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Rare record of the blues

By Pamela Perkins
perkins@soulsvilleusa.com

Rare record of the blues
Stax museum presents photo trove and some good times this weekend

By Pamela Perkins

One can almost hear the rhythmic wheezing of those cicadas from the Mississippi backwoods just by looking at the picture of a weary-eyed old man reclining in front of a wall of leaves and watching another man pick an acoustic guitar.

Though blues music legends Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James were Delta natives, the picture was taken in Rhode Island sometime during the Newport Folk Festival in 1964.

It is among 60 photographs in "Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive," an exhibit from Oxford, Miss., resident Dick Waterman at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music Friday through Oct. 14. In 2000, Waterman became one of the first non-performers inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

The exhibit will kick off with a reception 7-10 p.m. Friday with food and live music.

Soulsville, the parent nonprofit agency of the museum and adjacent Stax Music Academy at 926 E. McLemore, also will begin its largest annual fund-raiser that day. "Soul-A-Thon" will be broadcast live on WRBO-FM 103.5 Friday and Saturday from the Stax site. The agency will also treat its neighborhood, also known as Soulsville USA, to a festival with games, food vendors, live music and the release of 500 balloons.

Waterman, 70, unable to attend the exhibit’s opening, was at the museum Monday for a preview.

"Just to feel the people here think my pictures are worth being on the same walls ... as Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, that’s an honor," he said. "I consider myself as a guy who just took pictures for a long time."

He was a sportswriter in Cambridge, Mass., when he heard Hurt perform at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. The music compelled Waterman in 1964 to find Hurt and become his manager. He eventually became the manager as well for Skip James, Booker White, Lightning Hopkins, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Luther Allison and Bonnie Raitt.

Poignancy of humanity is what he felt when he discovered the blues. It’s what he wants viewers to get from the exhibit.

There’s Buddy Guy leaning into his guitar at Cambridge Common. B. B. King performing with a fist clenched in anguish or rapture.

Junior Wells giving Mick Jagger a harmonica lesson. Rufus Thomas on stage at his 80th birthday concert making a reticent B. B. King do the Funky Chicken.

And then there’s the massive on-stage presence from a diminutive image of Ray Charles under a spotlight, one of Waterman’s favorites. "He was just alone in his euphoria."

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