THREE OAKS – Canadian musician Rita Chiarelli was planning a blues pilgrimage down U.S. Route 61, which runs from Wyoming, Minn., to New Orleans, La., when she stumbled upon a reference to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
“It came up because it has this incredible musical history,” Chiarelli says by telephone from Salem, Ore. “I had never heard of this place and I was totally captivated.”
So when Chiarelli saw the roadside sign for Angola during that trip, she pulled over, put a call into officials, and was invited to take a tour of the facility located on an 18,000-acre property that was once a plantation and now serves as the largest maximum security prison in the United States.
“When I left there I kind of said off the cuff that maybe someday I’ll come back and play a concert,” Chiarelli says. “But I wanted to see if there were musical inmates who were there today, and on another visit some of them played for me. That’s when I realized that instead of just coming in and doing a concert, that I should do a concert with the inmates, join their bands for a day. Once they told me that it had never been done before, that’s when I thought, ‘We have to document this.'”
That concert and Chiarelli’s experience are chronicled in the documentary film “Music from the Big House,” which will be shown Saturday at the Vickers Theatre in Three Oaks, followed by a question and answer session and performance from Canada’s Goddess of the Blues.
Filmed by fellow Canadian Bruce McDonald, who directed the low-budget 1989 cult film “Roadkill” and the innovative horror film “Pontypool,” “Music from the Big House,” exposes the talents of some of the men behind bars while exploring the bonds of music, and raises questions about redemption.
“It was an odd balance for me; it’s an odd balance for anyone,” Chiarelli says of her experience. “Most of these men are in for murder and rape. You hear about how powerful music is, but I have never seen that phrase come more alive than at Angola. Most of these guys will never get out. Most of them have already been there 25, 30, 35 years. Yet through the music there’s some sort of hope that comes out.”
Chiarelli, the daughter of Italian immigrants in Hamilton, Ontario, says she gravitated to the blues at a young age.
“My parents were very strict old-school Italian, but my passion was always music,” she says. “We used to pick up radio stations across Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and these blues stations struck me immediately. I think I bought my very first blues record at 13. The blues just seemed to speak to me more than what was going on on regular radio. It was real. It wasn’t sugar-coated. It was more about where I was at than those happy surfing people.”
Chiarelli began performing in Ronnie Hawkins’ band in the early 1980s, and spent six years in Italy working as a session musician. When she returned to Canada, she attracted the attention of McDonald, who included her song “Have You Seen My Shoes?” on the soundtrack to “Roadkill.”
“I recorded that tune when I came back and mailed it to a couple of radio stations in Toronto,” Chiarelli says. “One radio station played it one time and Bruce McDonald happened to be in his car. He pulls over, stops at a phone booth and calls the radio station. I called him up the next day and he was literally editing his film around the corner from my house. I went down with the recording and he put it in his movie.”
They teamed up again when Chiarelli recorded a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” for McDonald’s 1991 film “Highway 61.” So after she got the go-ahead to document the concert at Angola, McDonald was her next call.
“When I got the OK to bring down a film crew, just knowing Bruce, I knew he was perfect for this project,” Chiarelli says. “He’s a renegade kind of director and once I had him on board it was much easier to get the film made.”
Legendary folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan, who set off on a year-and-a-half long odyssey on America’s back roads in 1933 to gather folk songs of African-Americans, specifically music born of slavery, first brought attention to Angola, also known as The Farm. The elder Lomax believed prison walls were a filter against what he considered the “polluting” influence of popular music. Lomax found all sorts of songs behind prison walls – work songs, love songs, field hollers, blues, religious music. He also found Huddie Ledbetter – better known as Leadbelly – and as the legend goes helped spring him from Angola.
“Because Lomax had gone in and recorded these inmates decades ago, including people like Leadbelly and Pete Williams, I was able to hear some of that music,” Chiarelli says. “And it’s not just the blues. There are spirituals and gospels and folk and country.”
In fact, when Chiarelli began working out the logistics of performing there, she decided the best way was for her to join existing prison bands to perform songs in each of those genres.
“I wanted to make it as comfortable as possible and the easiest way to do that was to perform with them in their own style,” Chiarelli says. “It’s not like they get to practice all the time. They are still in prison.”
Making the performance happen, she adds, also took a considerable amount of trust.
“Once they trusted me, I had to trust them,” Chiarelli says. “The weird thing that happens is you kind of forget about what they’ve done. It raises this question in your heart about forgiveness. It did for me and in the end I think that’s kind of the point of the film.”
In fact, through much of the film, the audience is kept in the dark about the crimes committed by the inmates who are featured, which makes for a bit of an impact when each of them tells their own story on screen.
” When you don’t know what they’ve done you like these guys and you enjoy their music and your compassion builds for these guys and then you’re hit with what they’ve done,” Chiarelli says. “Do people have a right to be forgiven after a certain amount of time? When have they paid their debt to society? The movie raises all these questions of forgiveness and redemption and compassion surrounded by all this great music.”
— WHAT: “Music From The Big House,” film, discussion and performance with Rita Chiarelli
— WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday
— WHERE: Vickers Theatre, 6 N. Elm St., Three Oaks
— HOW MUCH: $15
— CONTACT: 756-3522 or www.vickerstheatre.com
— ARTIST INFO: www.musicfromthebighouse.com; www.ritachiarelli.com