Crosstown Arts presents a special screening of You’re the Life of Me in Crosstown Theater.

Crosstown Theater
Thursday, October 3, 2024
Tickets: $5 at the door
Doors at 6:30 pm | Film begins at 7:00 pm (sharp!)

Shevan Bastian / 2024 

First time filmmaker Shevan Bastian sets out in Jackson Tennessee with these questions in mind, as he interviews and works with a group of musicians, while examining the roots of Black music in a small Southern city on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.

The documentary film You’re the Life of Me loosely follows the pursuit of creative renewal that Howard Rambsy and Barbara Jean Mercer experience as they engage with music making in their later years. Rambsy has written and arranged an obscure 1977 soul song recorded by a band consisting of his friends and family called Cold-Blooded Express. The song, You’re the Life of Me, is being recreated with the original members of Cold Blooded as well as Los Yesterdays, a younger duo consisting of Chicano members of LA’s burgeoning modern soul scene. Mercer dreams of recapturing some of the freedom of her youth by performing from her catalog for a large community of British Northern Soul fans at a reunion in Detroit.

Re-accessing their best creative selves, the two stories bookend interviews and discussions with noted local Jackson Black musical excellence about local musical pedagogy, the role of the Church in popular music and the former power and glory of juke joints and their contribution to musicianship.

Throughout the film, Howard and Barbara set the tempo, voicing ideas around belonging, love and freedom, foregrounded by a dreamlike accompaniment of the Jacksonian landscape of kudzu and cotton fields. You’re the Life of Me is a love letter to Jackson, a gentle reminder of the intrinsic connections between community and the art it creates, and a response to the tension between America’s love for Black culture but not Black people.

The Crosstown Arts Film Series showcases a diverse collection of independent, international, historically significant, artistic, experimental, cult, underground, and documentary features.