Classic Southern Culture & Folklife Documentaries for Sale from WSL
Barbecue & Home-cooking: Foods That Make You Smile
DVD - $25
Produced for SC Parks, Recreation and Tourism for use in the SC National Heritage Corridor. Selected as featured documentary on SCETV and shown four times in prime time over Southern Lens program, reaching audiences in the states of SC, GA and NC.
Folklorist, Saddler Taylor joins the filmmaker in a surprising search and discovery mission to find the last remaining “true” folk heritage eateries in the farm communities along two-lane blacktops in four rural SC counties. Folk heritage eateries are defined as those where the cooks in the kitchen are preparing food with recipes taught them over wood stoves in farm kitchens or over barbecue pits dug in the ground using old fashioned methods passed-down from generation to generation. SC native, James Brown – “the hardest working man in show business” – makes a surprise appearance in a diner a few miles from where he was born.
Folklorist, Saddler Taylor and Stan Woodward, in designing a field research method for locating and authenticating eateries in Region III of the SC Heritage Corridor that qualify as Official South Carolina Folk Heritage Foodways sites, discovered 48 such dining establishments. With the help of grants from the SC Humanities Council and the SC Arts Commission, a brochure with hours of operation, foodways on the menus, and locations of all of these special "dining museums of Southern cooking" was produced along with a map leading visitors to each site. Copies of these maps come with the purchase of each DVD
BRUNSWICK STEW: A Virginia Treasure
TRT:56:40 (PBS Version)
or …
BRUNSWICK STEW: Origins of a Southern Folk Heritage Foodway
TRT 1 Hr 56 Min (Historical Version produced for Brunswick County, VA )
DVD - $25
Broadcast over Virginia PBS Stations. Selected in Zoie Films 2000 Festival (Streamed on //www.movieflix.com)
From 1992 to 1998, Southern folklife documentary producer, Stan Woodward, moved into and through the network of stewmasters and stew crews in Brunswick County, Virginia, to document the story of the origin and the continuation of the nearly 200 year-old tradition of cooking Brunswick stew stirred in huge black iron pots with wooden paddles. The original stew made with squirrels has been modified with chicken substituting for squirrel, and the camera takes us “pot-side” throughout the county as we document the competitive stew crews and stewmasters cooking their “secret” recipes, raising money from sale of the stew in order to help those in need in their communities which exist in a dwindling tobacco-growing region of Southside Virginia. In the historical version we learn the story of the tradition first-hand and trace down the ancestors of those who are said to have first named the stew, and visit for the first time on camera the site where locals say the first stew names "Brunswick Stew" was cooked by Uncle Jimmy Matthews. Both documentaries spend time with locally acclaimed and revered stewmaster champions, so-called “victors” in the “Stew Wars” competition with Brunswick, Georgia, in the perpetual argument over the “true” origin of Brunswick Stew.
Brunswick Stew:
Georgia Named Her; Georgia Claims Her
TRT 56:40 DVD DVD - $25
Premiered over Georgia Public Broadcasting in 2005, shown at the annual Brunswick Stewbilee cookoff and festival in Brunswick, GA, funded by a grant from the Georgia State Arts Council and the Brunswick-Golden Aisles Arts & Humanities Council.
The Classic Story of the Origin and Folk Heritage Roots of the Georgia stew - kept alive today...
Everyone from Governor Sonny Perdue, U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, the last of the Hogshead Brunswick stewmasters in South Georgia, a Brunswick Stewbilee "stew dog" and "stew Maccaw" testify to the superiority of Georgia Brunswick stew over that made by “the other state up north” that claims origin of the stew. This documentary, shot in the filmmaker's inimitable handheld, spontaneous camera style, begins with a commentary about Stan Woodward's starting out in the 1990's producing the in-depth story of Virginia Brunswick stew during which he discovered the ongoing "Stew Wars" with Georgia Brunswick stewmakers over “the true origin of the stew.” In the feature length documentary, BRUNSWICK STEW: Origins of a Southern Folk Heritage Foodway, and the shorter version which I had shot in the mid 1990's and couple this with contemporary footage shot at the Georgia Agrirama and the Stewbilee Festival in Brunswick, GA, where we documented the folk heritage roots of the Georgia Brunswick stew tradition."
