Harper Lee: Hey, Boo illuminates the phenomenon behind Lee’s first and only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the 1962 film version, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Offering an unprecedented look into Lee’s mysterious life, Emmy®-winning filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy (author of Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of To Kill a Mockingbird) interviews Lee’s friends and family, including her centenarian sister Alice, who share intimate recollections, anecdotes and biographical details for the first time: her rise from small-town Alabama girl to famous author, her tumultuous friendship with Truman Capote, and the origin of her most memorable characters: Atticus Finch, his daughter Scout, her friend Dill, and Boo Radley. The documentary also explores the context and history of the novel’s Deep South setting and the social changes it inspired after publication and through the film starring Gregory Peck. Tom Brokaw, Rosanne Cash, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, Oprah Winfrey, and others reflect on the novel’s power, influence, popularity, and the ways it has shaped their lives. Lee gave her last interview in 1964 and receded from the limelight.

Mark Childress: Yeah I always have. I mean, every time I go back I’m impressed more by the simplicity of the prose. And, we think of it as being…classic, and I think the reason that we think it’s so classic is that there’s, it’s not, the prose is not very adorned, it’s very plain. And although it’s plainly written from the point of view of an adult, looking back through a child’s eyes, there’s something childlike…I don’t want to say that. There’s something beautifully innocent about the point of view, and yet it’s very wise. So it’s a combination of either a wise child or an innocent adult, the point of view.

And the fact that Scout is surprised by people’s racism is what’s so, what was revolutionary about the book. Because most little kids in little towns like that, they weren’t surprised, because racism was all around them, it was the fabric of life. I mean, when I was three years old, my grandmother and I would walk down the main street of Greeneville, which was the little town where she lived, and black men would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect. And if I walked down the sidewalk, at five years old, by myself, they would get off the sidewalk as a sign of respect to me. And this was in the mid-60s, after the book came out,

There’s something so…it’s just a child trying to understand, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make any sense, trying to organize it into, you know…And I guess I’ve spent my whole writing career kind of trying to do the same thing, laboring in the shadow of…making sense of what race meant in the South and, how to you grow up having come from that system. It’s a lot of interesting problems.

I don’t think that they, the kids today have, read it with the same edge that we did as children though because the segregation was still very real when I was reading that book, you know. When I went to the swimming pool, there was a ‘no colored children allowed,’ as the sign said, “white” and “colored.” You know, we went to the Dairy Queen there were two lines, there was a white window, and there was a black window. So, it was a radical book at the time in the South. It might not have that way in the rest of the country, but it said radical things.

Interview conducted by John Antonelli

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Narrated by Danny Glover, the film features archival footage and interviews with Cooke’s family and intimates including Muhammad Ali, Herb Albert, James Brown, Dick Clark, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, and more.

Sam Cooke put the spirit of the Black church into popular music, creating a new American sound and setting into motion a chain of events that forever altered the course of popular music and race relations in America. With You Send Me in 1957, Cooke became the first African American artist to reach #1 on both the R&B and the pop charts. It was risky for this young gospel performer to alienate his fans by embracing “the devil’s music” – but he proved, with his pop/gospel hybrid, that it was, indeed, possible to win over white teenage listeners and keep his faithful church followers intact.

American Masters Sam Cooke: Crossing Over premiering nationally, Monday, January 11, 2010 at 9 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings), features interviews with Muhammad Ali, Lou Adler, Herb Albert, James Brown, Jimmy Carter, Mel Carter, Dick Clark, Sam Moore, Earl Palmer, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler, Bobby Womack and more. The film is produced by John Antonelli and D. Channsin Berry and directed by Antonelli. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters. American Masters is a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG – one of America’s most prolific and respected public media providers.

“Before Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke already heated up the charts with his unique blend of sensuality and spirituality,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a seven-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. “His smooth songs and sophisticated phrasing influenced artists from Al Green to Alicia Keys. And Cooke’s legacy reaches far beyond music boundaries. Spike Lee featured ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in his film Malcolm X and the same song inspired President Obama’s speech. Who else besides an American Master can make such claims?”

Cooke’s career was tragically short, but meteoric at every stage. From early childhood, his silky, soaring voice electrified the congregation at his father’s First Baptist Church in Chicago. By the age of 19, he became lead vocalist for the popular gospel group The Soul Stirrers, heard in churches and jook joints and night clubs all along the Chitlin Circuit, from Chicago through the South to LA and back again. He redefined the genre and became gospel’s first iconic, and ironically, sexy superstar. Women began to flock to concerts to experience Sam, not Jesus!

