November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

And the Beat Goes On

The Music Maker Foundation preserves roots music and sustains the artists who create it

July/August 2002 Issue
By Karen Olson, Utne Reader 
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When guitarist Ry Cooder helped rediscover the great musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club, he ignited a major Cuban music boom. Having already done the same for West African greats like Ali Farka Toure, Cooder seemed to be taking up where the famed musicologist Alan Lomax left off, introducing American audiences to folk sounds from around the world.

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But Cooder is not alone. Other music lovers are trying to preserve authentic musical styles, including some catchy grooves a lot closer to home. In North Carolina, Tim Duffy, another guitar player turned ethnomusicologist, is bringing recognition and support to aging, mostly unknown masters of traditional Southern roots music—a.k.a. the blues. As music legend Taj Mahal describes it, "This tradition is 25 miles down a dusty road off the blacktop, where 157 people in a little village are listening to musicians still playing like they were playing it 50, 60, 100 years ago." Taj Mahal is one of a number of musical celebrities who have helped Duffy realize his dream of not only getting these old musicians on disc, but helping them find health insurance and pay the rent.Duffy, 39, encountered a number of these artists in the 1980s as a graduate student in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After documenting the work of James "Guitar Slim" Stephens for the university’s Southern Folklife Collection, Duffy began playing with another old-timer in the Winston-Salem area named Guitar Gabriel. Traveling with Gabriel to "drink houses" and other neighborhood venues throughout the Southeast, Duffy got to know many other old performers, most of whom were struggling to make ends meet. "It was food or medicine, rent or the car," he says.So working out of a tin storage shed behind a used-car lot, Duffy began trying to book gigs and make record deals for his new acquaintances, although none of it paid much. Meanwhile, Duffy started making his own field recordings of the musicians he met along the way. A breakthrough came in 1993 when he met audio pioneer Mark Levinson, who loved the recordings and was appalled to hear how poorly the artists who made them were often forced to live. Levinson came up with the idea for the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation, to provide assistance to Southern roots musicians over 55 with an annual income of less than $18,000. Many of the artists will be featured in Music Makers: Portraits and Songs from the Roots of America, a collection of photographs and stories, with a foreword by B.B. King, to be published in October by Hill Street Press.
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