Embodiment is the bedrock of the blues. They are the chronicles—poetic, brutally frank, or both—of a broad range of experiences endured by forebears whose names were often lost over more than two U.S. centuries. Countless blues songs document the consequences of troubled love and lust or the sweat and strain of onerous physical labor. In many of these experiences, the body—working, resisting, overcoming, ecstatic—is central.
Photographer Timothy Duffy highlights this principle in Blue Muse, a collection of sixty large tintype photographs of blues musicians published recently by The University of North Carolina Press. The book is one of three initiatives in a yearlong celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Hillsborough’s Music Maker Relief Foundation, which Duffy cofounded not only to document hundreds of aging master blues, gospel, Native American, and string-band musicians in the South, but also to help alleviate their financial strains and provide opportunities to record and perform. Duffy calls the artists collaborators and old friends, which rings true in the unvarnished, unguarded tenor of the images.
Large-format tintype photography, made with a camera weighing more than six hundred pounds, provides incredible intimacy and detail. When the faces and hands of elderly musicians fill the fourteen-by-fourteen-inch frames, the contours of their skin, the wrinkles and scars, disclose topographical maps of rich lives. Turning the pages, we lock eyes with Wilbur Tharpe, a pianist for the gospel group The Branchettes, and Vania Kinard, a journalist married to Carolina Chocolate Drops cofounder Dom Flemons, both of whom scrutinize us with incandescent intensity. The late, great Sharon Jones, of The Dap-Kings, demands that we bear witness in an earnest photograph taken months before she died. Though the face of Piedmont blues guitarist Algia Mae Hinton is in softer focus, the sharp foregrounding of her well-worn right hand testifies to a long life of farm work.
Duffy records different forms of spiritual communion in three faces with eyes closed: the rapture on the countenance of gospel singer Lena Mae Perry, the beatific smile of guitarist Little Freddie King, and the austere contemplation of Robert Finley. Duffy’s lens work also captures for eternity a resolute Captain Luke, standing strong one day before his 2015 death from cancer.
The companion CD, also called Blue Muse, features a number of the artists depicted in the company of guest musicians, including Taj Mahal, Jimbo Mathus, and Cool John Ferguson. The compilation features a previously unreleased Eric Clapton track, a 1995 duet with Duffy on “Mississippi Blues.” Following an opening track that seems a joyful blues séance, with spoken-word passages from an octet including the legendary Guitar Gabriel, Taj Mahal gives a deceptively light touch to “Spike Driver Blues,” and the resonant baritone of Captain Luke plums the bemused depths of his classic tribute to a stubborn mule, “Old Black Buck.” Alabama Slim’s electric guitar in “I Got the Blues” rubs against Flemons’s string-band take on “Polly Put the Kettle On,” and John Dee Holeman’s human percussion in “Hambone” contrasts with ninety-two-year-old Eddie Tigner’s full-band take on “Route 66.” (Tigner died in April.) Willie Farmer’s “I Am the Lightnin’” heads uptown from Hinton’s country blues, “Snap Your Fingers,” and Native American singer Cary Morin’s optimistic gospel song, “Sing It Louder,” updates more traditional a capella gospel from Perry and The Branchettes.
While all this documentation is vital, the blues is a living tradition. Duke Performances helps Music Maker Relief Foundation close out its twenty-fifth year with Music Maker 25, a week-long festival in December featuring concerts and other events, including an exhibit of Duffy’s tintype photography. Among seven concerts, Flemons joins “Blind Boy” Paxton, Jake Xerxes Fussell, and Gail Caesar in “Pickers and Storytellers.” Zydeco takes the stage with Major Handy, Buckwheat Zydeco Jr., and Ils Sont Partis, and Alexa Rose and Lonnie Holley perform individual sets in “Southern Voices.” A Native American musician showcase features Morin, Pura Fé, the Deer Clan Singers, and Lakota John & Kin. Duffy curates a blues revue featuring Ferguson, Alabama Slim, Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen, Fé, and Morin, and gospel concerts feature The Branchettes, Phil Cook, and The Glorifying Vines Sisters.
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