Longtime Blues Preservation Organization Garners Prestigious Oakley Award

Mt. Zion Memorial Fund wins the Oakley Award 

from the Association for Gravestone Studies

The MZMF erected the marker for Charley Patton in 1991

The award winning work of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund continues through the July 29 dedication of a memorial to eminent recording artist Armenter Chatmon (aka Bo Carter), of the Mississippi Sheiks, at the abandoned Nitta Yuma Cemetery in Nitta Yuma, Mississippi - To learn more and support this, please click HERE or GoFundMe

We are also currently working with St. John MB Church in Camden, MS to erect a memorial to Belton Sutherland, who folklorist Worth Long and Alan Lomax featured in the film The Land Where the Blues Began. To learn more, please click HERE or GoFundMe

Ruth and Moore first collaborated on the discovery of
the military marker of Son Simms in 2014, but Ruth's
coimetromania extends much farther back and connects
to his love for older photographic processes.

The Board of Trustees of the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS) has unanimously approved the nomination to award Euphus Ruth a Fred Oakley Award both for your dedicated photographic investigation of the rural and abandoned graveyards throughout the Mississippi Delta. In addition, to your creative work, T. DeWayne Moore, who nominated you, convinced the board that your work with the Mount Zion Memorial Fund extends the necessity of this award. There you have provided important research, identification and preservation of prominent African American musicians' graves. The unearthed and restored markers and newly identified graves have helped to renew several African American burial grounds in your area. Indeed, you are an inspiration! 

We thank you for your work for and on such important historic and fragile cemeteries. Your award will be presented at the annual conference of the AGS at the University of Alabama this spring. 

With kind regards, 

Anne Tait Chair Awards Committee

Roosevelt T. Williams: The "Grey Ghost" Walks Again

Roosevelt T. Williams: The "Grey Ghost" Walks Again

By George Papajohn - 1989

Nobody knows you, yes, when

you're down and out

In your pocket, not one penny

And your friends, you have not any

Roosevelt T. Williams, Texas' 85-year-old "Grey Ghost," knows these words to be true. He knows them the way he once knew the freight trains of the Southwest that carried him from one show to the next, the way he knows how to walk onto a stage, or into a club, or a houseparty or a roller rink, sit down at an unfamiliar piano and in no time have the place jumpin', the tips jar janglin'.

On this sultry San Antonio Sun-day, the piano is an electric Yamaha—not the acoustic one that had been promised—and Ghost's manager and friend, Tary Owens, the architect of the Ghost's unlikely late-life comeback, is a little nervous. The Ghost, though, is taking it in stride as he heads into the sunshine for the Bowie Street Blues festival stage.

"That's okay," he said. "I'll do the best I can. If they don't like it, they can put some cotton in their ears." That isn't necessary. By the time the Ghost plays "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"—one of his favorites among the 300 or so songs in a repertoire the piano professor has built in more than 60 years of study—the early-afternoon crowd of 300 gathered on a grassy incline is his.

There's no tips jar, but after Ghost's one-hour stint as opening act, Owens sells all eight copies of Grey Ghost records he has on hand, and the newly won fans are lining up for Ghost's autograph. Not bad for a man who didn't have a record re-leased until he was 83, who saw national fame pass him by four decades before, who only three years ago was not only down and out but believed by many to be gone for good, a true ghost at last.

"People are treating me like I'm 28 or 29," be said, painstakingly scrawling his given name and his nickname on a record jacket. "Here I am been half ready for the grave., But I ain't goin' yet." Tary Owens was not the first white man, or even the first Owens, to try to bring the Ghost to a larger audience.

In 1940, folklorist William Owens discovered the Ghost playing at a roller rink in Navasota, Tex., recorded some of his songs, including an original called "Hitler Blues" and wrote about his find. Other publications, including Time, followed up, and Alistair Cook used "Hitler Blues", in a BBC report on the impact of the war on American music.

"We had made permanent the work of 4 genuine folk poet and musician," Owens, who is not related to Tary, wrote in 1983 in his book, "Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song."

Piano men: Lavada Durst, Grey Ghost, Erbie Bowser. Photo by Clay Shorkey.

But his attempts to promote the Ghost were unsuccessful. "He was a black blues singer and there was not much of an audience for a black blue& singer, I was told at radio stations," Owens wrote. "The waste of imagination? Of talent? No one cared the to give him a chance."

He Lived and Died the Blues: Jackson's Sonny Boy

He Lived and Died the Blues:

Jackson's Sonny Boy took his Music to the Top

By Mary S. Reed - Jackson (TN) Sun - 1990

Part of the blues died one June 1948 night when Jackson's Sonny Boy Williamson was beaten to death on a Chicago street. A friend said it was because of 50 cents in the famous musician's pocket: A woman had given Sonny Boy the money to play the blues for her. Then her man beat it out of Sonny Boy when he wouldn't give the money back.