Brunswick Stewbilee:
Georgia's Brunswick Stew Cookoff Festival
TRT 30 min DVD - $20
In the process of traveling Georgia to authenticate the folk heritage roots of Georgia Brunswick stew the filmmaker ran across the Brunswick Stewbilee in Brunswick, GA. Incorporating the unusual and fun-filled festival into his Georgia Brunswick stew documentary, the filmmaker decided to produce this short to help the Stewbilee Festival “town fathers” get in touch with the folk heritage roots that authenticate a long history of Brunswick stewmaking tied to rural Georgia farm communities and families. The Stewbilee is now firmly in touch with the authentic and diverse folk heritage roots of the Georgia Brunswick stew tradition and has grown from simply “another food cook-off festival” to a genuine folk heritage celebration that recognizes the roots of the tradition it recognizes and seeks to keep alive each year.
BURGOO! Legendary Stew of the South ...
TRT 56 min 40 sec (PBS version)
...or...
BURGOO!- A Southern Tradition ...
TRT 1 hr 56 min 40 sec (Original Feature-length Version)
Either DVD - $25
From pioneer days on the western frontier came a stew prepared by farmers and hunters by the name of Burgoo. No one knows where the name comes from, but the folks in Western Kentucky around Owensboro declare that the authentic and historical burgoo has to be made with mutton, or mature sheep. Folks in central Kentucky prefer beef or wild game, and trace the origins to the hunter's stews of old - and one legend has it that a chef and camp cook for Morgan's Raiders gave the stew it's distinguished place in Kentucky lore. One Kentucky Derby winner bore the name, "Burgoo King" and he was named for the famous "Burgoo King" who cooked for the owner of Idlehour Farm - who became a legend himself around Lexington, KY. :But one thing becomes very clear in these documentaries – the passion for whatever is called Burgoo that is cooked in huge black iron cauldrons runs deep in Kentucky - and like Southern stews elsewhere, each location has it's own favorite stewmaster. This is reflected in the titles given to the burgoo masters- “Burgoo Kings”! And they rigorously maintain recipes and cooking traditions passed down from generation to generation. And always along with the communal cooking of Burgoo in black iron pots stirred with wooden paddles comes a lot of leg-pulling, tall tales and a re,arkable fellowship that is sealed around thecooking of Burgoo.
The PBS version of BURGOO! ( Legendary Stew of the South) was premiered over KET 1 and broadcast throughout Kentucky, and the original, feature length version - BURGOO! A Southern Tradition (containing the expanded story of Burgoo, including the peculiar connection between Kentucky Burgoo and the International Burgoo Festival held in West Virginia and named after a legendary Burgoo cooked on Bergoo Creek nearby) - was broadcast over KET 2.
REVIEW By: John Egerton, Food Writer and Author of books on Southen Culture
"Stan, we sat down and watched BURGOO! - the long version - last evening. It flows
like a good sauce, like a frosty- cold beer or a crisp white wine or a
tall glass of sweet tea. I couldn't possibly think of anything to change, to
take out or add. If the Kentucky people don't love this, and praise you
for capturing the essence of their dying art, then I am blind and deaf,
and they are beyond redemption. KET ought to be running the long
version every few months for the next decade, and at least once a year
thereafter. I'm proud to be a part of it."
- John Egerton, Author of "Southern Food"
Carolina Hash: A Taste of South Carolina
TRT 56:40 DVD DVD - $25
CINE Golden Eagle Award Winner
This lively documentary carries the viewer across the State of South Carolina to tell the story of one of the Palmetto State’s most unusual indigenous folk foodways. Hash, cooked in huge black iron pots and stirred with wooden, hand hewn paddles, is original to South Carolina. This foodway has fed most native Carolinian’s ancestors during good and hard times. Hash migrated from Carolina slave cooks on low country rice plantations to farms and into “hash houses” and BBQ restaurants that continue today satisfying the local community taste for this folk heritage stew.
