Blind Boy Paxton plays various blues songs for the audience gathered at the Ford Center Wednesday night.
Photo by Anna Brigance | The Daily Mississippian
The Gertrude Ford Center for Performing Arts is committed to bringing quality, culturally rich entertainment to Oxford and The University of Mississippi. Since it’s opening in 2003, the Ford Center has been a hub for Oxford’s finer tastes.
“Oxford is a very diverse place and we want to get a broad range of what’s out there in terms of the arts so that people will have a chance to see different performances,” said Kate Meacham, marketing director of the Ford Center.
The Ford Center hosts a multitude of events each year ranging from authorial visits, performances by speakers and singers to Broadway shows. Among the list of those who have visited are intellectual and performing greats such as James Earl Jones, B.B. King, Marty Stuart, Morgan Freeman and Janet Reno.
The Center for the Study of Southern Culture has been working with the Ford Center to produce the Music of The South series.
“The idea is that we are able to present two or three concerts a year in a time when the members of the community find it more convenient. So we do it in the early evening at the Ford Center,” said Scott Barretta, the host of Highway 61 Radio, sociology instructor at Ole Miss and former editor of Living Blues magazine.
“The point of it is that we get to highlight the artistry of someone. While a lot of good artists play at various clubs in town, it’s not exactly what you would call a respectful setting to an acoustic artist.”
Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton joined the list of historic visitors Wednesday night when he came to perform for the most recent Music of The South production. Blind Boy Paxton is a rising blues musician proficient in various instruments. The Los Angeles native plays a concoction of bluesy-jazz and ragtime.
“Blind Boy Paxton is really interesting because he is a master of various musics from the 1920s or even earlier,” Barretta stated. “Not very many people of his generation, in their early to mid-twenties, play this music. And certainly very few who have mastered the music.”
One of the most amazing things about Paxton is that he lost nearly all of his vision at age sixteen, but never let this phase his musical ability. He plays the harmonica, banjo, accordion, piano, ukulele and guitar proficiently.
“It gives students the opportunity to see things very beautifully and relatively inexpensively so they can take a chance on something they’ve never seen before. They don’t have to drive to Memphis, and student tickets are either 10 or 15 dollars for anything in the Ford Center,” Meacham said. “So, it’s part of our educational mission to bring the highest and best quality performances we can to try and enrich the university.”
The Ford Center has been integrating the community in a new way of late.
“We have several things coming up, and one has already happened, where professional ensembles coming in are working directly with university students or community members and using them in performances,” Meacham continued. “We have a traditional ‘Nutcracker,’ which has cast local children and local dancers in it, coming up.”
This addition to the center’s performance is sure to endear more and more individuals to it, as it now incorporates the very people who love it. The Gertrude Ford Center for Performing Arts has been bringing singular artistry to Ole Miss for 10 years, and will continue to be the source of fine entertainment.
