If anyone knew what power an instrument could have for someone, it was going to be Candace Williamson, who gravitated towards filmmaking as she watched her father file reports for the local news in Knoxville, Tennessee and introduce her and her brother to movies during his off-hours. She found that it wasn’t only the experience of watching movies that opened up new horizons, but as she actually started to make them, the camera itself gave her confidence.
“When I was behind the camera, I could ask questions that I was too scared to like ask without it and it just opened up my world to so many new things,” says Williamson, whose short documentary “Boil That Cabbage Down” is bound to inspire that same feeling for others.
Fortunately, Williamson doesn’t have to put down the camera as she picks up another artistic pursuit with the banjo in the delightful doc, which follows her from first plucking a few strings in search of rhythm to being able to carry a full tune. But the particular song she stumbles onto at first to learn how to play, from which the film takes its title, is far less innocent in origin than it’s generally presented now, a former staple at minstrel shows where performers wore blackface and has since been adopted as a much more innocent starter track for beginners as decades have passed and its racist connotations have been forgotten.
As Williamson gradually takes ownership of the song on her “Banjolina,” culminating in a big performance at a jam session, she also presents a proud tradition of Black banjo players that has largely gone unnoticed, tracing the practice back to slaves who found refuge in the instrument and would make banjos out of the material available to them such as stretched pigskin and wood and eventually made it a center of family celebrations, carrying on through post-reconstruction times. If the burden on Williamson is considerable to become a skilled player before taking the stage, she’s never seen sweating it too much, nor does she make the heavy history she’s taking on look like it’s ever too much to bear, instead finding an ecstatic truth in generations that have found the banjo as a way of building community, finding practitioners today such as Hannah Mayree, founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, who are actively reinvigorating the form while reminding all about the instrument’s roots, and taking moments that had been previously recorded only on the page or in paintings and bringing them to vivid life.
After premieres at the Florida and Cleveland Film Festivals earlier this year, “Boil That Cabbage Down” is headed to Blackstar in Philadelphia this Friday and before the rousing film can raise the roof there as it has elsewhere in the shorts section, Williamson graciously took the time to talk about how she made the most of the two instruments at her disposal, pulling through an occasionally hectic shoot and the not all-that-obvious decision to literally put her voice into the film.
How did this come about?
I grew up in Tennessee until I was around 7 or 8, and then I moved to Florida, so I’ve always been a southern girl, and I remember my dad and I went to the International Biscuit Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, which I talk a bit about in the film, and there was a little jug band there, and they had a banjo, and I was infatuated ever since, so I kept joking about it for years and years and years, “Just get me a banjo. I wanted to have it in my room somewhere.” My boyfriend got one for me for my birthday, and I was super excited, Googling “Beginner songs to learn” because I’m not a musician, that’s when I saw Jake Blount had done a video with Vox about the banjo and its origins.
I was 24 or 25 and I had no idea that this had this origin, but something about it felt so connected to me, and I sat on that before I went to USC [for film school], and when I got there, I had to pitch for the documentary class and as I was belting around ideas, that came up, and I [thought] “This is something that I can really explore.”
In the Special Thanks section, I noticed an organization called the Black Banjo Reclamation Project. Did you know there was much of a community out there before getting into this or was that a real discovery of the project?
I think we’re in this really interesting cultural renaissance, which is amazing, but I actually started the film over a year ago, and when I was Googling it back then, there was nothing. I e-mailed Hannah [Mayree], the founder of it and she was seven months pregnant, so she told me to stay in the loop and when I finally was able to start the project, she had had the baby and really, really worked with me on connecting me to other people. But the only two contacts I had was Hannah and Kristina R. Gaddy, who had written a book called “Well of Souls: The Banjo’s Hidden History,” and from there, they connected me with other people and the community was pretty small, but it’s growing exponentially now.
There’s a painting, “The Old Plantation,” that opens the film and ultimately becomes a centerpiece. How did you first come across it?
The crazy thing is I had gone to the African American History Museum in D.C. the year before I pitched the film, and I took a photo of a banjo, and behind it was that painting, and I had no clue at the time what the painting was. But it was in Kristina Gaddy’s “Well of Souls,” there’s a foreword where she talks about this painting like a novel, [saying] “just listen to it, and the way it’s described, the painting was just so alive, and it just represented the crux of what the banjo is meant for — the community aspect and the joy, and it just was exactly the kind of embodiment of the film that I wanted to have, so then it [became], “Okay, I have to make this come to life.”
