River City Drumbeat

Directed By Anne Flatté and Marlon Johnson

RIVER CITY DRUMBEAT is a powerful and uplifting story of music, love, and legacies set in the American South. Edward "Nardie" White devoted his life to leading the African-American drum corps he co-founded with Zambia Nkrumah in Louisville, Kentucky three decades ago.

  • ABOUT
  • BIO
African American youth join the River City Drum Corps in Louisville, Ky.
Anne Flatté​ is an award-winning filmmaker whose recent work explores stories about music and community. She is a director and producer of the feature documentary River City Drumbeat (World Premiere, DOC NYC 2019). She directed and produced ​Symphony for Nature​ (Ashland Independent Film Festival; PBS National Broadcast 2019). Flatté is a producer of ​the feature documentary Serenade for Haiti​/Serenad pou Ayiti (World Premiere, DOC NYC 2016) which is currently distributed by Good Docs. In 2014, Flatté created and directed the 15-episode web series ​Music Makes A City Now​ (PBS.org and YouTube). She co-produced and edited ​the original feature documentary Music Makes A City​ (Dir. Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler, 2010), which was awarded Britain’s Gramophone Award for Best DVD Documentary, and received a PBS National Broadcast. Her editing work on acclaimed documentary films includes Monumental: David Brower’s Fight for Wild America (Dir. Kelly Duane, 2004), What Do You Believe? and Daughters and Sons: Preventing Child Trafficking in the Golden Triangle (Dir. Sarah Feinbloom, 2003; 2005), and Devil’s Teeth (Dir. Roger Teich, 2004). Flatté earned a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley, and an M.A. in documentary film from Stanford, where she directed the award-winning shorts ​Interlove Story​ and ​Body of Tradition​. Flatté lives in San Francisco with her husband and two teenagers.