‘The Blues Under the Skin’ Trailer: Restored Blues Doc Featuring
B.B. King and Buddy Guy Finally Hits Theaters After 50 Years

Roviros Manthoulis' 1973 documentary has long been a lost piece of music history. Now, blues
lovers have a chance to experience it on the big screen.

Even the most casual students of American music will be quick to tell you that it’s almost
impossible to find a musical tradition that can’t be traced back to the blues.
From the lyrical repetition and call-and-response structure of countless pop songs to the 12-bar
guitar lines that formed the foundation of jazz and rock ‘n roll (which in turn created many of
the samples that fueled the genesis of hip-hop), America’s first art form produced many of the
creative traditions and stylistic flourishes that we now take for granted.

As the blues artists of the early 20th-century continue to influence a new generation of
musicians in both direct and indirect ways, a forgotten documentary featuring many of the
genre’s most influential voices is returning to theaters this summer. The 1973 film, “The Blues
Under the Skin” documents the origins of the blues through conversations with legends
including B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Bukka
White, and Roosevelt Sykes.

The film explored the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and the ways that the genre
was inextricably linked to the institutions of slavery and segregation before entering
mainstream American culture. While the blues was already a century-old art form at the time of
the film’s production, “The Blues Under the Skin” was shot against the backdrop of a late 1960s
and early ’70s music landscape that featured artists like The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The
Band Eric Clapton, and the Grateful Dead, all of whom pulled heavily from blues traditions to
write some of the era’s biggest hits.

The film never received a theatrical release in the United States and has existed for fifty years
as a piece of lost media available only to the most diligent scholars and archivists who could
track down a copy. But following a new 2K restoration, Kino Lorber is bringing the film to
theaters this summer for a proper release.

IndieWire can exclusively reveal the trailer for the restored film’s theatrical run, which begins in
select markets on Friday, July 12. Watch the trailer here:
https://www.indiewire.com/news/trailers/the-blues-under-the-skin-trailer-1235016295/