The Memphis Blues Again by Ernest C. Withers

These Memphis Blues musicians sit amongst iconic images of the Civil Rights. This book goes beyond the headlines to show how Withers created an essential record for all of us to better understand life in the South during this crucial era. In a career that stretched back to World War II, Ernest C. In 2010, three years after his death, the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper published a series of articles that showed that Withers was a paid informant of the FBI. They serve as an important missing link in the civil rights narrative. They are also important examples of photojournalism, documenting decades of struggle in Memphis and the Mid-South. The photographs, taken as bare-bones journalism, rises to the level of fine art decades later. This book combines this work for the first time and uses first-hand accounts of people who lived in the South to explain these transformative years. He was also a noted baseball photographer, documenting Negro League baseball in Memphis, and a noted music photographer, taking thousands of photographs of jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll and R&B performers. His photographs of the everyday world-bridge clubs, funerals, people at work and play, and street life-create a stunning record of what it was like to live in Memphis and the Mid-South. Withers was primarily a local photographer, working as a freelancer for the Memphis World and Tri-State Defender starting in 1948. What set his work apart was that he goes beyond the political struggles to explain the civil rights movement that changed the country.

During the course of his work, he took thousands photographs that document the civil rights movement-from the Emmett Till trial in 1955 to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. As a photographer, Beale Street was his primary beat, and the landmarks of his life are names familiar to any Memphian Manassas High School, the Gospel Temple Baptist Church. Withers was one of the most prominent African-American photographers of the civil rights era. Withers was a man of Memphis, where he was born, lived for most of his life, and died in 2007 at age 85.

The Memphis Blues Again by Ernest C. Withers