Award-winning director/editor John Anderson is wrapping his feature-length doc, “Sons of the Blues,” to meet the June deadline for entry in the Chicago International Film Festival.
The story is about a group of tough white Chicago teenagers in the early 1960s, who became an integral part of the city’s all-black blues scene when black musicians took them under their tutelage and helped them succeed.
The boys who wanted to learn blues and jazz became the great Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, Nick Gravenites, Barry Goldberg, Harvey Mandel and Corky Siegel.
“They were young guys, so ballsy and great with their instruments,” notes Anderson, a musician himself. “By the end of the decade, they all moved to the Coast and became instrumental in the blues-rock explosion of the late ?60s.”
“We’re talking Electric Flag, the Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat, Siegel-Schall, Big Brother and Holding Company,” he adds.
Anderson has been working on “Sons of the Blues,” for a year. Producer is Out the Box Records of Northbrook. The narrator has yet to be named.
A lot of the footage comes from the Chicago Blues Reunion, a band consisting of Corky Siegel, Nick Gravenites,
Barry Goldberg, Harvey Mandel and Sam Lay.
He has woven footage he shot of the band’s March 2008 Park West concert and interviews with interviews and archival footage of the original bands.
