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Ninety-year-old Jimmy Lee Sudduth stares at
the picture of his old friend and is baffled. "Now, who
is this?" When someone nearby tells him the guitarist in
the photo is Johnny Shines, there comes the moment of recognition.
"That is him, isn't it!" The man's mind awakens
to memories of playing harp alongside the Delta blues legend.
Rocking slightly on his high-backed metal chair, he recalls how
he and Shines even went on television together. "Oh, he
could make that guitar talk, boy."
Sudduth was about 15 when he learned to play the harp. "If
you got a tape recorder, I'll play you one." A friend passes
him one of his Hohner Marine Bands. He takes it out of its plastic
case, cups it in two creased hands and blows a blues like he
used to play at back-country dances. His foot taps out the beat
nice and steady. Afterward, pleased with his 30-second performance,
he points to a busted amplifier in the corner, wishing he could
plug in and make some noise his neighbors would hear.
Portrait of an aging country bluesman? Almost. Jimmy Lee Sudduth
is of the same generation as our oldest surviving musicians,
and he is expressing something as earthy and unselfconscious
as the music of an Othar Turner or David "Honeyboy"
Edwards. There's just one difference.
Jimmy Lee Sudduth is a painter.
He lives and works in Fayette, a small Alabama community which
- in Sudduth and the late Benjamin Perkins - has produced two
stars of an ongoing folk-art boom that bears an uncanny resemblance
to the folk-blues resurgence of the 1960s. Louisiana bluesman
Robert Pete Williams, when he first recorded, was a middle-aged
man; Fred McDowell debuted in his mid-50s; Texas songster and
sharecropper Mance Lipscomb was older than that. Similarly, Jimmy
Lee Sudduth was already 60 when his art was first exhibited in
Fayette in 1971. For years before that, the former farmer and
landscaper had been making pictures by applying "sweet mud"
(dirt mixed with water and sugar) to whatever flat surface he
could find. He added color from berries, turnip greens, and lawnmower
soot. Since that hometown show 30 years ago, Sudduth's self-taught
art has received - and survived - a remarkable amount of international
attention. His paintings now hang in the Smithsonian and can
sell for $2,000 or more on the Internet.
(continue
to part 2)
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