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Deep Inside the Blues:
Photographs by Margo Cooper
December 18, 2004-June 5, 2005
From generation to generation, in informal settings and professional concerts, traditional Mississippi blues has thrived in the Delta and the northern hill country. Although blues was born under the clouds of racial intolerance and poverty in the segregated Jim Crow South, it is often a music of joy and release. The style afforded early players true freedom of expression while the soaring vocal phrases of the blues' finest singers and the thrill of a deftly bent guitar string continue to stir audiences today. The National Heritage Museum presented a unique look at this enduring musical genre through the photographs of Arlington-based photographer Margo Cooper. The 38 black-and-white photographs on view were taken by Cooper over the past 10 years as she traveled throughout the Mississippi Delta to document the blues, its traditions, and its people as close to the music's wellspring as possible. "Deep Inside the Blues: Photographs by Margo Cooper" was on view at the Museum December 18, 2004 through June 5, 2005. The exhibition also featured the writing of Blues Foundation Award-winning journalist and musician Ted Drozdowski, who prepared the show's text and labels.
"I want people to know that the blues--which started a hundred years ago in the plantations and work camps of the rural South--is still alive," explained Cooper. "Through my photos, I want to show that there are still musicians who carry the light of this music. Some are young performers fresh to the stage, but many are a living part of American history, like Pinetop Perkins and Honeyboy Edwards, who have been performing since the 1920s and 1930s. They play not only in concerts all over the world, but right where the blues was born, in places like Mississippi and Alabama, where the music has been passed from generation to generation and family to family."
Cooper began photographing blues musicians and the culture surrounding their music in 1993, when a fascination she developed for the genre in high school bloomed during a yearlong sabbatical from her career as a lawyer. She chose to work in black-and-white, finding that the textures and subtle shadings it affords reflect the timelessness and the emotional resonance of this important African-American style that has influenced every form of popular music.
"When you're there at a festival, a picnic, or a little juke joint and the blues is being played, it's so powerful and so moving," she says. "You can hear and see and feel the history and the culture and the generations in the rhythms of the guitars and the drums. Then you know you're deep inside the blues."
Cooper's photographs--depicting musicians ranging from nationally recognized performers like B. B. King, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells to lesser-known artists both onstage and at home--gave Museum visitors their own opportunity to look "deep inside the blues."
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