The Memphis Blues Again by Ernest C. Withers

Withers passed away on Monday, Octoat the age of eighty-five. Withers and his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Curry, raised eight children.Įrnest C. For his life’s work, Withers was elected to the Black Press Hall of Fame and received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art. In his more than sixty-year career, Withers accumulated a collection of an estimated five million photographs his works appeared in The New York Times, Jet, Ebony, Newsweek, and Life and were featured in touring exhibits and shows around the country. The Memphis Blues Again: Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs, Viking Studio, 2001.

King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press. Withers's pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Memphis Blues Again by Ernest C. Withers