Between Midnight and Day

Dick Waterman has led the mythic life most blues fans only conjure up in their wildest juke-joint dreams. In the early ’60s, he and some college friends traveled from Boston to Mississippi in search of legendary Delta-blues master Son House, who disappeared after Alan Lomax recorded him in 1941 for the Library of Congress. A couple months and a thousand miles later they tracked him down in Rochester, N.Y. It was an inauspicious meeting: House, who hadn’t touched a guitar in 20 years, was a hopeless alcoholic. By default, Waterman became his manager and helped him sober up. He worked with Canned Heat co-founder Al Wilson to coach House back to his former musical greatness, eventually booking him on his first big concert tour that included the 1964 Philadelphia Folk Festival and Newport Folk Festival.

Thus began a musical lifetime that encompassed managing House and fellow early bluesmen Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup; kick-starting the careers of latter-day titans like Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells; rubbing shoulders with legendary blues artists like Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf; and forming deep friendships with the iconic likes of Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. In 2000 Waterman was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. That’s some serious mojo for a guy who’s never played onstage.

Along the way, Waterman attended countless concerts and festivals and took some breathtaking photographs, many of which are included in the book Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive (Thunder’s Mouth Press). Accompanying the photographs are his pointed and poignant reflections on the blues musicians he’s known. Chris Murray, director of the Govinda Gallery in Washington, D.C., saw Waterman’s photos displayed in a framing shop in Oxford, Miss., where Waterman (now semi-retired) has been living since the late ’80s. Murray immediately recognized the potential and convinced Waterman to couple the images with his personal reminiscences, which turned out to be anything but a simple task.

“I’m not really a writer,” Waterman says. “I tried to write for a long time, and it didn’t go very well. I looked at the photos, and I wrote about the photos, and after a while I had some facts about a bunch of frozen moments in time. It was boring, quite frankly. So I changed my approach. I walked around all day, thinking about one or two of the musicians I had known. Then I’d sit down at the computer, late at night, and I’d ask myself, ‘What do I want people to know about these musicians?’ And after that it was easy. I’d write a couple sections per night, then I’d look for the photos to go with the stories.”

It worked. In a few short passages devoted to each musician, his stories and anecdotes reveal the quirks and idiosyncrasies, the fears and hopes, the foibles and passions that made them the astounding individuals they were.

“These people had what I like to call ‘textured personalities.’” Waterman says. “There’s been a tendency to mythologize them, homogenize them. But I knew them, you know? And they could be obstinate and arrogant and kind and friendly, the meanest sons of bitches and the best people you’d ever want to know. There’s a belief that they were all wonderful, gentle, terrific people, and in fact they were not. Lightnin’ Hopkins was a con man. Big Mama Thornton was the single most irascible human being I’ve ever encountered. John Hurt was one of the gentlest and sweetest men I’ve ever known. But all of them were textured; they weren’t one-dimensional. And I wanted to communicate what that looked like for each one of them, provide a window into who they were.”

That desire also accounts for the radiant quality of many of these black-and-white images, the way Waterman perceptively captured humanity in singularly unguarded moments with his photographic lens: the weary exhaustion of Janis Joplin at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival, utterly spent after a typically manic performance; the magisterial dignity of Son House posing beside the Liberty Bell in 1964, proud to be on the road again for the first time in more than 20 years; the palpable joy of Buddy Guy tearing into one of his incandescent guitar solos. “I’m just a guy with a camera,” he says, with self-effacing modesty.

One of the book’s most striking photos shows Louisiana bluesman Robert Pete Williams playing his guitar at the bottom of a stairwell. Waterman shot the photo early one morning when he heard the sound of soft music outside his apartment door. He opened it to find Williams hunched over his guitar at the bottom of the stairs, crooning softly on the phone to his wife, Hattie, hundreds of miles away. You don’t expect to see such intertwined tenderness and pathos, but Waterman witnessed it again and again.

And the future of the vital music he chronicled? “It’s pretty bleak out there right now,” Waterman concedes. “The U.S. Congress proclaimed 2003 as ‘The Year of the Blues,’ but that was a joke. Blues festivals are folding. Three-day festivals are becoming two-day and one-day festivals. Corporate sponsorships have dropped dramatically. Labels have trimmed their rosters, and music sales are down. But the music will survive. There will always be people who hear the blues, know the blues deep down and want to carry on that tradition.”

When asked if he’d ever like to manage again, Waterman is more reluctant. “Probably not,” he says. “The fire still burns. I see people with great talent, great potential, and sure, I’d love for them to be better known. But it’s a different world today. It’s all about computers and the Internet and marketing. But I was always in it for the people. I really liked the people.”

And the people are the focal points of Between Midnight and Day. Their stories, told vividly in words and pictures, are stories of friendship, in all its intimacy and profound complexity. These are the stories of great artists, great and not-so-great people, and the extraordinary manager, photographer and human being who knew them well. Just a guy with a camera? Sure—just a guy with a camera and a heart as wide as the Mississippi. In the words of Muddy Waters, one of the singular artists Dick Waterman called friend, “Ain’t that a man?”