Great music isn’t always captured by musicians, record labels or studio producers.

Sometimes, great music can be captured by a filmmaker.

And few artists working in motion pictures have created a body of work as consistent as Bob Mugge, a low-key, Philadelphia-based filmmaker who’s been capturing the essence of great performers and performances since the 1970s.

Like a journeyman musician whose recordings can go in and out of print, Mugge’s films have often seen fleeting releases at film festivals and art-house circuits but slipped just as easily into memory.

This fall, Mugge’s work, including two of special interest to many blues fans - Mugge’s 1991 landmark documentary Deep Blues and his just-finished Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson - are set for video release.

In the 1990s, Mugge’s films have mostly hewn close to blues roots: Pride and Joy: The Story of Alligator Records came in 1992; Gather at the River: A Bluegrass Celebration, The Kingdom of Zydeco and True Believers: The Musical Family of Rounder Records” all came in 1994; Iguanas in the House in 1996 and now, Hellhounds on my Trail, a chronicle and then some, of a week-long tribute to the legendary bluesman sponsored by the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in September 1998.

As a filmmaker, Mugge was influenced by directors such as Marcel Ophuls and Louis Malle, who made long, non-fiction films without narration about the same time Mugge was in film school. He also credits a series of BBC documentaries by Ken Russells. “I got to believe that narration was an easy way out, and that you should get the people in the film to tell the story,” he says.

With that aesthetic, Mugge outlined the basic blueprint for building his films: “Going back and forth between musical performances and interviews, hoping that each of these would illuminate the life and art of the person being profiled.”

“I was inspired by this idea that you could do a portrait of an artist and that you could put in a lot of other things about the artist to illuminate the work - the landscape from which they come, the community from which they come, that allows you see the context of the art. So from the very first there was a danger of working by a formula.”

But the “formula” works, and it’s molded in each film by the unfolding of the subject. Mostly that’s because he’s an innately intelligent interviewer, using the right passages of conversation to support the music.

But it’s also because there’s often visual poetry in Mugge’s vision that rises above a typical concert film or MTV video hack. Take the scene in Deep Blues with R.L. Burnside sitting on his rickety porch playing a beat-up Telecaster, while British rock star Dave Stewart plays along on an acoustic, almost like a religious pilgrim kneeling at the feet of a wizened master at some far-flung temple of the blues.

Mugge cuts from Burnside’s sinewy hands to some of the nearby folk who’ve gathered on this summer day to hear the music and to a kid sitting atop a bike with no wheels. Burnside watches with a bemused smile as Stewart improvises a bit, and Mugge captures both the natural performance and the scene’s surrealism: This is down-home Southern black music being played in the bright sunlight, with a white, British outsider dressed all in black - wearing inky sunglasses and hair dyed jet black - playing along.

Mugge’s earlier films concentrate more often on single artists; recent films have been overviews of genres such as Deep Blues or Gather at the River, which documents the 1993 World of Bluegrass Festival and International Bluegrass Music Association awards ceremony in Owensboro, Kentucky.

“There are a couple of reasons for that,” he explains. “I’m not sure how many artists are around whose work is important enough and whose lives are interesting enough to carry a whole film the way a Sun Ra or Sonny Rollins have done for me. It’s also a matter of what you could get money for. In recent years it’s been easier to get funding for projects covering a number of artists hinged around an event.”

Those projects include the tributes to the independent labels Rounder and Alligator, but Mugge points out sometimes it’s just a way for him to get around financial restrictions and still do what he wants. No one would pay for a film about Peter Rowan, he allows, but by making Rowan the main on-camera spokesman explaining the music and its origins in Gather at the River, Mugge managed to show us as much about Rowan as he does about the bluegrass industry.

The principle narrator, the “guide,” is a key figure in many of Mugge’s films, and especially in the case of Deep Blues, where Mugge and his crew mapped out a Mississippi blues territory that had not been visited by many outsiders. In that film, Southern music critic Robert Palmer is the indispensable helmsman.

It was Dave Stewart’s idea to document the Delta blues scene that thrived outside of the music industry. Mugge was asked to film the project, and Palmer signed on because of his depth of knowledge. In the opening scene he gives Stewart a tour of Beale Street in Memphis and explains how most of it is different from when he lived there in 1965, when blues singer Furry Lewis was a street sweeper and many of the elder musicians lived in the neighborhood.

In another early scene, where Palmer introduces Stewart to pianist Booker T. Laury, Stewart stares entranced as Laury’s hands dance across the keyboards in his living room while Palmer sits in the background and lackadaisically sips a whiskey.

During key segments - such as after Stewart leaves the film for a tour with his band, the Spiritual Cowboys - Palmer’s voice-overs become quick, two-minute musicological surveys jammed with both overview and details about the evolution of this Southern roots music and its migration up the Mississippi to the cities of the North.

The film introduced a cadre of little-known musicians who have since become much-better known and gotten national exposure through recording contracts: Junior Kimbrough, the late Roosevelt “Booba” Barnes, Jessie Mae Hemphill (who is featured both with her fife-and-drum band and playing solo guitar). At the time the film was made, Palmer points out, if you wanted to hear Junior Kimbrough’s music, “You got to go jukin’,” because he hadn’t yet been captured on records.

