Show Documentary
Travel back through the 20th century to explore the roots of American music and discover the pioneers of the musical forms that combined on American soil to become the most pervasive music throughout the world.
Similiar movies
Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper
Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper is a 1995 short documentary film about Herbert Zipper. It was written, directed, and produced by Terry Sanders, with Freida Lee Mock co-producing. The extraordinary story of Vienna born musician and conductor Herbert Zipper who survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and a Japanese concentration camp to become one of the great music educators of the world, continuing at 92 to bring music to the inner city schools of America. In Dachau, Zipper organized secret concerts using makeshift instruments. He learned the lesson that music and the arts are essential to the very existence of life. For the last half of the 20th century, Zipper has pioneered in bringing professional orchestras into America's inner city schools. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short at the 68th Academy Awards in 1996.
Gray Matters
Gray Matters explores the long, fascinating life and complicated career of architect and designer Eileen Gray, whose uncompromising vision defined and defied the practice of modernism in decoration, design and architecture. Making a reputation with her traditional lacquer work in the first decade of the 20th century, she became a critically acclaimed and sought after designer and decorator in the next before reinventing herself as an architect, a field in which she laboured largely in obscurity. Apart from the accolades that greeted her first building –persistently and perversely credited to her mentor–her pioneering work was done quietly, privately and to her own specifications. But she lived long enough (98) to be re-discovered and acclaimed. Today, with her work commanding extraordinary prices and attention, her legacy, like its creator, remains elusive, contested and compelling.
India Speaks
A documentary of explorer Richard Halliburton's travels on the Indian sub-continent, featuring a mix of real and staged footage.
Song of Freedom
John Zinga, a descendent of slaves, has an ancient medallion around his neck and a fragment of song passed down generations. He is an English dockworker with a magnificent voice and a yearning to learn his roots.
Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster
Beginning just before his debut as Frankenstein’s creation, this documentary compellingly explores the life and legacy of a cinema legend, presenting a perceptive history of the genre he personified. Karloff's films were long derided as hokum and attacked by censors, but his phenomenal popularity and pervasive influence endures, inspiring some of our greatest actors and directors into the 21st Century – among them Guillermo Del Toro, Ron Perlman, Roger Corman, and John Landis, all of whom and many more contribute their personal insights and anecdotes.
Shine on Harvest Moon
Biographical movie about the early 20th century broadway stars Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.
Stars and Stripes Forever
Marine bandmaster John Philip Sousa (Clifton Webb) becomes famous for his marches and inspires the sousaphone.
The Byrd Who Flew Alone: The Triumphs and Tragedy of Gene Clark
A documentary on the life and work of Gene Clark, co-founder of The Byrds, whose subsequent career was a rollercoaster of pioneering music and personal disaster.
A Complete Unknown
A young Bob Dylan shakes up the folk music scene when he plugs in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
Fairport Convention: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?
Documentary following English folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention as they celebrate their 45th anniversary in 2012. Fairport's iconic 1969 album Liege and Lief featured some of folk music's biggest names - including singer Sandy Denny, guitarist Richard Thompson and fiddler Dave Swarbrick - and was voted by Radio 2 listeners as the most influential folk album of all time.
The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities
This musical celebration charts the lives and careers of some of the biggest selling acts in Irish rock, punk and pop from Van Morrison and Thin Lizzy to The Undertones and U2. From the pioneers of the showbands touring in the late 50s through to the modern day, the film examines their lineage and connections and how the hardcore, rocking sound of Belfast merged with the more melodic, folky Dublin tradition to form what we now recognise as Irish rock and pop.
Maestro or Mephisto: The Real Georg Solti
This film tells the story of one of the greatest and most controversial conductors of the 20th Century. The Hungarian-born Georg Solti had huge drive, energy and ambition. A combination of willpower and extraordinary talent took him to the peak of musical power and prestige. This film includes remarkably candid interviews which Solti talked with great honesty about his life, challenges and achievements. It also includes new interviews with some of the artists and musicians who worked closely with him.
