Part of Music City Mondays and Nashville: A City on Film
Mon, Jan 5 at 8:00pm: Introduction from T. Minton, Belcourt's public historian and archivist
Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, James Szalapski’s landmark documentary offers a vivid, ground-level portrait of the emerging Outlaw Country movement in Texas and Tennessee during the winter of 1975–76. Blending an observational style with intimate musical performances, the film follows singer-songwriters Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, David Allan Coe, Steve Young and the Charlie Daniels Band — artists who rejected the polished “Nashville Sound” of the previous decade in favor of older folk and country traditions. Szalapski captures early recordings by Earle and Crowell, visits Van Zandt at his Austin trailer, films Coe performing inside the Tennessee State Prison — and ends with a Christmas Eve gathering at Guy Clark’s Nashville home.
Szalapski’s approach underscores the presence and personality of these musicians before they became pillars of American music, revealing the layered and sometimes contrasting truths of Nashville’s cultural landscape in the mid- to late 1970s. The film also contains subtle connections that point to the city’s role in shaping both music and film — and to the broader, overlapping histories that make up Nashville’s entertainment lineage across the 20th century. Together, these threads help trace how the city’s musical past continues to echo through roots music, local cinema, performance culture, and the outlaw ethos itself.
“Part concert movie, part behind-the-scenes and backstage documentary, HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS is something distinctive, more like a compilation album than a conventional doc…. It’s shaggy and rambling, like a hard-drinking and hard-living songwriter or an unfinished gravel road.” —Nadine Smith, Nashville Scene “While the songwriters Szalapski follows are exceptional, there is the sense that he could have just as effectively been following any number of other young artists or communities. The documentary pushes into the moment, which if not timeless, is at least removed from time. The lack of context as the camera rolls is the point.” —Doug Freeman, Austin Chronicle
