condescension."

Take this from the NYT review by Stephen Holden:

The camera lingers too long on one woman's deformed face and on another's nearly toothless grin. At such moments, "Wrong-Eyed Jesus" gives off a whiff of European nose-thumbing

I didn't get that impression. Furthermore, I think some big-city film reviewers who don't get out of town much may have never seen a real rural poor person -- or if they have, they'd prefer not to be reminded of the experience (Heads-up: Really poor people can't afford dentists or plastic surgeons).

Perhaps Holden could reveal the number of people working at the NYT with a "deformed face." I can't speak for New York, but in Toronto, prettiness counts for a lot in certain circles.

Most people in the film (or in the South in general) aren't misshapen, but they are ordinary-looking. They are Sarah Palin's people.

Many in the rural South are poor, and if they are fervently religious, it's partly because religion gives them hope, dignity and community in a bleak, beautiful, isolated land.

Southern religion is known for having a certain fire-and-brimstone quality, and the Pentecostalism of Lousiana is the ultimate in that regard. It gave us cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart. Both are from Ferriday, La., which I visited once upon a time and which appears in the film (for more on Jerry Lee and the Ferriday of his youth, read Hellfire, by Nick Tosches). Maybe that religious tradition is what drives the art of the region.

It would seem that Brett Sparks agrees.

"There's a great tradition of art emerging from a clash between the sacred and the secular," the male half of the Handsome Family said about the South as he sat in a car outside a rural Louisiana cut-and-shoot bar.

"The devil is alive in the South," added Rennie Sparks, his wife and the songwriter for the duo, sitting beside him. "Without the devil, what's God? Nothing. You need both. You need something dark. You need ghosts, you need evil, before good makes any sense. You need some sin."

Rennie invoked the names of musical gods Lewis and Johnny Cash (who grew up poor in Arkansas) and said, "they could have been priests, they could have been killers*."

* Incidentally, Jerry Lee's nickname is the Killer. One of his biggest hits is Great Balls of Fire, which will become relevant shortly. And for comparative purposes, here's cousin Jimmy preaching in 1989.

Revving up into full Southern Gothic mode, she talked about the amount of blood, violence and fiery images in Southern music and religion. "It's very sensual. It's a God and devil you can touch and feel. The flames of hell are all around you."

Rennie said snake-handling as a way to get closer to God was "an amazing leap" -- not that she wants to do it herself. :)

The song they are singing in the scene from which the above image was captured is called Cold, Cold, Cold. Here's the lyrics (sample available on iTunes, or listen to the full tune on Grooveshark):

Out on Highway Five there’s a field
Where sometimes at night people disappear.
That’s the only road that takes me home
Across the open prairie and the drifting snow.

Cold, Cold, Cold, as the cold wind blows.

I was halfway there one frozen dawn
When she appeared at the side of the road.
A woman weeping in the frozen snow.
Her black hair flying across the empty road.

Cold, Cold, Cold, as the cold wind blows.

I pulled to the shoulder and she fell to the snow
But when I stepped from my car in the cold wind’s blow
She drifted away in the swirling cold
Down through the fields and their frozen rows.

Cold, Cold, Cold, as the cold wind blows.

But I heard her howl and I heard her moan
And she called my name in the swirling snow
But when I turned to run back to my car
There was nothing waiting but her frozen arms

Cold, Cold, Cold, as the cold wind blows.

SFTWEJ explores those themes of religion, sin, place and more. A second volume would almost be worthwhile, because you see almost no (any?) black people in this film. And you can't fully tell the story of the South without talking about blacks.

The filmmakers admit they missed that side of the equation, along with the Civil War.

But that's because they didn't set out to tell the story of the South. Instead, they settled on addressing two key questions: "Why does so much music and writing come out of this place? What are the elements that come together to make it so stimulating for artists?"

My short answer? Beauty and pain and the grim romance of tragedy.

Addenda

If you live in west t-dot, the DVD is available at Black Dog Video on Queen W. and Ammo Video on College St.

The Handsome Family will be playing the El Mocambo on April 21.

Here's a brief article about a talk Rennie Sparks gave at the University of Minnesota last year about murder ballads. Apparently veteran music writer Greil Marcus had been teaching a course there called "Old Weird America," so he brought her in, according to More Cowbell. :)

This 2007 IndyWeek.com interview with Marcus and Sparks covers much the same ground.

One blog, Gonzobrain, had a quote where the Handsome Family described themselves thusly: "A little bit creepy and a little bit country." :)

Actually, that quote comes from the band's MySpace page. Sorry, they don't have Cold, Cold, Cold there, which is too bad because it's a great song, but you can hear some other tunes.

And finally, there's this description of the duo, found at  the blog Teeth Boy:

Rennie and Brett are The Handsome Family, an odd couple of medicated kooks from Albuquerque, New Mexico, with an unrivalled onstage chemistry. ....

Brett is the teacher you wish you had on your side at college, stylish and sarcastic, while Rennie is the sweet hippy chick obsessed by spiders in her purse and wolves sitting in pine trees. ...

Their approach to music might be termed ‘gothic Americana’: a fusion of folk, country, bluegrass and an overriding theme of personal tragedy.

I've also seen the phrase country noir bandied about.

I liked this film review at drownedinsound.com:

Searching For The Wrong-Eyed Jesus is mystifying and wondrous, haunting and humbling: Images will stay with you as long as the superb songs. Rusted cars on thunder roads, dusted whiskey bottles on a bar looking over beer-sodden revellers, God-fearing folk and good boys done wrong, twisted tree bark and barking hellhounds: there’s so much here to see that you’ve simply got to immerse yourself. You should see this film.

As I did this one at slant.com:

As White says, a place's essence can't be grasped by looking directly at it; it's in the blood of its inhabitants, on the edges of one's senses, on the periphery of one's vision. And thus it's no surprise that somewhere deep within the very fabric of the film's gnarly tapestry of anecdotal stories of death and heartbreak, lyrical landscape cinematography and plaintive homegrown songs, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus truly captures the bewitching, somewhat unsettling spirit of the South.

The BBC co-produced the film. Here's its webpage.

Here's Luaka Bop's Jim White page. There are some samples of his stuff there. One of White's albums is 1997's The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted Wrong-Eyed Jesus!

The Guardian profiled White in 2004 (thanks for the link, BBC!):

White says that "sometimes I'm labelled an oddball", but he must have been called worse things than that. His life story has been a hair-raising ride through rejection, drug abuse and breakdowns, except for the past few years when he finally found his identity, and began making some of the most haunting, tantalising music you could wish to hear.

Here's a snippet of a BBC Four interview with director Andrew Douglas:

BBC Four: It's a documentary but it certainly doesn't feel like a traditional documentary. Were there any precedents that you had in mind while making it?

AD: Not really. Because I don't have a strict journalistic background it was not an activist journalistic subject. My intention wasn't to expose the Third World of Bush's America. But it kind of does - it shows exactly his constituency and it starts to illuminate his foreign policy, because when people in the South talk about The Rapture that is Bush's foreign policy.

It differs from most documentaries in that it started as a series of notions about exploring the music and storytelling in a place that had its own conflicts. Documentaries are usually polemics. This didn't really have that as its basis and I think that made it much more of a searching film. We had all these notions we wanted to explore but we didn't force ourselves to be disciplined in the way we explored them. It's a documentary in the sense that it's live speech, live music and live testimonial - it's people saying their own words. But it's people saying their own words very much in a context which was in pursuit of idea.

This NPR interview with Douglas has some music samples attached.