Cooperative Grocery:
Hashing Out Life at the Old Country Store
TRT 18:40 DVD - $20
This is a remarkable “inside” glimpse into Southern folk culture and the roots of Southern “raconteurship” at it’s most authentic and best. The short work is edited from the archival footage gathered while the filmmaker was producing the CINE Award-winning, Carolina Hash: A Taste of South Carolina. Researching South Carolina upstate hash traditions led to an old time country store in Abbeville, SC - one of the first “cooperative grocery” stores in the state. Folklife field research pointed to the Cooperative Grocery and a “hash master” who was said to be among the best in the upstate - Walt Wilson, operator of the Cooperative Grocery. In one of the most spontaneously-shot and humorous "first-person" camera runs of his career, Stan Woodward becomes the "fourth wheel" in a conversation around a card table that ranges from what constitutes the most outstanding hash in South Carolina to Strom Thurmond's longevity to an invitation at the end of the shoot to "Come shoot Walt cooking a traditional hash at one of our Southern wing-dings….”
Ehrhardt Five and Dime
TRT: 15 min DVD - $20
While shooting the Barbecue and Homecooking documentary for the SC National Heritage Corridor, the filmmaker happened upon an old 5 and 10 cent store loaded with general merchandise so typical of small town mercantile stores in the early 20th century in South Carolina and the rest of the South. The proprietor had inherited the store from his father and, out of a love of the “good old days” and respect for the memory of his father he maintained the store pretty much the same as in earlier days. The filmmaker spontaneously entered the store with camera rolling and the resulting amusing spontaneous “slice of life” is a testimony to this producer’s belief in capturing life “au naturale” on the fly.
HALLOWED GROUND: Camp Meetings of the South Carolina Low Country
2-Disk Set - $35
2-Disc set containing documentaries of the five historic primitive campmeetings in the South Carolina Lowcountry with roots in 18th century Methodism and the horseback evangelist, Bishop Francis Asbury. All camp meetings - three Anglo-American and two African American - are located within a radius of twenty miles from a geographical center in Upper Dorchester County, SC. The three Anglo-American Camp Meetings are Indian Field, Cypress and Cattle Creek and the two African-American Camp Meetings are Shady Grove and St. Paul . Each Camp Meeting remains robust, meets in the fall, and returns thousands from across the nation back to their roots to worship, fellowship, eat Southern home cooking over woodfire stoves and keep alive the memory of their ancestral families.
* NOW AVAILABLE! DVD's of Each Individual Camp Meeting ... Each DVD - $20
IT’S GRITS –
TRT: 44 min/ Black & White
DVD (Digitally Restored and Re-mastered with Authored Commentary by Filmmaker on Track 2 Audio) - $35
This has become a Southern documentary classic and Stan Woodward is still invited to present the film and tell about it's production - which occured over a period of five years. The film was premiered in 1980 and shown widely - including a national PBS broadcast over WNET in NY. Over the years and through many moves, the 16mm film original became compromised due to reduction in silver halides by Kodak which manufactured the film stock. and variable storage conditions. The original was restored to pristine quality by the finest film restorer in the country, made possible by
a Film Preservation Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It remains a best-seller, and the review of the film by New York Times Food Writer, Craig Claiborne testifies to it's timeless value:
“An engaging, sometimes hilarious celebration of one of American’s most interesting and singular
(or is it plural?) foods. This is a film to be taken seriously by anyone who cares about America's culinary heritage.”
