
          Southern Documentary to Air Nationally
          By StaffStaff
          Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 21-22
          
          "A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle"--the first film to
trace twentieth century African-American history through the musical
traditions of one family--will be shown nationally on public
television at 10 p.m. EST on Feb. 12, 1989. (Broadcast times may vary
from station to station; check local listings.)
          "A Singing Stream" presents the Landis family of rural Granville
County, North Carolina, and examines the cultural resources with which
this black family faced the enormous changes of the twentieth century
South. Co-produced by independent filmmaker Tom Davenport, Southern
Changes editor Allen Tullos, and Daniel W. Patterson of the Curriculum
in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "A
Singing Stream" is a feature presentation of Black History Month on
public television.
          In the lifetime of Bertha Landis (born in 1898), the woman who
becomes the film's central subject, her family has experienced small
farming (as tenants and as landholders), racial discrimination in the
Jim Crow era, northern migration, post-World War II industrialization
and the currents of modernization, the transformation of the
agricultural economy, the Civil Rights Movement, return migration, and
a grandchildren's generation of expectations.
          "A Singing Stream" features a wide variety of musical performances
by a family whose repertory includes black religious song styles
ranging from nineteenth century spirituals, to unaccompanied
shape-note singing, to "jubilee" style performances, to contemporary
gospel. Featured in the film are The Golden Echoes, a male gospel
group that includes three members of the Landis family. "A Singing
Stream" explores the relationship between the music the family creates
and the family's history.
          The hour-long documentary seeks to show how singing at church, in
gospel concerts, at the annual family reunion, and in their "home
house" has served four generations of Landises.
          In her eighties during the years in which "A Singing Stream" was in
production, Bertha Landis remained active and articulate,
participating in community, school, and church affairs, writing a
regular column of neighborhood news for the local paper, and offering
her musical observations to the newly-forming groups of her
grandchildren's generation.
          Mother to eleven children and grandmother to nineteen, Mrs. Landis
regards singing as a having been a powerful force in disciplining,
motivating, and uniting her family. Highly conscious of the musical
gifts of her family, she speaks of a "singing stream" which flowed
from her parents through her into her children and
grandchildren. Landis family singers have reached a high level of
musicianship in church and gospel singing, feeding a thriving
performance tradition in this part of the Carolinas that sits between
the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.
          In San Francisco this past summer "A Singing Stream" won one of
television's highest awards, first place in the independent
productions category of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Local
Programs Awards, winning over 

nominees from WGBH in Boston and WNET in
New York. For further information on the February showing of "A
Singing Stream," or to inquire about rental or purchase of video or
16mm copies of the film, contact Davenport Films, Rt. 1, Box 527,
Delaplane, VA 22025. Major support for "A Singing Stream" was provided
by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film
Institute, and the North Carolina Arts Council. The Southern Regional
Council acted as fiscal agent for the production.
        