Film will screen at North Park Theatre on Monday night

By Patrick Sawers

A Buffalo-based folk musician, lauded and exalted by his industry peers but largely overlooked otherwise, is finally getting a bit of the recognition his work has long merited.

“Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank” will be presented Monday, May 5, at the North Park Theatre, where a screening of the documentary will be followed by a Q&A panel set to include the film’s director, Damien Aimé Dupont, as well as its subject’s friend and biographer Jim Abbott.

“The first time I heard the music of Jackson C. Frank it was on YouTube, 10 years ago or something like that,” said Dupont, a Paris-based documentary filmmaker with two previous full-length projects to his credit. “At that time there was not a lot of information about him to be found, and so I began to do some research on him.”

Frank is best known – when he’s known at all – for the single “Blues Run the Game,” a track from his 1965 eponymous debut album on Columbia (EMI) Records. That song, a plaintive three-chord composition, would earn him the praise and adulation of his fellow musicians, and over the years it would be covered by everyone from Simon and Garfunkel to Nick Drake to Counting Crows.

“I love his music, and I knew it would be an interesting story to tell,” Dupont said. “And when there is not so much information on a subject, like was the case with Jackson, I love to dig into it. I love to find out what happened, to find out about the key issue and the story behind it.”

Frank’s remarkable story has its roots right here in Western New York, his life largely defined by an incident that occurred in 1954, when the 11-year-old Cheektowaga native was a sixth-grade student at Cleveland Hill Elementary School. In March of that year a boiler room explosion claimed the lives of 15 students, leaving 19 additional kids alive but severely scarred and forever traumatized. In a sense Frank was one of the lucky ones – he’d made it out – but at the same time he would suffer terribly for it, doomed to a life of coping with the physical pain and psychological fallout.

“We did a lot of filming at the Cleveland Hill school, where he was burned,” Dupont recalled, adding that shoots at that location were deliberately scheduled to coincide with the winter weather. “Jackson was burned in the winter, and so we came at that time to include in our scenes the snow on the ground. I wanted to have that visual, and also I love to film in the snow.”

FILM TRAILER

Frank taught himself to play guitar during the eight months he spent recovering at Erie County Medical Center (then called Meyer Memorial Hospital), and he would go on to graduate from Iroquois High School, his family having relocated to Elma in the wake of the explosion. By the early 1960s he was performing regularly in small venues in and around Buffalo, and his musical cohorts at that time included a young singer and guitarist named John Kay, soon to achieve fame as the frontman for the rock band Steppenwolf.

Relocating to London, Frank fell in with that city’s folk scene and continued building a reputation for himself, garnering widespread acclaim and swiftly attracting the attention of singer/songwriter Paul Simon, who bankrolled and recorded Frank’s first album. The record was well-received and critically praised, but it would remain the only full-length major label release of his career (although a spate of recordings, including a two-CD anthology, would be unearthed and issued posthumously).

Frank returned to the U.S. in 1968, but mental illness, unresolved trauma and a series of personal tragedies quickly sidelined his once-promising recording career. He married and had two children, however the couple’s first child died within hours of being born and the pair divorced shortly after the birth of their second. By the 1970s Frank was destitute, perpetually unhoused and living in a series of institutions and homeless shelters. He became legally blind by the following decade, after some cruel teens shot him in the eye with a pellet gun after finding him asleep on a park bench.

That’s about where Abbott stepped into the picture.

“It was back in the ‘80s, about 1983, I was working at a record store near Woodstock,” Abbott said, recalling his own introduction to Frank’s music. “There weren’t a whole lot of folk singers who I had not heard of. That was my thing, folk music. But I was at a different record store one day, and I knew the people there, and I got the whole story about Jackson that day. And that got my curiosity piqued.”

After pinning down Frank’s whereabouts, Abbott wrote in his 2014 biography of the performer, he took on the task of managing his personal affairs, something Frank, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, had never been able to do for himself. The two remained friends until Frank’s death in 1999 from pneumonia and cardiac arrest, and Abbott said he was glad for the opportunity to contribute to Dupont’s documentary.

Old Friends performing “Blues Run the Game” at the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame induction of Jackson C. Frank in 2015:

“Until recently there was really very little information out there about Jackson C. Frank,” he said, “and for a long time you just could not find anything out about the guy. So this film really fills that void. And these guys have done some work.”

“It was a long process,” Dupont said, noting that work on the film started in 2013, himself and a film crew traveling back and forth from France to the U.S. as time and money allowed. “We spent quite a lot of time looking for his friends, his relatives, and we were at last able to find his tombstone in a small cemetery not far from Cheektowaga. So it was step-by-step, making this movie.”

In the meantime, Abbott pointed out, Frank’s music seems to be enjoying a resurgence of sorts, beginning to turn up from time to time in contemporary pop culture. In 2019, for instance, director Todd Phillips included Frank’s song “My Name Is Carnival” in his Academy Award-winning film “Joker.”

“The people who have got (the rights to his songs) have done a really good job of getting his music out there in movies and TV shows,” he said. “I know ‘Blues Run the Game’ was used in ‘This Is Us,’ twice or three times. His version, and then they found on YouTube a young lady named Janileigh Cohen. She had done a version in her bedroom in England, and she’s just got this beautiful voice.”

The screening is set to begin at 9:30 p.m., and in addition to Dupont and Abbott, the Q&A panel will include Mark Anderson, who is another friend of Frank’s, and assistant director Étienne Grosbois.