Sleevenotes

Director's Notes: Andy Dunn

Director Andy Dunn writes about his adventures on the road with Seasick Steve.

SHOOTING DOWN SOUTH WITH SEASICK STEVE

"Seasick" Steve Wold was no stranger to the Music TV department at the BBC before we made this film. In fact his first television appearance was an eye-opening spot on Later... with Jools' New Year Hootenanny in 2006. That night he played across the room from Sir Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue among other big names, all the time looking like a busker who'd stumbled in off the street and gatecrashed the party.

In the couple of years since that first raw, stripped-down performance, the image of Steve as a wandering, bashed up-guitar playing hobo has gradually made its way into the consciousness of at least some of Britain's music fans, however he remains something of an enigma.

The allure of Steve's music for me was always the fragments of scenes it conjured up of an America from days gone by, mentions of train yards, diners, county jails and the like seemed to exist in a world somewhere between the innocence of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and the darkness of Charles Bukowski's Factotum.

When I got the opportunity to join Steve on a short trip to his old stomping grounds in America's Deep South I wasn't sure what to expect and my attempts to pin him down to any kind of itinerary for the trip were politely evaded. So I resigned myself to setting off into the unknown with a couple of small cameras, a soundman and a good dose of curiosity.

After a couple of days driving through Mississippi with Steve (in a battered '69 Cadillac Fleetwood) it was clear that the Delta blues from Robert Johnson to Mississippi Fred McDowell is a major inspiration to him and he feels at ease in the rundown towns and lonely highways of the rural South. He also had no intention of giving some kind of guided tour of the sights for the camera; we'd be visiting his old friends and hanging out where he would normally go and you won't find these places in the Blues Trail guidebooks.

As Steve remarks in the film, these parts of Mississippi and Tennessee are "how America used to be, a lot of America don't look the same no more, they literally just tore down everything and built shopping malls, but this place is old and funky".

It's this old and funky America that Steve writes about and in a way, embodies. He now lives part of the time in Norway (his wife's homeland) and also rents a farmhouse in East Anglia, but is usually to be found out on the road playing gigs all over Europe. Perhaps this is why there have been a few raised eyebrows of late, people questioning whether he's the real deal. Was he really a hobo? How old is he exactly? And where is he actually from?

Well the truth is that he's originally from California and has moved about. A lot. For a while he travelled as a hobo, riding the freight trains but most of the time he's been a regular guy working in normal jobs and raising a family just like anyone else. He's always played his music and for a while was a studio engineer and producer, but what's important is that now, in his late 60s he's discovered that people love his songs, they love his broken guitars and they love him.

As I filmed Steve reminiscing and kicking back with his pals in Mississippi it was clear that he's still trying to get his head around this long overdue recognition. And while he's loving every minute of it, no amount of press coverage, award nominations or fan mail will change him. If it all stopped tomorrow he'd be okay, he'd find something else to do to earn a crust... It just might take a bit longer to save up for his very own John Deere tractor.