Professionally, things continued to come easily to Cooke. You Send Me went gold, selling over a million records, and was followed by Soothe Me, Feel It, Bring It On Home to Me, Wonderful World, Cupid, Twistin’ the Night Away – all of which hit the charts within a two-year period. In combining two worlds, his constant challenge was to sing meaningful lyrics with the fervor of gospel and the romance of pop. He came closest with Chain Gang, observed and written during the Civil Rights era and with the poignant, biting lyrics and melody of A Change is Gonna Come in 1962, fashioned out of the depth of personal pain and loss.

Sam Cooke accomplished what no other black performer had ever even attempted, founding his own music publishing and record label, opening doors for and writing material for other artists – mentoring Aretha Franklin and launching Otis Redding. He had the courage to take an open stand against racism, refusing to perform at a segregated venue in the south and garnering the support of Dick Clark. But, his story ends abruptly at the height of his success when, at the age of 32 in 1964, he was, inexplicably, gunned down and killed in the company of a prostitute – leaving a profound legacy filled with extraordinary talent – and all the questions about what might have been.

“Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.” — Wynton Marsalis

From a New Orleans boys’ home to Hollywood, Carnegie Hall, and television, the tale of Louis Armstrong’s life and triumphant six-decade career epitomizes the American success story. His trumpet playing revolutionized the world of music, and he became one of our century’s most recognized and best loved entertainers. Now, thirty years after his death, Armstrong’s work as an instrumentalist and vocalist continue to have a profound impact on American music. As a black man living and working in a segregated society, he symbolized the civil rights struggle that was part of the changing America in which he lived.

Born in New Orleans on August 4, 1901, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was heir to the poverty suffered by Southern blacks at the turn of the century. At the age of eleven, Armstrong began to develop an interest in music, harmonizing on street corners and playing a toy horn. Arrested for disturbing the peace, on New Year’s Eve, 1913, he was remanded to the New Orleans Colored Waif’s Home for Boys. In and out of the home throughout his teenage years, Armstrong was taken under the wing of Peter Davis, who taught music there. Under Davis’s tutelage, Armstrong joined a band, and his talent blossomed. He left the Waif’s Home in 1914, and began to play the cornet around New Orleans. In 1921, at the invitation of the great cornetist Joe “King” Oliver, Armstrong moved to Chicago.

In the 1920s, Armstrong performed with a number of different musical groups, and began to revolutionize the jazz world with his introduction of the extended solo. Prior to his arrival, jazz music was played either in highly orchestrated arrangements or in a more loosely structured “Dixieland”-type ensemble in which no one musician soloed for any extended period. Musicians everywhere soon began to imitate his style, and Armstrong himself became a star attraction. His popularity was phenomenal, and throughout the 1920s he was one of the most sought-after musicians in both New York and Chicago. Armstrong’s HOT FIVE and HOT SEVEN recordings remain to this day some of the best loved of the time.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Armstrong maintained one of the most grueling continual tours of all time. He began playing with the large bands that were popular at the time, but soon realized that his style was better suited to a smaller ensemble. With the help of manager, Joe Glaser, he formed Louis Armstrong and His All Stars. The band, which had a rotating cast of “all stars,” first included Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, Earl Hines, and Big Sid Catlett. Though many believed the 40s marked the beginning of a decline of Armstrong’s playing, the recordings bear out his continued technical proficiency, spirited interpretations, and the depth and soul of his playing during these years.

The 1950s proved to be a regeneration for Armstrong as both a musician and a public figure. Though he had been singing since his early days in Chicago, it was not until the 1950s that audiences recognized his remarkable skill as a singer as well. His rough and throaty voice became, almost instantly, the internationally recognized voice of jazz itself. His 1956 recording with Ella Fitzgerald of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” was one of the most popular and best loved duets of the 1950s. For many, his “scat” singing was the perfection of a genre just then in its infancy. With his increasing fame, however, came the criticism of a black community that felt he was not living up to the responsibilities of the times. The late fifties brought with them the civil rights movement, and many blacks saw Armstrong as an “uncle tom,” playing for primarily white audiences around the world. Though adamant that these claims were unjust, Armstrong was then in his sixties and primarily concerned with continuing to travel and perform.

Armstrong spent the final decade of his life in the same way that he had spent the four previous — entertaining audiences throughout the world. In 1971, he died of a heart attack in New York City. Though the history of jazz is filled with many exceptional and innovative musicians, it is hard to find any one who has had as profound an influence on the movement as Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s legacy is more than simply his virtuoso trumpet playing (for which nearly every trumpet player since seems indebted), but his great formal innovations as well. His commitment to the search for new forms in jazz and his continued heartfelt performances will remain a major symbol not only of the musical life, but of the entire cultural life of 20th-century America.