MusicFoundation Assists Struggling Blues Musicians

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Blues Musicians Get Help Overcoming Hard Times

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: March 21, 2004

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — No one ever said the blues was any way to make a living.

Beverly (Guitar) Watkins knew that, and returned to cleaning offices in Atlanta when the Holiday Inn lounge gigs dried up.

Broke even in good times, Little Freddie King survived by playing juke joints in New Orleans until old age left his body broken. Deprived of a steady income, he went without dentures or glasses, and one night, a heavy rain brought down the ceiling of his bedroom.

Without an audience for his quirky style of music, Haskel (Whistling Britches) Thompson ended up in a Winston-Salem homeless shelter.

From the Appalachian highlands to the Mississippi Delta, musicians who got by on drink house tips and street corner busking have found themselves living in decaying mobile homes, formerly nimble fingers twisted with age, their homespun repertoires lost with their deaths.

"These people are our culture, our folk musicians, and no one is looking after them," said the bluesman Taj Mahal. "We're always putting our hands over our heart and saying the Pledge of Allegiance and honoring Davy Crockett, yet we're allowing these people and their music to fall through the cracks."

In the 1980's, while recording old-time mountain musicians in North Carolina, Tim Duffy came to a similar realization. As a student studying folklore at the University of North Carolina, he grew obsessed with preserving the sounds of these unheralded musicians. But as he traveled the rural South with recording equipment, he grew even more troubled by the poverty that left many artists without instruments and too strapped for heating oil or medicine.

"Their music ended up in archives but the problem is no one gets to hear it," said Mr. Duffy, who lives in Hillsborough, N.C. "And the recordings don't put food on their table, it doesn't get them a gig."

Over the last two decades, Mr. Duffy, 41, has turned his passion into a nonprofit organization, the Music Maker Foundation, which is part recording company, part artist management service and part social welfare agency. For those able to perform, the foundation he and his wife, Denise, run from their converted wood shop promotes roots music and offers artists a touring career; for those too old or sickly, he sends monthly checks that average $100.

When unexpected hardships strike, as in the case of Little Freddie King's collapsing ceiling, Mr. Duffy provides emergency cash. When he learned that Mr. Thompson was living in a shelter, he arranged for him to stay with another Music Maker artist, Captain Luke Mayer, a smoky-voiced baritone who lives in a Winston-Salem housing project. Mr. Duffy also helps Mr. Mayer keep the van that ferries a half-dozen musicians to the grocery store, to doctors' appointments and to gigs around the state.

More than 100 musicians are served by the foundation, which has arranged whirlwind tours for musicians like Ms. Watkins, who still performs on the streets of Atlanta, and has appeared at blues festivals across the country and in Europe.

The foundation also puts CD's into the hands of men like Cootie Stark, a blind guitarist from Greenville, S.C., who had never had his music recorded until he met Mr. Duffy at age 68. Mr. Stark, now 77, one of the last surviving purveyors of the Piedmont Blues, has since taken to the stages of Lincoln Center, the Rockport Rhythm and Blues Festival at Newport and other concert venues around the world. He earns about $8,000 a year selling his CD's.

"It should have happened 45 years ago, but I finally got a break," he said.

In the process of helping the musicians, Mr. Duffy has helped cultivate new audiences who eagerly await the next Music Maker recording. Mr. Duffy has produced 45 CD's, and many of his artists can be booked for appearances through the foundation's Web site. A dozen artists recently had their work added to Apple Computer's iTunes site, which allows customers to download songs.

William Ferris, author of the "Encyclopedia of Southern Culture," said popular interest in roots music had grown in recent years, especially after the PBS series produced by Martin Scorsese, "The Blues," and films like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Cold Mountain."

"It's an exciting time for indigenous music," said Mr. Ferris, who is the associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Still, the bulk of these musicians, he said, live in anonymity, their lives dominated by the struggle to survive. "The blues has always been the stepchild in the family of American music."

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On his front porch in the morning cold, John Dee Holeman cradled his steel guitar and plucked out a mournful tune. Although slowed by a recent stroke, Mr. Holeman, 76, can still produce nearly 100 songs, many his own creations.

"Fingers aren't as swift as they used to be," he complains, but they easily glide across the neck of Big Boss, the name he has given his guitar. He recalls how he taught himself to play as a child, stealthily grabbing a few moments on his half-brother's Silvertone during breaks from working the tobacco fields. "I'd come in for water and steal a tune and put it back just like it was."

Mr. Holeman got his first guitar at 15, a $15 Sears, Roebuck model. As a teenager, he honed his style with Blind Boy Fuller, considered the father of the Piedmont Blues, a more buoyant version of the Mississippi Delta blues.

Despite his talent, Mr. Holeman worked most of his life as a heavy machinery operator, with nights spent stripping the wood out of tobacco leaf at the Liggett Meyers factory up the street from his home in Hayti, Durham's historically black section. On weekends, he would play local drink houses, or birthday parties. In the 1970's, he began appearing at a blues festival in Durham.

When Mr. Holeman met Mr. Duffy in the early 1990's, his world opened up. Mr. Duffy arranged for him to get his $1,200 guitar, made sure he had a steady supply of nutritional supplements and helped him record two CD's. Over the past decade Mr. Holeman has appeared at festivals in Washington, Turkey and Japan. He performed at the Library of Congress, and he took part in a State Department-financed cultural tour of Africa. "Sometimes people stop me on the street and say, `Aren't you famous?' " he said. "Now that's real nice."

Another of Mr. Duffy's proud discoveries is Ms. Watkins, 64, whom he met a at a shopping mall in Atlanta.

"She was prowling the sidewalk like Jimi Hendrix, flailing, playing the guitar behind her head, falling to her knees, as if she was performing for a packed concert hall," Mr. Duffy said. "She was on fire. I couldn't believe my eyes."

Mr. Duffy gave her a $20 tip and said he wanted to help her reach a wider audience. "I'm ready," she says she told him. "Let's rock on."

She was soon booked on a 42-city tour sponsored by Winston cigarettes that included a dozen other Music Maker acts. She has been to Italy, Portugal, France and Switzerland.

"There are no lack of artists we could be helping," said Mr. Duffy, who said he raised about $500,000 last year in grants and donations. He pointed to a rack of digital audio tapes he said contained the raw material for 45 recordings.

"I can't get them out fast enough," he said, adding that every year, three or four musicians die before he can get their music out. "I feel like I'm racing against time."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/21/national/21BLUE.html?8hpib