A Journey Through the Blues The Son Seals Story
May 2008 Reviewed by: Joseph Taylor Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

"We lived right in the back of my daddy’s juke joint," Frank "Son" Seals tells us in A Journey Through the Blues: The Son Seals Story." I got the chance at a real early age to see what was going on out front -- you know, peeping through people’s legs, people picking me up, putting me on their shoulders, let me see the bandstand." Seals was born in 1942 in Osceola, Arkansas, and his life was so full of incident it sounds like a parody of a blues legend. Seals told Bruce Inglauer, who signed the guitarist and singer to Alligator Records in 1973, that he learned about music from his father. He also learned about gambling from him. Seals told Inglauer that the first time he played cards with his father, he was standing on a dead body so he could reach the table.

Seals, the youngest of 13 children, was pulled towards the blues after seeing so many great musicians, including Albert King and Robert Nighthawk, when they came through town. He started out on drums and began sitting in with top blues musicians. He picked up the guitar when he was 17 and soon was leading his own band. "You have to start off playing like somebody," he says in the film. Seals took what he learned from the musicians he’d heard and developed his distinctive style, which showed the influence of Albert and B.B. King, but with a uniquely stinging tone and a brutal yet elegant attack. Seals moved to Chicago in 1971 so he could be where the blues was played ". . . every night of the week, every night, and in more than one joint." One evening he sat in with an old friend, Hound Dog Taylor, and ended up signing with Inglauer.

Seals, a powerful singer and formidable blues songwriter, gained some critical standing and a solid following with his second LP, Midnight Son (1976), but his life was a series of grinding one-night stands. Younger fans caught on to him in 2000, when Phish’s Trey Anastasio played on what would be Seals’ final studio recording, Lettin’ Go. By that time, he had survived a gunshot wound from an ex-wife in 1997 and the loss of a leg to diabetes in 1999. Two years later Seals’ motor home was destroyed in a fire. In 2004, diabetes took him at age 61.

A Journey Through the Blues includes comments from other musicians and from Seals’ son and sister. The film also includes interview footage with Seals, who never betrays a moment of self-pity. A half-hour seems short rations for a story as rich as this one, but the film is well paced. A half-hour of live performances, from three dates, helps fill out the DVD. The two-channel sound is generally good, although one of the live recordings is scratchy.

Son Seals lived a life worthy of a feature film, but until it is made A Journey Through the Blues: The Son Seals Story will have to suffice.

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