Tom Davenport
Directing
Biography
Tom Davenport, recipient of the 2021 Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship, has dedicated much of his life to creating forums to teach the world about different cultures and ways of life. Through collaborations with hundreds of documentary filmmakers, he brings stories and traditions of American culture to Folkstreams, a free streaming service for nearly 400 hard-to-find documentary films about American folklife. The curated site includes interviews with filmmakers, background essays, teacher guides, and film transcripts. The films of Les Blank, Arlene Bowman (Diné), John Cohen, Amanda Dargan, Gerald Davis, Bill Ferris, Debora Kodish, Alan Lomax, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Pete and Toshi Seeger, Bill Wiggins, and Steve Zeitlin are among those whose work lives on Folkstreams. Davenport had early contact with iconic figures in folklife and cultural heritage when his father, Robert Davenport, moved to Washington, DC during the Great Depression and became president of the Washington Book Shop, a left-leaning cooperative which hosted performances of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. He then discovered their 78 rpm records as a teenager in the 1950s. Davenport attended Yale and spent time in East Asia, where he began a lifelong practice in Zen Buddhism and began to photograph folk traditions in Taiwan. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, and found a job with Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, pioneers of cinéma verité. He married Miriam McDaniel, and in 1970, they moved to a farm in Virginia to complete work on his first documentary, The Shakers. There, he began a lifelong partnership with folklorist Dan Patterson from UNC Chapel Hill. Simultaneously, the Davenports produced From the Brothers Grimm, a live-action series of folktales set in Virginia. Struggling to get his own documentary films seen, and to shine a light on other folklore-inspired films, Davenport became intrigued with new technologies of streaming in the late 1990s. In 2000, he wrote to folklorist Bill Ferris, then chairman of National Endowment for the Humanities, about his idea for a streaming site. This started a 20-year search for folklife films, a number of which would have been irretrievably lost but for his efforts to identify and stream them. The films now serve as a touchstone for younger generations to tap into the lived experiences of often overlooked Americans with deeply rooted traditions. As Davenport wrote, “One of the ways we made Folkstreams appealing was to treat the filmmaker as an artist, an ‘auteur.’ The films we selected for Folkstreams are not clips of performances, but documentaries that have a story, and in best of them, give something of the catharsis that art conveys.” Davenport received the first Archie Green Award from the American Folklore Society, which recognized Folkstreams as a visionary project. The award described Folkstreams.net as "an extraordinary democratic initiative in public folklore and education, exponentially increasing the visibility of the field, and giving grassroots communities across the U.S. access to their own traditions, folklore, and cultural history."
Known For
A girl acts spoiled and doesn't want to marry any of the suitors that come for her hand. One guy, who she nick-names "Bristlelip" makes a deal with her father for her hand. The next day "Bristlelip" comes disguised as a peddler, and the girl becomes his unwilling bride. He carries her off to his crude cabin, all the while commenting on her questions about properties. The girl proves to be an unfit (at housework) wife at first, trying her hand at cooking, spinning, basketry, and even sales of pottery to no avail.
Bristlelip
Adapted from an Appalachian Jack Tale set in the late 1940s, this tale follows a World War II veteran named Jack who, in return for an act of kindness, receives two magical gifts: a sack that can catch anything and a jar that can show whether a sick person will recover or die. Jack becomes a national hero when he rescues the president's daughter from a serious illness by capturing Death in his magic sack. However, after many years without Death in the world, Jack realizes that he has upset the natural order and releases Death to save humankind from perpetual old age and misery.
Soldier Jack, or The Man Who Caught Death in a Sack
Tom Davenport's realistic adaptation of an old Appalachian story. With nothing more than her plucky spirit and her pocket knife, a mountain girl outwits a witch and an ogre to save herself and her sisters. Part of the PBS series "From the Brothers Grimm." Winner Chicago International Children's Film Festival. Ages 10 and above.
Mutzmag
A soldier can not return home after he leaves the army, and can not find a job. Desperation drives him to make a deal with the Devil, who makes a bet with him. For the next seven years, he will carry a purse of gold that's always full. However, he must wear a bearskin and neither pray nor wash nor cut his hair in all that time. If he survives, he can keep the purse, but if he dies, the Devil gets his soul.