It would have been like Sonny Boy to sing about that 50 cents the next day. For Sonny Boy Williamson could wail his blues on a two-bit harp like no one before him. By the time the violence and poverty of his world caught up with him that night, the harmonica — and the blues — would never be the same.

"He was the single most influential blues harmonica player of his day and possibly of all time," said David Evans, Memphis State University blues expert. Few in his hometown of Jackson remember Sonny Boy or know of his fame, said T.W. Utley, Sonny Boy's younger brother, who lives within a few miles of the musician's birthplace and grave.

Sonny Boy's 25-cent harmonica and down-and-out songs became his ticket out of Madison County's cotton fields in the 1920s. But in the end, he couldn't escape the South's poverty. His body lies in a rural Madison County grave marked only by a rusting, metal marker — the kind the funeral homes stick in the ground until money buys a grave-stone.

A faded piece of paper stuck behind dirty glass on that marker gives his name: John Lee Williamson. His age: 34. The day he died: June 1, 1948. "Now, I want to bury my body, way down in Jackson, Tennessee," Sonny Boy would sing while his feet shuffled the two-step and his right hand cupped the harmonica to his mouth.

The handsome Sonny Boy — always friendly, smiling and setting up the whiskey-loving house with drinks — could hold an audience like any good preacher offering hope from everyday troubles.

Sonny Boy turned the harmonica into a lead instrument when others were using it for background music. He went from singing to playing so effortlessly that it was hard to tell where his voice stopped and the harmonica began.

"He inspired so many imitators, he was like the Michael Jackson of his day in the blues community,- said Jim O'Neal, founder of Living Blues Magazine. 

In taverns and tourist-filled clubs where they still sing the increasingly popular blues, Sonny Boy's influence is felt whenever a harmonica is played or a singer pulls out one of Sonny Boy's songs from his bag of tricks, said Bob Shatkin, who teaches the harmonica in Brooklyn and has been playing it for 35 years.

“He’s a hero.”

The more he plays, Shatkin said, the more he appreciates Sonny Boy's skills.

"Every harp (harmonica) player owes him a debt. He's a hero. Even 41 years after his death, he's still thought of by musicians in Chicago as wonderful." Sonny Boy was born March 30, 1914, near Britton Lane in south-west Madison County, with the blues in his blood and a need to go places.

Still a Great Delta Blues Singer

Still a Great Delta Blues Singer

By Lawrence Cohn

The story below is Copyright 1968, Saturday Review Inc.

Please consider supporting the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund's campaign to mark the grave of blues musician Belton Sutherland and maintain existing memorials in Mississippi

"Son" (Eddie) House lives a leisurely life now at his Greig Street home.  Resting from a trip to Philadelphia to see friends, and to New York to tape the forthcoming show, the musician said he'll be going to Chicago in February to participate in the Chicago Folk Festival.  Meanwhile, his principal occupation is correspondence with many fans who heard him on a European trip last year. That trip was followed by a tour of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, However it is principally the fans of Germany, Austria and England with whom House corresponds.

He is a great deal older now. Perhaps his hands can't behave exactly as he would have them. But he is still the great Mississippi delta blues singer and guitarist, whose handful of old recordings has kept his memory and reputation surviving for these many years.

Along with two or three other artists, his name has be-come a synonym for the r o u g h, intensely emotional delta blues style. He is, in many ways, the most important and significant blues artist to have been "rediscovered" as a result of the cur-rent intensified interest in the blues and the important re-cording artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

His discovery by three young enthusiasts—Dick Waterman, Nick Perls, and Phil Spiro—Is a story by it-self and, in short, is a tale of a search that covered 16 states and 4,000 miles, all of which resulted in locating "Son" House living in Rochester, N.Y., far removed from Mississippi.

"Son" House is an artist of almost incredible forcefulness and stature. His is a ferocious, almost violent, instrumental attack accentuated by the sliding of a steel tube, which he wears on one of the finger's of his fretting hand, along the strings of his steel-bodied National guitar.

His singing is dramatic, and he is still, to many, the finest blues singer of all. In performance, his eyes are closed, head reared back, and he gasps as he builds his song to a fever-pitched emotional level. He has the quality of becoming so totally immersed in his artistry that, by all indicatons, it appears that each song is a complete catharsis in itself.  He is an emotional experience, and no other blues artist active today appears to be capable of conveying these qualities to his listeners.

In a sense he is a paradox. He is the man whose very name stands for the harshness and abrasive qualities of which the Mississippi blues consist. But despite this, his initial external influences were experienced outside of Mississippi. And, to heighten the curiosity, he began to play the guitar when he was a grown man—rather than as a boy.

His outward personality appears to be nothing short of a complete reversal of his musical approach. He is not, by any means, a very forceful person, and the word "shy" would most appropriately describe him.

Eddie James House Jr. — "Son" — was born outside of Clarksdale, Miss., on March 21, 1902. At age of three or four his family moved to New Orleans, La., where he remained for about 20 years.

"I remember Louis Arm-strong in 1917 or '18; he was already a big man. The singers were a little different in New Orleans. They sang mostly ballads and not blues."