- Craig Claiborne, Food Editor, The New York Times
American Film Festival Red Ribbon; Keynote Film, Margaret Mead Film Festival, Museum of Natural History, NY, NY, nationally broadcast over PBS
Lord Have Mercy: Olgers Store
TRT: 38:40 min DVD - $20 (Includes Shipping/Handling)
Special Selection - Indie Memphis Film Festival: The Soul of Southern Film, 2001; Permanent Collection: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“The video documentary presents the filmmaker’s impromptus visit with Jimmy Olgers, a natural-born performer of the sort academic folklorists would label a “verbal artist.” Olgers is “on stage”, i.e. performing, throughout the encounter, much as he would do, presumably, in response to a visit by any inquisitive stranger who stops by his converted storefront Museum. The piece engages the viewer in an emergent experience, framed by the filmmaker’s first-person point of view in a skillfully executed hand-held camera style and developed through the filmmaker’s spontaneous interaction with Olgers and two friends who happen to be present – and constitute a kind of in-group audience.” - Gary Barrow, Folklorist
Rockfish Muddle
TRT 18 min DVD - $20 (Includes Shipping/Handling)
Folk Heritage Foodway cooked in the “Rockfish Capitol of the World”
From ancient times to the present, the East coast striped bass – an ocean and freshwater fish nicknamed “rockfish” by the native population that dwells in and around the village of Weldon at the annual spawning ground for these robust game-fish – have returned from the waters of the Atlantic Ocean up what is known today as the Roanoke River to the rocky falls and turbulence of the waters surging past the bend in the river at Weldon, NC (named the “Rockfish Capitol of the World” by local folk. Down a 130 foot drop from the piedmont to the coastal plain, nature provides ideal conditions each April and May for the annual spawn of rockfish at the stretch of river named "Moratuck" (the river of death) named by the Native Americans who gathered here to fish each year.
Today the last of a breed of traditional local fishermen who grew up making a part of their living from catching the rockfish during their colossal spawn keep alive a tradition of folklife, folklore, and the folk heritage foodway known as “rockfish muddle.” The filmmaker documents Weldon resident, J.E. Evans, Jr. as he cooks a classic Weldon “rock muddle” that he hopes will influence his young grandchild as he seeks to somehow pass on this local cooking tradition and the lore surrounding it to a young generation who are descendents of the “river people”.
Seeing Things Into Being: The Scap Iron Art of Charlie Grimsley
TRT: 18 min 40 sec DVD - $20 (Includes Shipping/Handling)
During the drive to Atlanta, GA from a shoot at the Brunswick Stewbilee in Brunswick, GA, the filmmaker and folklorist John Burrison passed an humble house well back from the road that would have gone unnoticed had it not been for a four-story tall mobile sculpture visible over the trees with a 30 foot metallic fish rotating in a circular motion high in the air trying to get away from a 40 foot metallic canoe with a fisherman aboard raring back on his fishing pole.
At Burrison’s request the car was turned around and when the day was done one of the most unusual and spontaneously-shot records of the work of a self-trained artist and “visionary” was “in the can.” Without the filmmaker receiving an NEA “Creativity in Folklife” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, allowing him the time to edit works from his extensive folklife video archive, this work would have remain unedited and unseen.
Sheep Stew of Dundas:
TRT: 56:40 min DVD - $25 (Includes Shipping/Handling)
A Gastronomical Delight
Special Selection - Indie Memphis Film Festival: The Soul of Southern Film; Broadcast over Virginia PBS Stations
In a tiny area of Southside Virginia along the Brunswick and Lunenburg County line, this documentary tells about a most unusual and distinctive folk heritage stew, cooked by stewmasters using mutton, stale bread, onions and potatoes. The recipe is one of the closest, in its purest form, to the original Jimmy Matthews Brunswick Stew cooked with squirrel. In the center of town a sign proudly boasts that Dundas is the “Home of the World’s Best Sheep Stew: A Gastronomical Delight.” This film documents one of the last stews cooked over wood fire on the coldest night ever recorded in Dundas. A yard sale and raffle by folks in the Dundas community made possible the editing and broadcast of this documentary over PBS.
Southern Stews: A Taste of the South
TRT:56:40 min DVD - $20 +$5 Shipping/Handling
Broadcast on SC/ETV on Southern Lens Series; Southern Humanities Media Fund Grant Award
"Stan Woodward creates an earthy, front-porch-rocker environment that draws the viewer in as a participant in the
action and takes us deep into the South to see the links between burgoos and Brunswick stews, hashes, bogs and Frogmore stews and the many variations thereof. His "first-person" camera style allows the viewer to travel with him from Kentucky and West Virginia burgoo stewmaking, to a rare glimpse into a sheep stew made in Southside Virginia, to the "puddin' pot" and Frogmore stewmaking of the coastal South Carolina area and along the way to explore the Brunswick stewmaking rivalry between Virginia and Georgia as well as the bogs and hashes that substitute for Brunswick stew in South Carolina."