And you actually do – you assemble people for a scene recreating the painting with all the joy that entailed. How did the idea come about to do that and what was that day like?
I’ve been a journalist for a really long time, and I have a deep, deep disdain for found footage pictures. I find them so boring, and I did not want to do that, so I [thought], how can I embody this and bring it alive into the space? The main idea was that I wanted to take all of the historical aspects that I was researching at the time, and instead of showing a bunch of photos, I wanted to actually show how that photo might have felt. What it really must have been like to have this instrument, to be dancing with your kin after a long day, to have this little reprieve of celebration and joy.
That’s where the idea came from, but in practice, it was really difficult. The actor that was holding the banjo, this is our fourth project together and he’s fantastic, but he had never played the banjo before, and I also was a beginner banjo player, so I only knew how to play a few chords, and we spent most of the time leading up to it [learning how to play]. I had to lend him the banjo, and I sent him a video of how to practice holding it right, playing the same three chords over and over and over again. And we shot it in six hours on this sweeping Malibu estate. It was absolutely insane. There was a point in time where I think I was in a car, and we were running out of daylight, and it was so deep in the mountains, so everybody got lost and were two hours late, so we had four hours [to shoot].
You do get the feeling of joy from the scene, so I’m even more impressed. And it actually seems integral to how you film this – the atmosphere can really be felt around you and other banjo players. What was it like to cover those scenes with the camera?
The word “joy” is very much at the center of who I am. It’s a name in my family, and joy is a big feeling in my life, so I think finding joy comes really naturally to me, and when we were talking about the shots, we used the colors of the painting to help us imagine the visual style of the world, so [that’s the inspiration for] those yellows and those greens. And then a lot of the times the question I was asking to my team was, “Are you having fun doing this?” We took a road trip to San Francisco and we got so connected on that trip, the joy that we felt as a connected team over this film just came through, so when we’re talking about this instrument, which has many facets to it — it’s used not just for joy, but for all kinds of things — and when you’re looking for [joy], you kind of find it. But I think I just look for what felt good and what made us happy.
Did anything happen that changed your ideas of what this was?
Initially in the story, I wasn’t in the voiceover at all. That was something that came in the edit and it was pretty difficult to let go of. Initially, we had four historians, Joe Johnson, a a Black banjo and fiddle fellow, Tony Thomas, who’s one of the foremost Black banjo experts of all time and they were giving more of an academic standpoint of the instrument and its history in narration, but because the class [this was a project for] is over six months, we were getting close to the end there and it just was not clicking. What we were showing was a feeling, but what we were hearing was text, so after the advice of my editors and my professor, they [said] “You should just try and do a pass where you talk about how you’re feeling.” And my brother’s a poet, so I had him help me figure out how to write these things out about how I was feeling and [when I laid in] my voice in at the end, it just made all of those aspects snap into place.
Did the fact you knew you had to end the film with your performance actually lead you to become a better banjo player?
Absolutely! That is the other thing — we were trying to find another Black beginner banjo player and spoiler alert, there were not a lot around, so I was like, “Damn, I have to actually play this well.” [laughs] My producers literally [put in] time in our production calendar where I had to practice. And because the performance was coming up, they would FaceTime me and watch me practice to make sure that I was practicing and I had to send them a video. I was playing the banjo before class, after class, and I would bring my banjo to school, then play it in the backseat of my car. If I had some time between classes…it got intense towards the end. But it helped me become a lot better and really confident. Becoming fluent in one made me want to become fluent in so many more.
What’s it been like to get this film out into the world?
The reception it’s been getting has been really shocking. This is my first time doing a festival run, and being at these festivals like the Florida Film Festival, where I used to work, and having a film play at my home theater that I love so much and knowing how competitive it is, it’s been really inspiring because the films that I get to watch around my film have ignited [excitement for] me for what I want to make next and meeting the kinds of filmmakers that I’ve met. USC is such an interesting place, but that can be an echo chamber, so getting to go outside of the school and meet some of the filmmakers who align with the kind of films that I’m passionate about and having my film play before or after theirs, that still makes no sense to me — and my dad comes with me to all the festivals, but we’ve just been having a blast.
“Boil That Cabbage Down” will screen at the Blackstar Film Festival on August 1st at the Wilma Theatre at 11 am EST and will be available to screen virtually for 48 hours starting at 1:30 pm EST.