Episodes

It's the life and times of the hard traveling music-man Woody Guthrie on American Masters in a national encore broadcast Tuesday, November 13, 2012, on PBS (check local listings). All in honor of the centennial of Guthrie's birth and in concert with the premiere of Ken Burns' two-part documentary The Dust Bowl.

Muddy Waters is, in many ways, the archetypal bluesman. He was raised as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta, where he learned to play an acoustic guitar. He went to Chicago in 1943, and the band he assembled established the electric blues sound. Over the next three and a half-decades, his band became a springboard for many of his sidemen, launching a prominent school of blues performers.

A quintet of African-American women, singing as a unit of the vocal workshop of Washington D.C’s Black Repertory Theater Company, organized an a cappella group and called themselves “Sweet Honey In The Rock.” It would not overstate the case to add the overworked – but definitely applicable – phrase “and the rest is history.”

Considered the father of the screwball comedy, Preston Sturges was recognized as one of the great early writers in Hollywood. Sturges was born in 1898 in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Mary Desti, was an Irish immigrant with dreams of stardom. When Preston was still an infant, she left his father and later pursued a career as a singer.

The period that followed the end of World War I was one of gaiety & optimism, and it sparked a new era of creativity in American culture. Surely one of the most profound — and outrageous — influences on the times was the group of a dozen or so tastemakers who lunched together at New York City’s Algonquin Hotel. For more than a decade they met daily and came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table

The American novel is a powerful story. It unifies us, it motivates us, it gives meaning to our lives. It is a story affirming that success in this country is not a matter of inheritance but, rather a matter of determination. It is a story assuring us that we can, indeed, define our own destiny. Yet, experience tells us there is another American story.

A pillar of the American film industry, William Wyler directed some of the best loved movies of his time. Known for his sensitive direction of great actors, he worked with some of the best, including John Barrymore, Bette Davis, Humphry Bogart, and Myrna Loy. Today he is considered both a master director and a substantial influence on American culture.

He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"The most important singer to emerge from the bop era.” Ella Fitzgerald called her the world’s “greatest singing talent.” During the course of a career that spanned nearly fifty years, she was the singer’s singer, influencing everyone from Mel Torme to Anita Baker. She was among the musical elite identified by their first names. She was Sarah, Sassy — the incomparable Sarah Vaughan.

At the turn of the century in America, the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight, Jack London wrote Call of the Wild, Henry Ford started his motor company, and thousands of people escaped small apartments in big cities to see the amazing acts of vaudeville. Vaudeville was made of comedians, singers, plate-spinners, ventriloquists, dancers, musicians, acrobats, and animal trainers.

In 1952, a 22-year old athlete with little training or experience won a work scholarship to the American Dance Festival. Powerfully built, he immediately captured the attention of dance giants Martha Graham, José Limón, and Doris Humphrey. This young dancer had a commanding presence, instinctive talent, and a unique way of moving.

The work of William Styron, which includes novels such as SOPHIE’S CHOICE and THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, has generated both praise and controversy over the past fifty years. Grounded in history and epic in sweep, his fiction has grappled with some of the most harrowing events and unresolved moral questions of our time.

When Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs met in New York City in the 1940s, they had no intention of starting a social revolution. According to Ginsberg, “We were just trying to propose our own souls to ourselves.” In the midst of post-war conservatism, these young writers had become disenchanted and were experimenting with new forms of communication.

The war in the South Pacific, a country doctor in Colorado, victims of industrial pollution in a Japanese village — all of these were captured in unforgettable photographs by the legendary W. Eugene Smith. No matter where, what, or whom he was shooting, Smith drove himself relentlessly to create evocative portraits that revealed the essence of his subjects in a way that touched the emotions.

In the 1960s, Paul Simon’s moving lyric “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was an anthem for a generation. With Art Garfunkel he made moving testaments to the times, fusing folk and rock music. In the 1980s he pioneered a popular cross-cultural music that brought South African musicians into mainstream America. Recently, Simon finished his most ambitious project yet — “The Capeman,” a Broadway musical.