But after the film’s completion, Palmer released a soundtrack that posited himself as the producer, and though Mugge says he was still friendly with the writer, who died in 1998, the filmmaker wants to set the record straight on a couple of things.

“On some level, every film is a collaboration,” Mugge admits. “He brought to it so much, obviously so much about his knowledge of this music.”

But, he states, the film started with Stewart, who gave the project to producer Eileen Gregory, who works with Stewart. “It wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t run with it,” Mugge says. “She laid the groundwork for the production and created this opportunity for Palmer and me to collaborate. I provided the visual metaphors and Robert provided the verbal ones.”

Palmer’s liner notes for the soundtrack, Mugge says, “basically said Dave Stewart hired him to do a live record, and as an afterthought they brought in a film crew,” and he points out that the sound man on the recording - whom critics as august as Cub Koda credit to Palmer without mentioning the film - is the same recording engineer who has worked on all of Mugge’s films over the years. Mugge says releasing a CD of the film’s music was originally just a plot device he dreamed up for Palmer and Stewart.

A couple other points that Mugge wants to clarify: The film has no relation to Palmer’s book of the same name, except that both cover roots blues music; and Palmer gave permission for the title to be used for the film. “It was the only name all of us could agree on,” he says. And, he adds, Stewart’s involvement was purely to get the project done, and in fact he didn’t want to be in the film until the producers convinced him his appearance would help interest younger rock fans in the music. “Dave Stewart didn’t do any grandstanding.”

The importance of bringing fringe music to wider audiences was also key to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’s week-long tribute to Robert Johnson. Hellhounds segues between panels featuring notable scholars, including keynote speaker Peter Guralnick and Robert Santelli (who works for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and organized the Johnson tribute), discussing Johnson’s life and influence, amid several nights of performances by an amazing variety of musicians from both the blues and rock worlds: From Robert Lockwood Jr. to Keb’ Mo’, Chris Whitely, Sonny Landreth, Peter Green, Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman, Rory Block, Alvin Youngblood Heart, G. Love, Gov’t Mule and Joe Louis Walker, all proving that Johnson’s songs have more than survived the test of time in many guises and stylistic treatments.

Aside from the performances, which Mugge captures with his usual sense of visual dynamics, Hellhounds includes three narrative scenes in particular that make the film special, and they all involve Stephen La Vere, the legal representative of Johnson’s musical royalties.

Though he’s often been demonized by music fans and writers for squeezing people for money every time a Johnson photo (there are only two in circulation) or song is used, the film introduces him as a historian who’s protected the legal rights of Johnson’s heirs over the years. Once he started tracking Johnson’s publishing legacy, La Vere went directly to rock musicians who have played Johnson’s songs. First up was Eric Clapton, who recorded “Crossroads” with Cream and had been strongly influenced by the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961. La Vere describes how Clapton immediately and gladly gave up any rights to the song. Mugge couldn’t get people who have privately criticized La Vere to do so on camera, and the lone writer who did couldn’t substantiate his charges to Mugge’s satisfaction.

La Vere’s appearance itself is something of a revelation. “He can be less than diplomatic,” Mugge says, “but Steve La Vere goes out of his way, and every chance he gets he promotes the memory of Robert Johnson and the art of Robert Johnson and helps supports projects about Robert Johnson.”

Another riveting moment comes during a panel which screens the much-discussed film clip that a Beale Street store owner has suggested might be Johnson (see BA#36). Among the scenes of weekend life on a busy Ruleville, Mississippi, street, the brief - and mesmerizing - clip shows a young, black street musician with spidery fingers blazing down the frets of an acoustic guitar. Watching, it, you can see how many music fans would want it to be Johnson, because it would be such a priceless record of the man.

But La Vere and scholar Thomas Freeland do a deft job of pointing out other things in the film that prove the film was shot three years after Johnson’s death. Finally, Johnson’s stepson, Robert Lockwood Jr., announces authoritatively after viewing the clip: “I don’t care how many times you look at this film, it ain’t never gonna be Robert Johnson.” Any questions?

The third transcendent scene - which brings Johnson’s music back home and out of the sterile stage confines of a big-city auditorium - is when Mugge shoots a La Vere interview with Willie Coffee, a childhood friend of Johnson’s who pulls out his guitar on his front porch to show some of the licks his friend taught him.

A delighted La Vere shows Coffee some documents, including school records of a class Coffee and Johnson attended together, and the photos of Johnson, which Coffee recognizes as his old friend. In one particularly touching sequence Coffee wipes tears from his face as he recalls Johnson’s enormous talent.

Coffee also says he never believed the legend that Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads to get his talent. “He was always coming in here with a lot of jive,” he chuckles.

