We had the chance to sit down with Alan Swyer, director of the documentary When Houston Had the Blues, which tells the largely untold story of a vibrant and rich American music scene in Houston, Texas. Our discussion covered the importance of oral history, storytelling through generations, and of course the greatest artists you may have never heard of before!

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This project is a documentary about the seemingly unknown history of Houston music. Can you briefly take us from conception to now for this project? Where does that first inkling of an idea to explore a topic like this come from?

There's a young female producer named Drew Barnett Hamilton, who is terrific. She approached me and asked me if I'd ever heard of the El Dorado Ballroom. She's from Houston, I think fifth generation. She didn't know much about the Black music scene there, but came upon something about the El Dorado Ballroom. So we met, and I said, “Look, the El Dorado Ballroom is a really interesting place, but as the focal point of a documentary, I don't think so.” I think that it really can fit in as the linchpin to look at an entire world. I started telling her about the great artists who came from there [Houston], the amazing Duke Peacock Record Label, Empire and so forth. I said, you know, there's untold history there. Houston has never gotten its due. People think in terms of Black music, they think of Memphis, they think of Chicago, they think of New Orleans. All that is justified, but Houston is, at the very least, equal and arguably superior to all of them. So, she got really excited. I introduced her to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Big Mama Thornton, Gatemouth Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Duke Peacock. And she loved it, she immersed herself and that led to the film that you've now seen.

Does that desire to make a film like this spawn from historical curiosity, or more of an obligation to tell the story?

It was a combination of the two. Black music is very important to me, I grew up in a Black neighborhood, so I never discovered Black music, it was there. My mother's kitchen was smoke, you know, she had to kill the vegetables, and there was a soul food restaurant down the corner. It [the restaurant] had the most amazing jukebox I've ever encountered, Big Maybelle, Wynone Harris, people that, you know, White America doesn't know about at all. I fell in love with it, going to friends' houses, hearing what their parents were playing and whatnot. So, Black music has always been a part of my life, and when we started thinking about doing something about Houston, it was largely meant as a celebration of music that had never really gotten its due. Of an entire scene, as you see in the film.

One of the topics that we chose to cover was the impact of desegregation. There was an amazing scene between the third and fifth wards. This amazing, self-contained, Black community. Sure, integration was probably the most important social movement of the 20th century, but there was also an impact of it, and the community fell apart. The city of Houston, as many cities did, put in a freeway dividing the Black community. They choose the Black community for two reasons. Real estate was cheaper and there was less political clout in those days. The impact continues to this day, but we can’t forget that the music is spectacular. How many people know about Gatemouth Brown today? How many people have White America never really discovered? Bobby “Blue” Bland, who may have been, and this is going to sound like heresy considering that Ray Charles was a close friend, but Bobby “Blue” Bland may well have been the greatest Black singer ever.

You did talk about how you grew up around Black music, so how does the process of finding archival footage look for you now? Because there is some really tremendous archival footage in this film.

To call it a deep dive is to put it mildly. We scoured everything, and one of the great moments was when we discovered the footage of Big Mama in a car being interviewed with Muddy and Big Joe Turner also on board.

That was a great moment that we cut back to a couple of times. I love her quote where she's talking about how she got $6 for the song, and Elvis got 6 million.

Well, tell me anybody else who was covered by Elvis and Janice Joplin. She wrote “Ball and Chain.” There's a great video you can find on YouTube of Big Mama about to do “Ball and Chain” and she says, “This song was written by me and recorded by me and Janice Joplin,” not in a particularly flattering way. There was a rock critic once upon a time named Ellen Willis, and she wrote a piece in which she called Janice Joplin the greatest blues singer of all time. And I said, I'm going to coin a term, you are a “rockist.” What does that mean? I'll leave it to you to think about it, but if you think that Janice Joplin was the greatest blue singer of all time, I kind of think you've never heard of Bessie Smith or Big Mama Thornton, or I can name a dozen other women who were there first and were better than Janice.

