Mississippi Blues.
See them, hear them, feel them right here in Annapolis at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts.
Maryland Hall’s major exhibit, “Blues @ Home: Mississippi Blues Legends,” is a multimedia study of Mississippi blues players by painter-photographer H.C. Porter.
Three of Porter’s subjects, led by blues showman Bobby Rush, will punctuate the official opening of the exhibit with a live concert Jan. 18.
Porter’s Blues@Home is a project that started in 2010 to capture living Mississippi blues performers through art and oral history . She spent a year photographing the blues masters from her home state and capturing oral histories from each.
The performance on Thursday is pegged Bobby Rush and Company. His “company” will be two other blues musicians portrayed in Porter’s exhibit: Vasti Johnson, an Albert King Lifetime Guitar Award winner, and Eden Brent, who learned boogie-woogies piano and juke-joint hollering from her mentor, the late Abie “Boogaloo” Ames.
But, before the 8 p.m. ticketed show (at $25 per person, details below), there is a free reception presenting a chance to mingle with the artist and performers beginning at 6 p.m. The exhibit fills both main galleries of Maryland Hall’s second floor exhibition space.
Porter grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and says she came to really appreciate the blues around age 20 at The Subway Lounge in the basement of the then dilapidated and structurally iffy Summers Hotel in Jackson.
“My father told me not to go, not because it was a bad area, but because the building was about to fall down,” she said. The late, late start of the blues shows might also have affected her father’s warning.
Later she found herself at the Greenville Blues Festival in a plowed cotton field shooting pictures of Son House and Bobby Blue Bland, “without knowing who they were.”
She studied painting and photography at the University of Alabama on scholarship, but then returned to Mississippi.
“I was a young artist, trying to establish myself,” Porter said. “I did posters for the Greenville Blues Festival for about eight years.”
Porter has been painting and shooting pictures depicting the cultural heritage of Mississippi ever since. It is hard to do that without the blues.
The Works
The 22 paintings on hand at Maryland Hall are on loan from the many owners of the works who participated in building the Blues@Home project.
When the vision was hatched, Porter set up a lottery of sorts. All those who wanted to invest in the project to capture Mississippi blues and own a piece of the result paid up front and then selected from a list of the 32 subjects selected with the help of blues scholars. (Only 22 of the original 32 are on loan to the show.)
The musicians agreed to pose for a photo. Porter took the photographs and then produced a high contrast black and white image from them via silk screen – the same process used by Andy Warhol. Then she painted them, actually painting several copies of the black and white silk screens.
The musicians captured by Porter’s camera run the gamut from the world-renowned to more local pickers and players in the genre. From B.B. King and Honeyboy Edwards, the last living member of the original blues generation who played with Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton, to a 22-year-old fife player Sharde Thomas, who, at age 7, started playing with her grandfather Othar Turner, master of the fife and drum blues, perhaps the oldest form of the music.
“We captured them at home, not in their houses per se. Some have moved away like B.B. King and Honeyboy, but we captured them when they came home for a visit,” Porter said.
Other subjects include some who might be familiar to blues fans in this area, like Jimbo Mathus and Zac Harmon, who, along with Rush, have played at the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival at Sandy Point.
Sadly, six of the 32 subjects included in the overall project have died since their images were made.
“That really underscores the importance, the timeliness of this work. Their legacies will live through their music, images and the oral histories,” Turner said.
The exhibit brings all those elements to play. Outside of the visual images, a headset systems allows visitors to listen to the subjects speak about their music and their homes, and hear a bit of their music.
“This is a major exhibit for us,” said Maryland Hall’s president and CEO Margaret Davis. “It is an important American art form and we are glad to be part of keeping it alive through fresh, creative visual arts and having these three fabulous musicians come to bring that art alive.”
The Show
Bobby Rush was born in Louisiana in 1933, but his family, led by his preacher and musician father, moved to Arkansas where he met and befriended Elmore James and other musicians. As a teen he would wear a fake mustache to play gigs in local juke joints.
Like so many of his generation he made it to Chicago, and fell in with his neighbor Muddy Waters and the rich array of bluesmen that dominated the form for years.
A solo career took him all over the world and several blues chart hits. He has been honored with several Blues Music Awards. But his first Grammy came last year for his record, “Porcupine Meat.”
He’s a showman who happens to play the guitar, or so he says. And his full stage show includes risque double entendre tunes and dancing girls. To the disappointment of some and relief to many his appearance at Maryland Hall will be, well, toned down.
Vasti Jackson, grew up in a musical family in McComb, Mississippi. His guitar talent combined with deep church roots. He landed a job doing session work while attending Jackson State, eventually working on Bobby Rush and B.B. King recordings, followed by a period of session work with Alligator Records.
Eden Brent bangs a spirited boogie-woogie on the keys and has been a successful songwriter and performer with 11 Blues Music Awards nominations since 2009, including three wins.
Tickets for the show are $25 and available at www.marylandhall.org or by calling 410-280-5640.