I also remember that movie "Crossroads" from the mid-80s. A white kid goes with Wille Brown to find a lost song by Robert Johnson. Of course, the Willie Brown they depicted in the movie never existed. The real Willie Brown was a helluva guitarist and not a harpist.

Ralph Macchio's guitar parts were played by Ry Cooder--white guy. Then they have this guitar battle between Macchio and Steve Vai--two white guys. So Ralph wins and now he's the greatest bluesman of all time or something--some white Italin guy.

I know they did all that because the movie was aimed at a white audience. If I made "Crossroads" it would have been a mockumentary detailing the lives of the old bluesmen, sharecropping, Jim Crow, lynch laws, drinking canned heat, fleeing to Chicago, the birth of electric blues and so on.

But apparently Hollywood felt that such a movie would not likely garner much of a black or white audience although it would become a cult favorite in a few years time.

You can aim a movie squarely at a black audience and still have a very successful movie--ask Tyler Perry. But that no black film makers have really tried or at least succeeded at making a great movie about the birth of blues is telling.

I learned blues mainly from books by Mel Bay, Kenny Sultan and Stefan Grossman so I often wonder where blacks went. But then I'll meet some black guy who plays blues like nobody's business and it seems that maybe it's not so hopeless after all. Then again I met this guy named Robert Jones who used to host a blues show on public radio. He's black but he said he learned blues from Mel Bay's big note songbook. He said that people think he learned it from his grandaddy or something but he didn't apparently. But Mr. Jones lost his blues program which was a real shame but I don't know if it's because people don't care to listen to blues or because they couldn't compete with XM--I listen to Bluesville quite a lot but I miss the old Blues from the Lowlands program that Robert hosted. So I don't know what to think about it.