A school fire, a shooting and mental health issues plagued a man whose legacy is remembered in a new documentary
Thirty years ago, when the music writer Jim Abbott tried to track down the “lost” folk singer Jackson C Frank, he had no idea what he’d find. All he had to guide him was a tip from an old associate of Frank’s to go to a housing facility in Queens, New York, where he was told he was living. When he finally arrived there, the man he saw bore no relation to the Frank he was expecting. “All I had to go on was his album cover from 1965 when he was much younger and looked pretty dashing,” Abbott said. “This was the 90s when he was much heavier and was hobbling around looking really grouchy.”
The place Frank was living in “was populated by drug addicts and hookers and, for some reason, had this gigantic sand pit in the middle of the lobby that you had to walk around. It’s very hard to weird me out,” Abbott said. “This did.”
Regardless, he sought and sustained a close friendship with Frank, initially inspired by his love for the only album the artist ever released in his lifetime. A self-titled work, Frank’s album was produced in the mid-60s by a young Paul Simon, featured guitar work from Al Stewart and included haunting ballads the musician wrote that were covered at the time by folk icons such as Sandy Denny (whom he briefly dated), Nick Drake and John Renbourn. Upon its release, Frank’s album barely sold but, as happened with so many once overlooked artists, his songs were disinterred during the YouTube era leading to covers by artists such as Laura Marling, John Mayer and Counting Crows, as well as their usage in popular TV series such as This Is Us, and films as widely seen as Joker. In 2014, Abbott wrote a book about the artist’s life and music titled Jackson C Frank: The Clear Hard Light of Genius.
Now, Frank’s legacy has a chance to be discovered by a whole new audience through the first documentary about his life, by the French director Damien Aimé Dupont, titled for one of his most cherished songs, Blues Run the Game. As told in the film, Frank’s story stands with the sorriest of the many doomed musician sagas, replete with tales of intense physical pain, lingering mental trauma, horrific diagnoses, an accidental shooting that left him blind in one eye, as well as periods of homelessness. Frank’s story and music were so compelling to Dupont that he pursued the film even though funds were scarce and footage of the artist, who died in 1999, was severely limited. Only an 18-second flash of silent film of Frank performing survived. More, there was a serious language issue: Dupont barely spoke English when he started the project. “I took lessons for the film,” he said with a laugh during a Zoom interview in which he was aided by a translator.