MISSISSIPPI.- Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper’s interviews with blues artists and is illustrated with over 160 of her photographs, many published here for the first time. For thirty years, Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighborhoods, festivals, and gigs. Her photographic work combines iconic late-career images of many legendary figures including Bo Diddley, Honeyboy Edwards, B. B. King, Pinetop Perkins, and Hubert Sumlin with youthful shots of Cedric Burnside, Shemekia Copeland, and Sharde Thomas, themselves now in their thirties and forties. During this time, the Burnside and Turner families and other Mississippi artists such as T-Model Ford, James “Super Chikan” Johnson, and L. C. Ulmer entered the national and international spotlight, ensuring the powerful connection between authentic Delta, Hill Country, and Piney Woods blues musicians and their audience continues.
In 1993, Cooper began photographing in the clubs around New England, then in Chicago, and before long in Mississippi and Helena, Arkansas. On her very first trips to Mississippi in 1997 and 1998, Cooper had the good fortune to photograph Sam Carr, Frank Frost, Bobby Rush, and Otha Turner, among others. “The blues come out of the field,” Ulmer told Cooper. Seeing those fields, as well as the old juke joints, country churches, and people’s homes, inspired her. She began recordinginterviews with the musicians, sometimes over a period of years, listening and asking questions as their narratives unfolded. Many of the key blues players of the period have already passed, making their stories and Cooper’s photographs of them all the more poignant and valuable.
MARGO COOPER is a photographer and oral historian working in the classic documentary tradition. She is a longtime contributing writer and photographer for Living Blues magazine. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times Lens blog. WILLIAM R. FERRIS is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the senior associate director emeritus of its Center for the Study of the American South. The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997-2001), Ferris has written or edited ten books, created fifteen documentary films, and his most recent work Voices of Mississippi won two Grammy Awards for Best Liner Notes and for Best Historical Album in 2019.
PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:
“The urgent need to preserve a cornerstone of American culture led folklorists like John Lomax to travel the country documenting early blues recordings and writers like Amiri Baraka to publish Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Although Margo Cooper did not know it when she began more than twenty years ago, she has followed that tradition and produced a documentary project that archives the oral and visual histories of blues musicians, their families, and communities in northern Mississippi and the Delta.”
—fayemi shakur, New York Times Lens blog “Cooper’s images remind us that the blues is as much attitude or way of life as art form. She sees herself as an advocate for the music, a cele-brant, but not an apologist. Clearly, her photographs are a labor of love.” —Mark Feeney, Boston Globe
PRAISE FOR DEEP INSIDE THE BLUES:
“Deep Inside the Blues avoids the culture-wide tendency to romanticize and elegize its subjects as ‘the last surviving bluesmen’ or view them solely as conduits for the pain of racial oppression. Instead, Cooper’s interviews offer a nuanced celebration of the musicians she has come to know—indomitable individuals, storytellers and healers both, who have etched themselves into the world’s imagination.”
—Adam Gussow, author of Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Fu- ture of the Music “Deep Inside the Blues is truly historic. It is a stunning tribute to the musicians and to Cooper for her vision and persistence in gathering their photographs and oral histories.”
—William R. Ferris, author of I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960–1970
