Music of America/Nut Hill Productions

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #138 (October/November 2008).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Music of America

Nut Hill Productions

by Kerry Dexter

"Every piece of music, every style of music in the program has a historical antecedent of some sort. We're hoping that student will really be able to relate to that, to own the music as part of their own heritage, to see how it relates to themselves," said Deborah Robins. Robins is executive producer of "The Music of America: History through Musical Traditions," a six-hour television series expected to be aired on public broadcasting stations in the United States during the winter of 2010.

Robins, with a background as a television executive, and Peter Ashlock, with a background in fine arts and animation, at first thought they'd create an oral history archive. Drawn by their love of handmade music, music that arises out of, as Robins puts it, "people coping with their situations," they began to interview musicians. "We've been working on this for five years," Robins said, "and what happened was we found out that it had evolved from being centered around the performers' experiences with music to being centered around the American experience of music, of why and how people have used and created everyday music through American history, and in conjunction with American history."

So they began to think in terms of telling that story. "It started out really chronologically," Peter Ashlock said, "with the bookends at 1618, with the first boatload of indentured servants arrived at Jamestown, up to as close to the present as we could figure out how to get. What is it that made American music today this blend of Africanized elements mixed with European elements? Where did they come from, and how did they blend? That was pretty much what the original notion was."

This led them to look at the music of the Carter Family, the Weavers, Leadbelly, Doc Watson, Lydia Mendoza, and Phil Ochs. They also began to research context for sharing the music. They formed Nut Hill Productions, based in San Francisco, and began to set about shaping a television production from their ideas.

[cover #138]