Bearskin, or The Man Who Didn't Wash for Seven Years
An upper-class, late 19th-century dining room where a wealthy industrialist presides as "king" sets the stage for this version of "The Frog King," the classic tale about a princess's promise to a frog.
The Frog King
A re-telling of Cinderella set in the rural south during World War II
Ashpet: An American Cinderella
An American 1910s version of 'Snow White' where Willa joins a traveling medicine show to escape her evil step-mother.
Willa: An American Snow White
A portrait of Arthur "Peg Leg Sam" Jackson --black harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living "busking" on the street and performing in patent-medicine shows touring southern towns. Footage includes excerpts from one of his last medicine shows, videotaped at a county fair in 1972, and material filmed near his home in South Carolina in 1975. The performance includes harmonica solos, songs, a parody of a chanted sermon, folktales and reminiscences, and three buck dances.
Born for Hard Luck: Peg Leg Sam Jackson
In this comic variant of the Grimm's story, The Master Thief, a poor laborer's son wants to marry the dentist's daughter.
Jack & the Dentist's Daughter
Remembering the High Lonesome is the story of the making of a classic documentary film. It is also a profile of filmmaker, photographer, artist, and musician John Cohen. Through interviews, as well as Cohen's own photographs and scenes from his classic film The High Lonesome Sound: Kentucky Mountain Music, filmmaker Tom Davenport focuses on Cohen's journey to rural Kentucky in the 1950s to document the lives of the people there and his "discovery" of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. Remembering the High Lonesome also examines the birth of a new artistic ethic and counterculture through John Cohen's involvement with the Beat Generation, abstract expressionist painters, and the Folk Music Revival, and explores the role of an outsider documenting the life and arts of an Appalachian community.
Remembering the High Lonesome
Rapunzel imprisoned in a tall wooden tower by a witch, allows a young man to climb her long brown hair to visit her.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel
An Appalachian version of the classic story of the courage and loyalty of two children abandoned in the forest.
Hansel & Gretel
A short filmed at a horse show.
The Upperville Show
A series of interviews with and performances by the attendees and musicians at the Warrenton, Virgina country music festival in 1972.
It Ain't City Music
The Shakers are America's oldest and most successful experiment in communal living. A century ago, nearly 6,000 Shaker brothers and sisters lived together in nineteen communities scattered from Maine to Kentucky. This film (narrated by the filmmaker, Tom Davenport) traces the growth, decline, and continuing survival of this remarkable and influential religious sect through the memories and rich song traditions of Shakers themselves. It includes performances by the late Eldress Marguerite Frost of Canterbury, New Hampshire, and the late Sister R. Mildred Barker, a leading singer and spiritual leader of the Shaker community still active at Sabbathday Lake, Maine when the film was made.
The Shakers
During the 1960s, Tom DAVENPORT was commissioned by National Geographic to film in Taiwan. This was his first documentary, in which he captured philosopher NAN Huai-chin practicing Tai-chi at Taiwan’s northeastern coast. Shot with a 16mm camera, the film features sound created by composer Tom JOHNSON.
Tai Chi Ch'uan
This anthology is part 1 of 2, including the Americanized tales of: Hansel and Gretel, The Goose Girl, Bristlelip (King Thrushbeard), and Soldier Jack or The Man Who Caught Death in a Sack.
The Brothers Grimm: American Folktales Part 1
As a teenager growing up in the mountains of rural northern virginia, Jerry Payne wondered "Animals are dying all the time. Where do they all go?" This question led to Jerry's remarkable study on insect succession in carrion, which became a landmark study in forensic entomology. Now retired, Dr. Payne and his wife Rose excel at the taxonomy of birds, butterflies, and plants. They often bird and butterfly watch with the Trappist monk Father Francis Michael Stiteler, on the grounds of his monastery near Conyers, Georgia.
Where Do They All Go?
This anthology is part 2 of 2, including the Americanized tales of: The Frog King, Bearskin (The Man Who Didn't Wash for 7 Years), Jack and the Dentist's Daughter (The Master Thief), and Rapunzel.
The Brothers Grimm: American Folktales Part 2
A Singing Stream highlights the importance of religious faith and music in the Landis family, and shows the impact of tenant farming, Jim Crow, the New Deal, civil rights, Black Migration, and issue of land inheritance in this extended family.