Soundtrack Album Challenge
Tiny Hands and Wrong-Eyed Jesus’s
Searching through the weeds and back roads
If you drive or walk along enough country back roads, you’ll see hauntingly familiar sights: rusted out and abandoned old structures (were they grocery store stop-in’s; storage sheds?); machinery abandoned to Johnson grass and other varying forms of wild weed; rutted dirt roads leading to places we might imagine or wish that we didn’t.
But sometimes, if you travel long enough or if you’re really lucky and hit it on your first go, you’ll walk by a still-in-use station wagon and find a young woman sitting on the edge of the opened trunk door, and she’ll be fine tuning an old saw, using her bow, and the other-worldly sound you’ll hear is “Amazing Grace,” and how she achieved this masterwork is as unknowable as that rutted road’s beginning and end.
If this were the only revelation on artist Jim White’s semi-spiritual journey, the film and soundtrack of his 2003 Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, it would be enough for me. Thankfully, there’s so much more.
I had never heard of the film or of Jim White until my colleague, Phillip Perdue, advised that if I wanted a film for my Southern Film class that defied and exceeded all expectations, this was the one. It had to be.
