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About 25 minutes into our conversation at Vino’s, Rwake’s vocalist begins talking about crawfishing. Not large-scale, commercial crawfishing, but in a backyard, creek or pond — catching the mudbugs one at a time as a child.

“I’d lift the rock and wait for the dirt to dissolve,” says Chris Terry, aka C.T., who has been the vocalist for the North Little Rock heavy music act since the band’s inception. “I knew they swam backward so you couldn’t go from the front. I know that these guys did the same sh*t.”

“These guys” are the musician subjects of the documentary Slow Southern Steel that Terry produced and co-directed with friend David Lipke, a documentary that examines the heavy music scene of the South over the past two decades. And stories like Terry’s are the keystone of Slow Southern Steel, as the musicians, from Hank III to Eyehategod’s Jimmy Bower, describe growing up in the Bible Belt and how a group of musicians spread out across the Deep South all came upon this heavier-than-heavy sound that might be described as sludge or doom or swamp or stoner. The genre-specific tags don’t apply. What it is is Southern heavy music.

Terry, who actually doesn’t appear in the documentary, got the idea for Slow Southern Steel in 2005 after being interviewed for a never-published book by his friend Christian Sweeney on the Southern heavy music scene.

“During the interview I told him that I was making a movie of his book,” Terry says. “I completely give him all the credit.”

Terry asked Lipke, a friend, local metal fan and video editor, about making the documentary, and the pair started filming in August 2008. After interviews with more than 40 bands, and Lipke editing “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours” of footage, the film premiered at the 2011 Little Rock Film Festival.

A week before beginning a 19-city tour of the film, which visits Market Street Cinema on Thursday night, Lipke and Terry chatted about Slow Southern Steel:

The challenge of creating Slow Southern Steel

Lipke: “For me it was not knowing if I got to a club if there was going to be power for my lights. Does the stage have lights? Where are we going to do this interview with this person? Does it have a quiet room? A basement? Can we do it outside the club? Those were the things I was worried about.”

Terry: “Even though you have all this footage, it has to connect. That all deals with editing, but it’s not even just that. It’s a documentary. It’s not a script. I had like 30 questions to ask in the beginning.”

On the guerilla filmmaking style of the documentary

Lipke: “The movie was done very run and gun style. ... There were times that we did interviews at three o’clock in the morning in a parking lot across the street from the club. It was all spur of the moment. ... Some interviews, I felt like it added to the uniqueness of it. Whether we shot in the parking lot or in the basement of this club or shot in the backyard. I felt like the fact that there were no rules, and we weren’t really sticking to anything kind of added to the movie.”

On finding subjects for the documentary

Terry: “I made a list, and I was like, ‘I know these guys or I know these guys personally. Or that guy is best friends with this guy.’ I had met some of the more celebrity types. I’m friends with some of those guys, but I would never ask them this sort of thing. We started out getting some popular bands and a lot of underground bands, and the word just got out. It spread.”

On interviewing Hank III

Terry: “Movie aside, that’s one of the coolest things that I’ve done. It ended up in his basement with him playing personally to us the songs. I asked him to play a Hank Sr. song that ... he wouldn’t play for anyone else. He started through his notebook and was like, ‘Oh yeah, those are the chords.’ He just nailed it. It was amazing just to be able to do that.”

On the message of the documentary

Lipke: “Anyone can do a history of the music, but for me it is more interesting finding out about these guys when they were kids. When you are an adult, that is how you are, but there is all this history prior to that that might lead up to the answer of why they are in these types of bands and why they listen to this music. ... This is a way to kind of connect with someone who is not into that type of music. We are not trying to force the music onto them. It’s just more of a story of how these band [members] are pretty much like you. They were a kid and did the same sh*t as you.”

Terry: “People who have seen it who are outside of the scene have said that that is the exact stuff that they did. You might understand more once you see that we are all alike.”

SEE THE FILM

Slow Southern Steel is showing at Market Street Cinema at 8 p.m. Thursday. Following the 90-minute documentary, Atlanta psychedelic doom metal trio ZOROASTER will play at 10 p.m. with Southern metal supergroup Hail!Hornet (the band includes Slow Southern Steel narrator “Dixie” Dave Collins of Buzzov•en and Weedeater) playing at 11 p.m. Tickets are $10 for the night.