Cheap Story of Blues: From Blind Lemon to B.B. King (DVD) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Story of Blues: From Blind Lemon to B.B. King

Easily The Worst DVD I've Ever Purchased
I would have given it zero stars if that was an option. <
> <
>I havn't actually been able to watch this DVD all the way through. The gross overuse (abuse) of video transitions (2 and 3 videos on top of each other most the time) nauseates me (I'm not kidding!) I finally "covered" my tv screen and listened to the audio once though. No music track is ever played all the way through, and usually has "special effects" (thunder, train, gun sounds, etc) or the narrators voice over the top of the music. The information this DVD offers is minimal, more someones opinions than any actual facts. And much of the information is incorrect and unfounded. <
> <
>As a blues musician myself for over 44 years I find the narrators insistence that "white people" don't have the ability to play or sing blues music ignorant and offensive.

---

An amateurish presentation
I'll grudgingly give this DVD two stars merely for the soundtrack which is, of course, great (and 95% public domain recordings, no doubt!). In fact, the vast majority of this presentation consists of public domain recordings set to sloppily produced visuals. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Windows Movie Maker could have produced the visuals for this DVD. There are no archive film or videotape performances of Blues artists themselves in this presentation! The narration is amateurish and unenlightening. Dry monotone readings briefly bridging poorly made "music videos". The overall presentation appears to have been done on the cheap. The DVD transfer quality is lacking, with a low bitrate and the resultant blocking in the picture. This is not what I would refer to as a documentary. One really comes away from the presentation learning nothing further about the Blues. This would be passable as a high school project in documentary-making, but not as a DVD on-sale to the public. It would be more advisable (and cost-efficient) to buy any "History of the Blues" compilation CD (which was undoubtedly the same investment poured into this DVD's production budget) than to waste your time with this. Some quality control would have wisely kept this product off of Amazon's inventory.