Capturing the Mississippi Blues: H. C. Porter’s astonishing storytelling quest.
"The blues is the roots, the rest is the fruits."
— Willie Dixon
Mississippi’s had the blues since the 1890s when a group of sharecroppers harvested their misery along with the cotton they chopped, and wove its fibers into a dark, rough cloth with a howl for the warp and a growl for the woof and pieced together a patchwork quilt of despair. Sure, it’s been cut, ripped, and stained, but later generations have continued to reweave and mend it, honoring the legacy of the first bluesmen. As a result, Mississippi has a wealth of current blues performers who’re adding their patches to the quilt. Some are famous, some infamous, some relatively unknown outside the state, but each has the power to change the way we respond to our home, the South.
Vicksburg artist and gallery owner H. C. Porter undertakes the mission to introduce them to us visually, audibly, and intimately in much the same way she presented Katrina survivors on the Gulf Coast in her traveling mixed media exhibit “Backyards & Beyond.” In that documentary, the subjects in each painting tell their recorded stories in their own words and voices. Viewers see their faces and look into their eyes as they stand in the midst of devastation with faith and determination to put homes and lives back together—powerful stuff.
In “Blues at Home,” Porter once again documents the physical realities as well as spiritual and emotional realities writ large on the faces of her Blues subjects, allowing us to read between the lines on their faces and the lines in their songs. She wants us to know them because she cares and wants us to see and hear them as she does with her artist’s eye and compassionate heart. A social realist, she recognizes some are caught in their environment and in the moment, while some are transcendent, and she acts as their cultural “ambassador,” bringing us the means to understand them through sight and sound, putting us in touch, making them vividly real and both tragically and joyfully human.
So now are you ready to “get” the blues and understand it and the passion that drives the men and women who perform it today? Don’t be shy. Porter will introduce you to thirty “Living Legends” of Mississippi through her vibrant mixed media paintings created from her black and white photographs transferred to paper by silk screening to create a print that she hand paints with acrylic paint and prisma color pencils in a fearlessly vivid palette. Her images aren’t typical performance shots but are taken while the performers are comfortable, at ease, and totally themselves “at home,” not literally or metaphorically on stage.
Once the original list of ninety-six musicians became the thirty chosen for Part One of the documentary, contacts were made, and Porter and project manager Lauchlin Fields set out across Mississippi’s landscape, lugging photographic and recording equipment from location to location, seeking out the blues performers and the comfort zones where they could sit back and tell their life stories, the details of how they were snared by and drawn to the blues, who influenced them personally and musically, who they’ve played with…all that and whatever else spilled out for Lauchlin to record. Meanwhile Porter prowled and scoped the surroundings, seeking a visually perfect shot location still within the environmental comfort zones. Being welcomed into private living rooms where possessions reveal the nature of the subjects who live there by their choices was “like heaven” to Porter as she took note of art on the walls, personal items within reach of the favorite couch or chair, books left open or bookmarked, family photographs, mementoes, religious icons, musical instruments—all the things that define home.
She realized, however, that she was falling into a pattern of having each photo set in a living room, so she began to take the locations outside but in areas familiar to the performers. Howlin’ Mad Perry sits on the front steps of a row house. Eddie Cusik, whose background is agricultural, stands in front of a feed and seed backdrop; Shardé Thomas sits on an overturned bucket on her legendary grandfather Othar Turner’s farm. Jimmy “Duck” Holmes stands in front of his Blue Front Café. Kenny Brown’s dog sits by his side along with a wooden chicken. These and the rest of the subjects are in authentic locales. The farthest away from her own comfort zone for Porter was a tin roofed shed where James Supa Chickan Johnson (just back from a European tour) makes guitars. It was August, no air conditioner, no fan. When he realized she was wilting, Supa Chickan got a hose and ran cold water over the roof to cool off both shed and photographer. Other comfortably familiar places chosen for photographs shoots are favorite hangouts and performing spaces—juke joints, bars or clubs like Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero. King Edward Antoine’s photo is appropriately at The Queen of Hearts Blues Café, where he often appears.
Talking about the experience thus far, Porter sits with a photo album on her lap. She speaks of her photo of Howlin’ Mad Perry, how they’d tried shots at Ground Zero and got “good images,” but, not quite satisfied and looking for the perfect familiar location in the area, his area, she found some row houses and sat him down with his guitar and hat. She says when he looked up there was an almost magical flicker of connection between him, her, and the camera that by chance caught “one of the most iconic blues images,” the thing for which she’d been questing. She chuckles and talks of wild man T Model Ford who kept offering her a Jack Daniels bottle and wild man Jimbo Mathis, formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, “the white guy with the only front gold tooth I have photographed to date.” She grieves for Pinetop Perkins who died before she could photograph him and Honeyboy Edwards who died shortly after she took his photo and before he could play at her studio as planned. She speaks of extraordinary talent, of academic success, of dignity, of humor, of prison records and violence suffered at the hands of others as she touches the pictures. Her eyes go soft as she speaks of L.C. Ulmer, a gentle man of faith who knows the Bible, a vegetarian who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke. “They’re all so sweet, so giving,” she murmurs. H.C. Porter has the Blues and is willing to share them with you.
Details. Details. Details.
Seven painting sponsorships remain available for purchase and may be seen at “The Blues at Home” site. Limited edition giclee prints of all paintings completed to date are available. Any works purchased will not only give you an incredible work of art but will help Porter complete this important project that will share our heritage with those in other areas of the country who don’t know Mississippi and rely on stereotypical caricatures to represent the South and its tangled roots.
Works available for sale can be previewed at hcporter.com, where you’ll also find a retrospective of “Backyards & Beyond,” a preview of “Blues at Home” and see Porter in her gallery and in action on location. Here too you’ll find photos and videoed performances, hear recordings, read bios, purchase CDs and follow schedules of the Blues legends in “Blues at Home.” It’s addictive; I wallowed in the Blues for hours.
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