The Story Behind the Hawkes Doc

The lifestyle magazine maine. has a profile of Andrew Jawitz, the director of The Eventful Life of Al Hawkes, a 47-minute documentary on the Westbrook musician:

Hawkes lives in Westbrook, Maine. When Jawitz and
Findlen walked into Hawkes’s recording studio in the basement of his home, they
were amazed. For Jawitz, who had done a college internship at the Woody Guthrie
Archives in New York City, it was heaven. Hawkes had 50,000 LP records, all
catalogued as if by an archivist, wax cylinder players, wire recordings,
reel-to-reel recorders from the 1950s, pictures of musicians, and old posters.
“It was like a Museum of Maine Country Music,” says Jawitz enthusiastically. "It
was a treasure trove." As the film documents, all the seminal Maine
country-music performers of the late 1950s are in some way connected to
Hawkes.

- John C.L. Morgan

Related: On Al Hawkes (April 9, 2010)