- Sandy Kytle Woodward, Food Writer
The Morris Chronicle
TRT: 1 hr 53 min DVD - $25 (Includes Shipping & Handling)
From 2003 through 2005, the filmmaker visited with Morris Peeples, an aging African American barbecue artisan renown for his wisdom and storytelling and the cooking of a hog over an old fashioned pit dug in the ground in the Williston-Springfield, SC tradition. Through Morris a connection was made with the Hatiola Hunt – a hunt club that partially restored the “big house” near Morris’s farmhouse and where Morris is elder member and caretaker. The big house – Hatiola – has a storied past and served as the plantation house where Morris’s ancestors were slaves. Today, Morris holds the keys to the big house and is revered by the members of the Hatiola Hunt.
This documentary takes the viewer on a journey that immerses them in the ebb and flow of Morris’s world and the world of the Hatiola Hunt, providing a penetrating and extraordinary glimpse into what makes Southern culture bound up in a history of black and white rural work relationships, political and social economies and folklife so much a product of a complex and intricate amalgam of inter-dependent and in-depth human relationships that profoundly effect and shape each other and end up somehow “making the South the South”, to the perplexity and often the consternation of the viewer looking from the outside-in.
The Olgers Chronicle
TRT: 1 hr 56 min 40 sec DVD - $25 (Includes Shipping & Handling)
From 1995 through 2002, the filmmaker visited with raconteur Jimmy Olgers on the porch at Olgers’ Store and Museum – a country store where Olgers grew up as a child. The country store had doubled as a living quarters for him and his mom and dad, a place of mercantilism and, most important of all, a gathering place for social interaction and entertainment in the days long before television when rural electrification was just beginning and men hunted game to feed their families in rural Southside Virginia. Olgers maintains the store as a museum loaded with Southern folk culture and Americana artifacts donated to him by people who recognize Olgers’ Store as an icon - a “last stand for the memory of the good old days.” Jimmy is both proprietor of the flea market outside the store and curator of artifacts for the objects in the most unusual museum anyone could imagine. He also is a poet and writes a weekly column for the newspaper in nearby Petersburg, VA. But in this documentary, shot over seven years, we are immersed in a world totally set apart from the ever-changing tide of events in the troubled world of the “Information Age”. It is Jimmy’s world. And it is a mixture of side-splitting laughter and joking and the pondering of “the deeper meaning in life” that Jimmy – at his core – represents and seeks to keep in front of us in spite of the seeming trivialization of life by modernity.
This two hour feature length documentary was produced as part of the Southern Routes series of programs containing works edited by the filmmaker out of his extensive collection of Southern culture and folklife documentaries and made possible by a grant from the Creativity in Folklife program at The National Endowment for the Arts.
We Just Call It “CUSH”
TRT 18:40 DVD - $20…VHS $10
In the once-thriving textile town of Piedmont, South Carolina and out of the textile mill folk heritage tradition of socializing and entertainment centered around traditional cooking of local foodways at communal gatherings sponsored by the mill owners and managers, a cornmeal-based and highly-seasoned concoction was created to compliment a fried fish dinner. It served as a means of economically extending the meal for large gatherings of 300 or more people. This dish was named “cush”, and it is said to be so unique to the town of Piedmont located on the Saluda River and so bound to the existence of the mill’s “Fishing Club” that dates back to the late 1800’s and turn of the century that “cush” is not known to “outsiders.” In fact, the filmmaker found that it is not known to most of the younger generation of town-dwellers who do not have deep roots in the textile mill community or relatives who were a part of the “Fish Club Dinners” of old.
SOUTHERN ROUTES 1 : Volumes One to Five DVD DESK-SET with Notes from the Filmaker on each documentary $100 (Includes Shipping & Handling)
A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Creativity in Folklife program enabled Stan Woodward to spend six months creating documentaries from The Woodward Studio Folklife Video Archive – an archive containing 1,500 hours of footage gathered over the filmmaker’s lifetime.
