Music Maker Foundation in Sunday "New York Times"
Dick Waterman
should bring an avalanche of support for Tim Duffy and his foundation.
Dick Waterman
March 21, 2004
Blues Musicians Get Help Overcoming Hard Times
By ANDREW JACOBS
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."
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."
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