I’ve spent the past year questioning whether “sacred stories” such as those from the Civil Rights Movement, retain their power to motivate and unite when the political, economic, and technological turbulence of the moment demands something different.
For sure, universal leadership lessons continue to resonate despite the uncertainty, as I concluded early in 2025 in my short documentary American Dignity.
But how do we extoll the necessity of remembering and retelling a 70-year story about the lynching of a boy by a group of white men in Mississippi? Especially when so many either want to forget or even erase that event from collective memory?
Therein lies the relevance to today. How we agree upon the truth of what ultimately sparked a ten-year period of activism and world-changing civil rights legislation is pivotal to creating a new shared reality as an unsettling future careens towards us.
As Patrick Weems of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center told me in THE BARN DOESN’T LIE, “If we don’t have a shared collective history, there’s no shared future.” And for him, the recent acquisition of the barn where the 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered is pivotal to grounding that history in a sense of place.
This film is part of my “We Cross the Bridge” visual essay series which asks “Where are we headed? And what stories will we agree upon to inspire trust and collaboration as we traverse into uncertainty?”
I produce all of the original soundtrack music for my films — it’s easier, cheaper, and more narratively-aligned with the visuals when I do it. With THE BARN DOESN’T LIE, I tried a different compositional and recording approach. I wanted something directly emotive to the spirit of the story. So, one late night, I opened up the film timeline in Davinci Pro and immediately after pressed “Record” on both an external MixPre III recorder (connected to a Neumann Microphone) and an iPhone on a Dock Kit tracking stand. And then, I just started picking at my guitar, building upon a sequence that had emerged a few minutes earlier as I was jamming away while watching the film. It became a pleading musical dialog between kidnappers and a teenage boy held captive in a barn, late at night in rural Mississippi. It was one take; I felt compelled to prioritize feel over perfection.
HRH MEDIA 