*Big Mama Thornton & Johhny Otis (L) Play Baseball*

Music is kind of historically built off the backs of what came before it, right? So when you're talking about all these different styles, like Zydeco, and how exactly Zydeco culminates in a place like Houston, how far are you trying to go back and find the roots of it?

The key to Zydeco is that it really came to life because of one man, Clifton Chenier, as the film discusses. And CJ Chenier is really good about [preserving it], as are other people like Roger Wood. There was music played among Black Cajuns called LaLa. That came out of the Blues, out of Blues came R&B, out of R&B came Rock and Roll, out of LaLa came what became known as Zydeco. Really a mongrelization of le haricots, which means the beans, it’s the French word for bean.

Anyway, Clifton became the king of Zydeco. The music became known as Zydeco because of him. So, I think it's important to show that it didn't just land on his head one day, right? But he took something that had been around and carried it to a brand new level, the same way that Charlie Parker did with BeBop. But the interesting thing is that that music has always been associated with Louisiana, while Clifton spent virtually his entire adult life in Houston. [He] recorded there, and played shows in Houston. It is part of the heritage that the city of Houston has never fully acknowledged or recognized. Blues, R&B, Zydeco, Jazz in the form of people like Arnette Cobb, had all acquired new forms of expression in Houston. I think a lot of it is owed to the fact that Houston was a melting pot.

It's about how they feed into each other. I want to circle back to a moment with CJ Chenier, it's probably the most powerful moment, and it kind of feels like the thesis for the film. It’s when he recounts his father performing “I'm Coming Home (To See My Mother).” Can you speak to that moment, as a filmmaker? While it's happening, does it shift perspective for you a little bit?

First of all, let me tell you about my first conversation with CJ. When I spoke to him over the phone, he was very pleasant, but he was questioning a little bit, you know, people protect themselves. He said, “Did you ever see my daddy play?” And I said, “I saw him play several times.” And he immediately asked where, and my response was, “Well, I saw him play in concert a few times, but the real fun was when I saw him play at Verbum Dei High School in Compton.” Dead silence from the phone before he said, “You were there?” I said, “I was there several times.”

I think “I'm Coming Home (To See My Mother)” is one of the most powerful songs ever recorded. But in doing an interview, one has to shape the interview. It's not just reading a list of questions, bing, bing, bing, coldly. There has to be a rapport with the person being interviewed. People are nervous initially, or sometimes they have a set of answers that they go on automatic pilot. You have to work through that. So, that relationship between me as the director-slash-interviewer and the musician I'm interviewing has to grow. I knew the way I felt about “I'm Coming Home (To See My Mother)” so I had to wait for the appropriate moment to ask him about that. Direct, instead of going through my crew. There's this great moment where it's just the two people, despite all the crew being there, right when it was brought up. I sensed it was the right moment to talk about “I'm Coming Home” and to see CJ get emotional. To me, that's the most telling, most powerful moment in the film. While it happened, CJ asked for Kleenex, and one of my crew members started to get into the frame to help him, and I, you know [Alan makes a yanking motion] and we grabbed him.

I'll tell you something funny that happened. The film editor, who is a very good guy and who did a nice job, we would discuss different segments, and then I'd leave him be, so I wasn't hovering over him. Then I'd review it, and we would talk about it. When I saw the interview with CJ I said, “What did you do?” He said, “I cut away from when he started to cry.” I said, “if you don't restore that, you're fired.” Most films don't keep that and I said, “I don't make most films, I make my films.”

Filmmaking is the ultimate combination of sight and sound. How did you find a balance between making the movie and utilizing the music?

I don't want to tease the audience, right? I'm talking about Katie Webster, so I want them to not only appreciate Katie Webster, but to really get a sense of the power of Katie Webster's personality and her music, not just a taste. So, it's a visual medium, but how can you do a film about prize fighting and not see the guys box?

