Clara Turnage | The Daily Mississippian
YZ Ealey performs at Lamar Lounge Thursday.
Lamar Lounge was bursting last Thursday night. Fifteen blues legends from across Mississippi had flocked to the bar, and, though the stage was small, the noise could be heard from blocks away. From its doors poured the blues that feels at home in Mississippi. What brought these musicians and these musicians together? One woman: H.C. Porter.
Porter is an artist who specializes in silkscreen productions. She owns her own studio in Vicksburg but has had her work featured in exhibits across the nation.
For three years Porter worked on a project to unite and publicize Mississippi’s living legends, the blues artists. The finished product was a collection of 30 pieces of artwork that capture prestigious musicians in places where they were not the whimsically confident men and women who appear onstage.
“I realized I had wandered and photographed all over the Delta, but I had never had the opportunity to tell the story of the music and musicians of the Mississippi Delta,” Porter said.
Porter’s collection was completed in early 2014 and was almost immediately snatched up by The University of Mississippi Museum.
Though the exhibition opened Tuesday, the reception was last Thursday night at the museum. After browsing the artwork, the musicians headed to Lamar Lounge to play for the waiting crowd of enthusiasts.
“We’ve got a house full of people tonight. I’m a blues musician and I know we had a great crowd,” Terry “Harmonica” Bean, one of the many talented artists present, said over the waning guitar in the background. “That’s what the blues does for you. It brings people together.”
Bean had just arrived back in the country after playing in Israel.
“I’m glad to be home for a minute,” Bean said. “But next week after the Juke Joint Festival I’m headed back out to Germany.”
The musicians picked guitars and hummed through harmonicas while Oxford native Jimbo Mathus backed up with the drums, bringing to life the blues that Porter represented in her art.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to have everyone gathered here, and to see these legends together has been awesome,” Porter said. “The response has really been an honor. It’s touched me completely.”
The artists, too, were awed by Oxford’s response.
“I have never been treated so nice and so well-accepted and appreciated,” musician “YZ” Ealey said.
This was more than astonishing, considering YZ has been playing for more than 65 years.
“I feel really great about this because it’s Mississippi living blues legends,” musician Vasti Jackson said. “Even though I recorded with B. B. King and worked with Bobby Glen and lots of other people, I never thought that my photo and my bio and my words would be in a museum with B.B. King and some of these great icons of the music that is indigenous to Mississippi.”
It seemed that Lamar Lounge was host to more than just another group of musicians.
“People have been exposed to not only the music and musicians but also the culture and lifestyle and to Mississippi’s sense of place,” Porter said. “I fell in love with the blues. I had hoped to be able to come back and tell the story, which I feel like we are doing that right now.”
