Sounder is a 1972 American drama film directed by Martin Ritt and adapted by Lonne Elder III from the 1969 novel by William H.

[4] The story concerns an African-American sharecropper family in the Deep South, who struggle with economic and personal hardships during the Great Depression.

[6] In 1933, the Morgans are an African-American family living as sharecroppers in rural Louisiana, raising sugar cane for their white landlord.

As they take him away, Sounder runs after their wagon and one of the deputies shoots him, though Nathan partially deflects the shot by kicking the gun.

He looks for him for days, but is unable to continue the search because with their father gone, he and his little brother and sister must help Rebecca farm and harvest the crops.

Mrs. Boatwright, a sympathetic local woman who employs Rebecca to do her laundry and often gives the children books to read, promises David she will find out the location of the work camp Nathan has been taken to.

Despite the sheriff's threats, she tells the Morgan family that Nathan has been taken to the distant Wishbone prison camp and helps Rebecca plot the route there on the map.

Sounder returns home, though he does not bark like he used to, and accompanies David on a long journey on foot to find the camp and try to visit his father.

One night, she shares books from her collection about important African-American historical figures with him and reads to him from the work of W.E.B.

According to music journalist Robert Christgau, it was "the first soundtrack ever patterned after a field recording", featuring a "suite/montage/succession of hums, moans, claps, and plucked fragments", all performed in the key of the gospel blues song "Needed Time" by Lightnin' Hopkins.

Sounder received critical acclaim, with reviewers praising it as a welcome antidote to the contemporaneous wave of films starring African-Americans, many of which were considered of low quality genre or "Blacksploitation" features.

[10] John Simon wrote "Sounder is a rare honest movie about people who work the soil under conditions of extreme rigor.

[12] In his Family Guide to Movies on Video, Henry Herx wrote: "Sounder captures the humanity of [its] characters and a fine, distanced sense of its sleepy Southern locale.

The Variety article noted that Fox wrote a study guide, prepared by Dr. Roscoe Brown, Jr., director of Afro-American Affairs at New York University.