You have those moments towards the end of the film where you're showing the people that we got to know, that sadly had passed away recently. It showed how this had been such a long process for you. How do you keep going with the film? How do you stay with it?

The key for me is to pick something that I love, right? It's no different than dating. If there's somebody you kind of like but only to some degree, then where she lives makes a difference. No, I don't want to spend three and a half hours driving to see her once a week, but if you care about her, it's worth it. I've done films that have been commissioned, and I'm proud of them, and and on those films, there's an air date. I have to have the film done in X number of weeks or months. And it's great, I get to explore a different realm. I get amazing access and whatnot.

With my passion projects, I don't want time to be a problem. I want to make sure I get everybody I can. And of course, we were shut down by the pandemic. I didn't want to jeopardize anybody's well-being by bringing my crew into someone's house. I said, no, we'll just sit back. It was tough emotionally, but you use that time to do some of the editing. The sad part is, we've lost five of the people who appear on screen. They were elderly, yes, but the great news is they will not disappear because of it, they can't.

We won Best Film at a festival in Houston. We thought it was appropriate to premiere in Houston. And it was great, they sold out, and it was in a multiplex. But the point I want to make is that CJ came to the screening and was thrilled by it. Katie Webster's family came to the screening and was thrilled by it. Grady Gaines, his widow, and son came to the screening, so for them to see that their loved ones haven't disappeared was very meaningful.

*Grady Gaines on Little Richard's Piano in the film, Don't Knock the Rock*

Okay, this is my last question, so it's more personal, but I did mention I am from Houston, and I still do live here. This documentary was particularly impactful for me. It kind of felt like those moments when I was a kid, when my parents would drive me around and they would tell me the history of every single building that they could remember. That really stuck with me, so how important is it for this film to abide by that oral history? The idea that stories should be passed down through generations, so that they be remembered.

I would hate for this rich, wonderful world to be lost. That is the driving principle of the film for people to realize not just the great music of Bobby “Blue” Bland or Big Mama Thornton, but of this amazing world in Houston that had a zillion clubs. It had restaurants, hotels, Don Roby and his empire with Duke and Peacock and Backbeat. It was an amazing world to me. The film, at risk of sounding highfalutin, is about race, culture, economics, politics and the greatest music ever made. I didn't want the music to be lost, nor did I want the world that it enveloped, that spawned it and in turn inspired it, to disappear. I'm thrilled that Drew and I were able to capture that amazing time and place and not only the music, but the great, great people who were creating it.

I think you captured that beautifully for people like me that live in Houston, that weren't aware of the history, I think it is going to be super impactful. Are there any other projects you're working on?

Drew and I got on so well when making this film that we said, “Let's do another right away.” I said, “but let's do one that doesn't mean going on airplanes.” We are now about a week away from finishing a rough cut of When L.A. Got the Blues. Amazing, unsung Black music scene here [in Los Angeles]. In fact, a great case can be made that rhythm and blues was born in L.A. right after World War II, when the big bands gave way to something new. The fun part for me is that we get to include a lot of the people who are friends of mine. Ray Charles, I mentioned, was a close friend, Louie Jordan, Sam Cook, Nat King Cole and on and on. I got to interview Willie Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, one of my favorite groups. Bobby Bradford, the Texas born trumpet player who was in Ornette Coleman's first band, he’s 91. John Densborn, Robbie Krieger of The Doors, Dave Alvin of The Blasters. I got to interview great people, but we really talked about Central Avenue, which was L.A.'s equivalent to Harlem. We go on through the Watts riots and the Watts renaissance that followed. It's been great fun to do it, and now I'm starting to contemplate my next one, but I finished this all right.

When Houston Had the Blues is available on major streaming VOD platforms - including iTunes, Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Apple TV

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Houston, The Music City? Interview with Director of When Houston Had the Blues