Imagine you’ve stumbled into a juke joint where the mentor of Robert Johnson and the idol of the Rolling Stones, Howlin’ Wolf, “dis” one another. Picture a place where Wolf taunts Bukka White and the spectral Skip James weaves his haunting Devil Got My Woman. It’s an archetypal blues “crossroads” where legends of the 1920s Delta and 1950s Chicago share the same musical space, suspended out of time in a super-real present, a non-specific “bluestime.”

The film captures the blues experience in its first and truest milieu, the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, one in which African-American men and women drink, dance, and share their troubles and triumphs.

Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
4:00 p.m.
Konover Auditorium