Mouth Music (Blaine Dunlap and Sol Korine, 1981)
Weird music can come from the most unexpected places. This ethnomusicological documentary video, which first aired on PBS in 1981, explores the remarkable phenomenon of “mouth music,” the bizarre and varied vocal practices of the residents of the American South. Communicative bird-calls and hollers, silly syllabic rhyming songs, and the virtuosic, rapid-fire delivery of auctioneers are just a few of the amazing sounds to be heard in this rare document of what critic Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”
Years and years ago, the people who settled this country of ours used their voices in all kinds of unusual and wonderful ways. They sang work songs in the field to help pass the time, they taught rhymes and chants to their children, and they made their own entertainment, with ballads, nonsense songs, and crazy mouth sounds. Their music was as much talking as it was singing, and if you had to call it anything, today you’d call it mouth music.