Volume One – BBQ, Country Stores & Joe Gunn's Sheep Stew TRT 56 min 40 sec
Individual DVDs - $20
Opens with a short meeting-up with an peculiar Southern folk-icon – the costumed sidewalk attention-getter for a hair cuttery; followed by a work that captures the quirky Drakes Bar-B-Q on the coast in Georgia; then the Ehhardt Five and Dime: one of the last small-town, all-purpose dime stores operated by a wonderful character who could be off the pages of a Southern novel; then Cooperative Grocery: another “last of the small-town” groceries that once served as a farmers coop but now keeps it’s doors open for gentleman gatherings where local “regulars” meet to play cards, ponder the things and ways of the world, and wait for a stranger to come in; Joe Gunn’s Sheep Stew concludes this volume: a “root-capture” of a disappearing Southern folk heritage foodways tradition with key interviews with the last of the tradition-bearers.
Volume Two – Scrap Iron Art, Horse Farmers Gathering, & Sheep Stew Stirring Stick TRT 56 min 40 sec
Individual DVD - $25
Opens with the spontaneously shot Seeing Into Being: The Scrap Iron Art of Charlie Grimsley: a most peculiarly talented artist who “sees” forms that are brought to mind by scraps of metal and realizes them in forms ranging from flowers and birds to whirley-gigs and mammoth moving sculptures; followed by The Ol’ Time Horse Farmers’ Gathering: a small-town festival that draws thousands to see the ways of life on the farms early in the 20th century – distinguished by the largest gathering of mules and work-horses and antique farm implements in the Southeast; then a “root-capture” of the explanation of the use of the three-pronged “stew-stirring stick” used by the makers of sheep stew in and around the villages in the Virginia Southside.
Volume Three – The Olgers Chronicle TRT 1 hr 56 min Individual DVD - $25
If ever there were a character who were ready to appear in a Southern novel, Jimmy Olgers would be that man: Poet, story-teller, jokester, and keeper of Southern regalia, the fineries of ol’ time Southern “black-pot” cooking, and Southern traditions rooted in the Civil War fought by his relatives on the site of Olgers’ Store. Includes another “root-capture” of a rare folk heritage tradition called “National Turtle Day of Sutherland”.
Volume Four – The Morris Chronicle TRT 1 hr 52 min Individual DVD - $25
In his 90’s, Morris is the son of a sharecropper and is superintendent of the Hatiola Hunt Club House – the very plantation house owned by the people for whom he and his father had worked as sharecroppers. The filmmaker starts out to document the old fashioned method of preparing and cooking a hog in the Williston/Springfield (SC) manner, but ends up on a discovery of a far more interesting and complex set of interwoven relationships that leave the South’s residue of the plantation system complex in it’s interwovenness of lives.
Volume Five - From Rockfish and Cush to A Brunswick Stew Monument TRT 1 hr 15 min Individual DVDs - $20
Rockfish Muddle is a documentary about a fish stew that is local to the Roanoke River from the falls below Roanoke Rapids all the way to where it turns into the tidal water that empties into the sound on the coast of North Carolina. J.E. Evans cooks his last Rockfish muddle – a traditional folk heritage foodway rapidly disappearing as modernity and laws against “bow-netting” have turned a generation of vigorous fishermen into storytellers. This is followed by We Just Call It ‘CUSH’ - the video capture of the cooking of a dish that is said to be found only in Piedmont, South Carolina, and is being maintained by Cush master-cook, the Piedmont Fire Department’s Fire Chief. We first learn how little-known the dish is to residents who have moved into the area and those who are too young to remember the days when the textile mill owners allowed their workers to form fishing clubs and hold fish fries where Cush complimented the fried fish. We end with a clip out-take from Stan Woodward’s Brunswick Stew documentaries – an Eagle Scout from Virginia finds himself in a dilemma of truth as he stands at the Brunswick stew memorial at the Interstate rest area near Brunswick, GA.
Make Check Payable to:
The Woodward Studio Limited / P.O. Box 5163 / Greenville, SC 29606
