DEEP ROOTS:
The Art and Music of Bill Steber and Friends
Now screening at select theaters and festivals
DEEP ROOTS: The Art and Music of Bill Steber and Friends is the latest feature-length music film directed by Robert Mugge, and produced by Mugge with his partner Diana Zelman. It is intended as a companion piece to Mugge’s 1991 film DEEP BLUES, which explored blues traditions of the Mississippi Delta and North Mississippi Hill Country. DEEP ROOTS examines the life and work of artist, photographer, and musician Bill Steber, while showcasing Black and white musical traditions of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, and rural music scenes of Mississippi and Tennessee. The film's first half takes place in Steber’s home base of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and its second half in the Mississippi Delta, long a major focus of his work. Included are interviews conducted at a Murfreesboro gallery exhibit of Steber’s art and photography; visits to Clarksdale, Mississippi’s Juke Joint Festival and Leland, Mississippi’s Highway 61 Blues Museum; and public performances by three of Steber’s powerful music groups: Jake Leg Stompers, Stoop Down Rounders, and Hoodoo Men.
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"Deep Roots: The Art and Music of Bill Steber and Friends [is] a documentary that returns the filmmaker to the Tennessee/Mississippi territory that has provided especially fertile soil for his art. The most momentous of Mugge’s more-or-less-local films was probably Deep Blues (1991), which introduced viewers to such previously neglected...artists as Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. The title of Mugge’s new film is an intentional echo. The blues acolyte/enthusiast/evangelist name-checked in the title…is a Murfreesboro, Tennessee-based photographer, musician, and painter. Steber, Mugge said, is ‘a guide into this world that he loves to document, this world that he inhabits’ and, through his artistic interpretations, 'helps to create.’”
- John Beifuss, Memphis Commercial Appeal (May 4, 2025)
Click for Memphis Commercial Appeal
feature story about May 7, 2025 world premiere |
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“Mugge has taken the profile approach with his latest motion picture, Deep Roots. On one level, it’s the story of a man, Bill Steber. But in truth, it’s the story of Steber’s passions, his creative pursuits, and the manner in which those elements come together to create a body of work and a mission. He brings to the mission the fervor of a religious zealot, the warmheartedness of a treasured friend, the scholarship of a learned academician, and—most importantly—the honest appreciation of the women and men who created the musical forms he reveres. Mugge captures the onscreen images and sounds in a way that’s deeply authentic. Music—as real as it gets—completes the picture.”
- Bill Kopp, Living Blues Magazine (July/August 2025)
Click for entire Living Blues Magazine review |
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