About the Film
STREET MUSIC (1979, 16mm, 57 mins)
Preserved by the Yale Film Archive, 2018
STREET MUSIC presents performances by 19 street musicians in seven cities across the United States, and was one of Doob’s first feature length films. With the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Doob and his friend Peter Bull, who recorded sound for the film, took a train to New Orleans, where they purchased a car for $500. They began filming their first subject, New Orleans legend Oliver “Porkchop” Anderson, a tap dancer working in a city where street performing was prohibited. After New Orleans, as Doob put it in a 2020 interview, “We just sort of stumbled around the country,” staying at the homes of friends and family, and learning from locals about who they should try to film. As Doob says, the film is presented “in the order I shot it. I don’t make anything of that, but it’s the way it worked, and I can’t imagine cutting it in any different way.”
The film features singers, guitarists, drummers, dancers, and others, including street performance legends like Brother Blue, the Automatic Human Jukebox, and Jimmy Davis. Drummer Gene Palma, who masterfully captures the styles of legendary bandleaders Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, had gained some fame from an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s TAXI DRIVER three years prior. From San Francisco to New York, and Chicago to San Antonio, the film captures a cross-section of Americans filled with raw talent, showmanship, and hustle, and presents a time capsule of the fashion, architecture, and culture of the 1970s.