Mugge tackles several such myths in Hellhounds. “I wanted to take those myths which have attached themselves to Robert Johnson over the years,” he says, “and turn them over on their heads. It’s a lot of romantic fun but nonsense about selling his soul to the devil.” Mugge and others at the conference also challenge the legend of his death at the hands of a jealous husband who poisoned him. Good story, but Mugge believes Johnson died of congenital syphilis, which is also the opinion offered on the death certificate.

Ultimately, Mugge thinks all the fans with wacky theories about Johnson, as well as the musicians who play his music and the academics and critics who debate it more than 60 years after his death are the “hellhounds” on the bluesman’s trail. “It greatly amused me that all these people won’t leave Robert Johnson in death.”

Mugge coincidentally shares the same birthday as Robert Johnson - May 8 - but at 49 he’s got a lot to look forward to. Besides the re-release of the long out-of-print Deep Blues and Hellhounds’ debut, tech-heads can expect DVD versions of most of Mugge’s catalog that will include extra musical tracks and other content, such as an essay on Hawaiian music for the Hawaiian Rainbows release, and the full, uninterrupted hour-long Sunday service from The Gospel According to Al Green. “You can feel how it builds and ebbs and flows in a way I can’t show in a movie,” he says. Mugge’s pleased to be able to add the bonus material - it’s more context for his multimedia portraits.

Though his recent work might make him appear to be a blues fanatic, Mugge has the catholic taste of a music fan who grew up with early rock and has fallen in love with sounds from many lands and regions.

His film education began during college; his musical education came much earlier, when he was given his first radio when he was four years old in Raleigh, North Carolina. ”I started listening to whatever was around - probably down there I heard a real interesting mix of country and gospel and rockabilly,” he says. “I have early but vague memories of hearing Ray Charles. In second grade, in 1957 I started watching American Bandstand and got focused on rock’n’roll.”

His family moved to Washington, D.C., when he was nine, and he quickly got hooked on the city’s soul beat. By the time he was in high school, he remembers, “I went back and forth between Bob Dylan and whatever Motown and Stax act was popular at the moment. My friends and I would go to the Howard Theatre - the city’s equivalent of the Apollo Theatre - to see Motown revues, with line-ups that included Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Jr. Walker … I can’t even remember who else would be on those shows. They say the music you listen to in adolescence has the greatest emotional impact on you. I certainly enjoy listening to rhythm and blues in all its forms, from doo-wop to soul to Al Green to blues.”

Growing up, he played various instruments and was in soul and psychedelic bands; he even wrote a musical comedy. “By the time I was in college I was writing short plays and ‘mixed media’ extravaganzas. It was the late ’60s, and these were tied into ‘happenings’ and the arts were getting crazier and wilder.

At Frostburg State College, where he majored in English, Mugge hadn’t quite found his calling. “I ran a head shop and coffeehouse - the Red Neck - where I showed film festivals and multi-media events and my plays. There was a day-glo peace sign in front,” he laughs.

He lived illegally in the top floor of the building and eventually got busted for pot. He was, he admits under some duress, a hippie. “I had always had a disdain for the more extreme ones, but I was part of my times.”

A burst pipe in his head shop was the impetus to send him into film studies. He left Frostburg for the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where he decided that “film was the way to focus all my different interests.”

He had started experimenting with films for his mixed-media happenings, but he was talented enough to be the recipient of the first film grant given under the new National Endowment for the Humanities Youth Grant Program. He used the funds to make Frostburg, a cultural portrait of the town where he’d been busted, and which has “more bars and churches than any town in America.”

Graduate school at Temple University brought him to Philadelphia. “I thought I’d make feature films and make fun little music films on the side,” he recalls. “But I kept getting funding for the little music films and they got bigger and bigger. It got successful enough so it became a career, of sorts.”

His professional career began with a 1976 profile of the composer George Crumb, then a 1978 portrait of the late Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo. Since then Mugge has made his reputation as one of the best chroniclers of various musical styles, through both biographical films of individual musicians and broader roadmaps of genres. Like a restless journeyman musician, Mugge’s criss-crossed the country recording indigenous styles, using his camera as his instrument and film for tape.

Among his prodigious body of work: Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980), Black Wax (1982, a portrait of Gil Scott-Heron), Cool Runnings: The Reggae Movie (1983, capturing the Jamaica Sun Splash festival), Gospel According to Al Green (1984), The Return of Ruben Blades (1985, an early appreciation of salsa music), Saxophone Colossus (1986, an excellent portrait of jazz giant Sonny Rollins), Hawaiian Rainbow and Kuma Hula (1987 and 1989 - the first a love affair with Hawaiian music and the second a closer look at the tradition of hula dancing), Entertaining the Troops (1988, a look back at the pre-baby boom generation’s entertainers during World War II).

His relationship with Santelli and the Rock Hall of Fame may turn into other projects. He’s hoping to film a bus tour of New Orleans and southwest Louisiana with Santelli, and another Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame tribute to the jump blues and swing star Louis Jordan.

He’d still someday like to do films on African, doo-wop and other black music styles, and regrets he hasn’t been able to do portraits of Neil Young, George Clinton and James Brown. He may yet get to do a film of Stephen Sondheim, but he’s not worried. As he says: “There are plenty of musical territories left.”