American Epic

At the height of the Roaring Twenties, music scouts armed with cutting-edge recording technology set out across America to capture the unknown voices of everyday folk. The recordings they made captured the country’s diversity – artistically ethnically, geographically, economically. As told by music pioneers, their families and eyewitnesses, we travel back in time to the "Big Bang" of modern popular music with the Carter Family, Will Shade and the Memphis Jug Band — to the first time America heard itself. Everyday Americans heard their own music for the first time, pure and unadulterated — a democratic revolution that would reverberate around the world.

From the sanctified shout of the gospel church to the coal mines of West Virginia to the cotton fields of Mississippi, music provided relief from tough lives and hard times. New rhythms were born in the echoes of stomping feet, the bite of pick-axes, and the ambling gait of tired mules. Almost a century later, the quest for singers remembered only as vague names on battered shellac discs brings those stories back to life.

The myriad threads of America’s musical tapestry are displayed: Hopi priests travel to Washington D.C. to defend their sacred snake dance; an eleven-year-old Hawaiian boy invents the steel guitar; a teenage tejana shakes the border with a ferocious feminist tango learned from a gum wrapper; the fightingest frères on the bayou turn a lament for a pretty blonde into the Cajun national anthem; and a gentle Delta farmer sings a nostalgic song of his hometown in the cold of a New York winter, and inspires the greatest rediscovery of the ’60s folk revival.

Jack White and T Bone Burnett produce an epic recording session using the only working 1920s recording device in existence in this tribute to the artists celebrated in the documentary. Starring Alabama Shakes, The Americans, Ana Gabriel, Ashley Monroe, The Avett Brothers, Beck, Bettye Lavette, Bobby Ingano, Elton John, Frank Fairfield, Jerron Paxton, Los Lobos, Lost Bayou Ramblers, Nas, Pokey LaFarge, Raphael Saadiq, Rhiannon Giddens, Steve Martin & Edie Brickell, Taj Mahal, Jack White, and Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard.