Output details

From Manchester to the Mississippi - Radio Documentary (Writer and Presenter)

Commissioned for BBC Radio 4, Lee’s 30-minute documentary is about Granada Television’s 1964 outside broadcast of a Manchester performance by the historic Blues and Gospel Train UK tour by African-American musicians that year. The programme was first aired on 9 November 2009; it has been repeated several times, and extracts from the original interviews used extensively in subsequent radio popular music documentaries, most recently in October 2013 on BBC Radio 2’s Didn't It Rain: When The Blues Came To Britain.

In the programme Lee continues his exploration of popular media culture evident across his body of BBC radio documentaries. Lee’s is innovative media practice research that draws on archive sound material and original recorded interviews, insights from his published academic research, a certain performative presence and interest as a media and music ‘personality’, and also makes use of the sonic possibilities of radio as a media form.

Lee’s oral history technique blends a montage of interviews with participants who were at the original television recording, including fans, the producer Johnnie Hamp, and the tour manager. He also paints an aural landscape around the featured performances of some of the leading artists, including Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. With his insight into the import of the event and analysis of why it became one of the most influential music television programmes of the 1960s, Lee also includes commentators such as British blues singer and presenter Paul Jones and American academic Gayle Wald to discuss the show’s post-concert legacy in relation to transatlantic popular music.

Lee’s published work in the field includes his 2002 book Shake Rattle and Rain: Popular Music-Making in Manchester 1995-1995. He incorporated many of the musical elements of the show in an invited concert at the Lowry Theatre, Manchester with John Cooper-Clarke on 1 August 2009.