When we made the original version of “Awake, My Soul,” we approached it from the perspective, not of documentarians in pursuit of a subject for a film, but as Sacred Harp singers who were curious about why there was not already a feature-length documentary about this idiosyncratic musical tradition. In the absence of a satisfactory answer to this question, we took it in hand to remedy what seemed like an obvious oversight. Since we did not really have a background in filmmaking, it was a massive and lengthy undertaking, occupying a considerable part of our attention and energy from 1998–2007.

The first five years or so, we collected footage, and if anyone asked, it was because we were “making a film.” At a certain point in the intervening years— and one can hardly point to a specific moment— we realized that, apart from anything else, we had committed enough work to the project that we felt there was no turning back. Through sheer stubbornness, we got to a finish line and enough people found the subject fascinating that it got far more attention than we had any hope of garnering when we started it. Particularly in those days, if a film aired on PBS, it meant a lot of people would see it. Over the years, we got word from a variety of well-known and oddly disparate individuals (e.g. Andre 3000, Ryan Gosling, Allison Krauss, Elvis Costello, among others) that they had seen and liked it.

I expect that without exception, all documentary filmmakers have had the following two experiences:

1) Every time a filmmaker sees the film he made, he notices many of the ways it could be improved and can affirm the maxim, “A film is never completed—It is simply abandoned.”

2) When a documentary has been completed and released, one can reliably expect that only then (when it is too late for it to be useful) will people come out of the woodwork, offering the very kinds of archival materials and access that one would have given an eyetooth for while making the film.

Both of these things happened with us over the years and we told ourselves “if we ever get a chance to re-do this, we certainly have a few ideas about how to improve upon it” without thinking that it would ever actually happen. So, when technology advanced to the point that we could reasonably consider upgrading the film from standard definition to high definition, and we had pried the original edit of the film out of the dying fingers of the ancient Apple computer it had lived on for almost two decades, it was simply too tantalizing to resist fixing, first a few small errors in the original, and then replacing some of the original low quality archival images and eventually deciding we would improve it wherever we could. Our unspoken rule was that we would only use footage and materials that we could have used at the time of the original production, if we had had access to it. Of course, we could have shot new material and created a new chapter on the surprising ways Sacred Harp has grown around the country (and indeed, the world), but one must work within limitations, and that was ours. Due, among other reasons, to the generosity of the many people who gave us access to archival materials, the new version is unquestionably superior to the original.

–Matt Hinton, Co-director