Black by popular demand: black and blue: black women in jazz and blues music.

These two documentaries take a traditional approach to familiar subjects and rely for their impact on the strength of the stories they have to tell. ‘Tiny and Ruby: hell divin’ women’ (Producer Andrea Weiss, director Greta Schiller) evokes the masculine milieu of the American jazz scene that two marginalised women have managed to succeed in. ‘Wild women don’t have the blues’ (Producers Carol Doyle Van Vallenburgh) mixes the oral history of now veteran performers with archive footage, old photographs and sound recordings to revise male-oriented preconceptions around development of the blues. Both stories are set against an economic and social context in which black people were far from equal, emphasising the strength, determination and sheer power of women who live on their music. This compilation will appeal not only to those interested in blues and jazz, but is also a good example for cinema studies for it’s documentary, drama and animation style.