Gaiety George
The life of Irishman George Howard who buys an English theatre and strives to improve the standard of musical entertainment. Set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and loosely based on fact.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich and packed with rare concert footage and home movies, this documentary explores the history of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, including Petty's famous collaborations and notorious clashes with the record industry. Interviews with musical luminaries including Jackson Browne, George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Roger McGuinn, Jeff Lynne, Dave Stewart and Petty himself shed some revelatory vision.
Similiar TV Shows
The Johnny Cash Show
The Johnny Cash Show was an American television music variety show hosted by Johnny Cash. The Screen Gems 58-episode series ran from June 7, 1969 to March 31, 1971 on ABC; it was taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. The show reached No. 17 in the Nielsen ratings in 1970. Cash opened each show, and its regulars included members of his touring troupe, June Carter Cash and the Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, and The Tennessee Three, with Australian-born musical director-arranger-conductor Bill Walker. The Statler Brothers performed brief comic interludes. It featured many folk-country musicians, such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Merle Haggard, James Taylor and Tammy Wynette. It also featured other musicians such as jazz great Louis Armstrong, who died eight months after appearing on the show.
Little House on the Prairie
Little House on the Prairie is an American Western drama television series, starring Michael Landon, Melissa Gilbert, and Karen Grassle, about a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the 1870s and 1880s.
The Chris Rock Show
The Chris Rock Show is a late night comedy talk show featured on HBO. It was created by Chris Rock and featured various guests. The show won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety or Music Program in 1999. It ran for five seasons from 1997 to 2000.
Small Island
Follow three intricately connected stories of Jamaicans and Londoners involved in World War Two. Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. Hope and humanity meet stubborn reality as we trace the tangled history of Jamaica and the UK.
20th Century Greats
Howard Goodall examines the work of The Beatles, Cole Porter, Bernard Herrmann and Leonard Bernstein.
American Epic
Travel the country in search of unknown 1920s artists, when the music of ordinary Americans was recorded for the first time, transforming music forever, in a three-part film narrated by Robert Redford, featuring Jack White, Nas, Taj Mahal and others.
David Holt's State of Music
David Holt plays tunes and talks with modern masters of traditional music in Appalachia, showcasing not just the music but also the countryside that gave it life. Shot entirely on location, the program puts its featured performers in the context of the countryside that nurtured their musical traditions.
Punk
Featuring original interviews with America’s punk pioneers and the U.K.’s most notorious bands, alongside a seamless blend of rare and unseen photos, gritty archival film and video, a crackling soundtrack of punk hits and misses, this documentary series explores the music, the fashion, the art and the DIY attitude of a subculture of self-described misfits and outcasts.
Country Music
Explore the history of a uniquely American art form: country music. From its deep and tangled roots in ballads, blues and hymns performed in small settings, to its worldwide popularity, learn how country music evolved over the course of the 20th century, as it eventually emerged to become America’s music.
Selena: The Series
As Mexican-American Tejano singer Selena comes of age and realizes her dreams, she and her family make tough choices to hold on to love and music.
Beyond Skinwalker Ranch
Utilizing a team of reputable professionals working alongside "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch" veterans, this series explores other sites of unusual activity and "high strangeness" phenomena in an effort to discover if the activity documented on Skinwalker Ranch is not only real, but pervasive.
Art Attack
Art Attack is a travelogue documentary series that explores the most unique, dangerous, and compelling art forms in the world.
A Taste of Marley
Rohan Marley, son of legendary musician Bob Marley, reconnects with his roots as he goes on a journey to explore the food and music of his native Jamaica.
Waiting for Guffman
Aspiring director Corky St. Clair and the marginally talented amateur cast of his hokey small-town musical production go overboard when they learn that Broadway theater agent Mort Guffman will be in attendance.