The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

[cmac2012]

A couple of weeks ago, a good friend of mine, a psychiatrist with 20% sight in one eye only, bought tickets for us to go see the Blind Boys of Alabama. I do maintenance on her house at a cut-rate and she does things for me. The BB of A are a politically incorrectly named group of 3 blind black men singers, a blind black drummer, and 3 younger sighted black dudes playing guitar and bass.

I’d heard them on NPR – pretty good – and they said the name came from the time they started decades ago and they were sticking with it.

We were waiting for the show to start, something like 6th row seats, and out walk 5 older black women. They looked a bit ill at ease, like it wasn't an everyday thing for them. I figured they were the warm-up act and oh, man, what an act.



I found out later that they were in town with the “Quilts of Gee’s Bend” exhibit at the DeYoung Museum in SF. I’d bought one of the books of stamps with the quilts on them and had seen a few pictures of the quilts in magazines.

The women of the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective live in a remote part of southwest Alabama on a sliver of land five miles long and eight miles wide, surrounded by a bend in the Alabama River. This community of about 750 residents has lacked ferry service to the county seat of Camden since the early 1960s, making them nearly an hour’s drive from the closest source of supplies and services.

This isolation has generated a community of women creating quilts from whatever materials were available, in patterns of their own imaginative design. "The compositions of these quilts contrast dramatically with the ordered regularity associated with many styles of Euro-American quiltmaking. There's a brilliant, improvisational range of approaches to composition that is more often associated with the inventiveness and power of the leading 20th-century abstract painters than it is with textile-making," says Alvia Wardlaw, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.



The quilts are quite impressive but the gospel singing these ladies came out with was a mind-blower. Lord have mercy, I didn’t know I had such a volume of tears waiting to be let out. This was the real deal, a direct line connection to some hard livin’ and survivin.’ I understand a tradition in that kind of quilting community is to practice their singing while they make their quilts. The Blind Boys of Alabama were all right, a bit too loud on the guitars, but the show had done been stolen already anyway.

I like to sing at fairs around campfires banging on my guit-box with friends, making our own music and eschewing this trend of being spectators watching the “real” musicians, the “really good” ones, doing the singing for us. If I can get half as real as these ladies, I’ll have gotten somewhere.



Dec. 31st was the last day of the exhibit in SF and apparently nation-wide, for now anyway. I took my friend over to see it. They said there’s a permanent display at a museum in Houston. Something tells me they’ll be around again, and if you get the chance, check it out. The hand stitching was obvious and, all fear of being cornball aside, you could sense the soulfulness in them things.



I found this quote from one of the quilters in a story about them from the Lehrer NewsHour:

ARLONZIA PETTWAY: I felt so good. I had the happiest time I had in my life to see our quilts hanging on the wall, and peoples just praising our quilts, and everybody's eyes full of water. And I didn't know what was going on. I really didn't know what was going on. White peoples was crying, and black peoples was crying, and everyone was crying. And I had such a good time and I enjoyed myself so much, I had to ask myself a question. I said, "am I dead and in heaven?"

You can watch the streaming video of the NewsHour report at the link above -- a really good piece.

[H-townbenzoboy]

I saw the exhibit when it came to town, very nice. The ladies of Gee's Bend probably looked ill at ease because they don't get out too often. I saw a TV special on them where they stated they'd travel to their gallery openings, but not via airplane, only by bus. I also like the Blind Boys of Alabama. They were founded in 1939 and still have most of the original members. Did one of the singers jump down into the audience during the performance? I love it when he does that.

There's also another group called The Original Blind Boys of Mississippi. I got to see them in concert about a year and a half ago. Many of the original members are deceased and they have younger additions, some of them aren't blind, but they can still tear the house up. If you look for any of their recordings, try to find some from 1960 and earlier especially. They had a singer back then named Archie Brownlee. He could be singing a sweet tenor one minute, and the next, he'd hit a high piercing scream.

[t walgamuth]

there was a major article recently on those quilts in smithsonian i think it was. they are very excellent!

the color and designs are very vigorous!

tom w

[cmac2012]

I certainly didn't mean to run them down on account of looking ill at ease. I agree that their sudden entry into the spotlight must be a bit startling. I mean, love it or hate it, San Francisco does have a reputation for being one of the world's cosmopolitan cities, and it must be a bit intimidating to be up in front of 2700 big city people. I could understand that years of being told you were just poor black folk would be hard to flush out of your system all at once. What sweet justice it is to see them honored so.

The Blind Boys put on a great show. My ears are a bit tender and the amps were not top quality and the sound was kinda over the top and muddy. The vocals were piercing in their volume.

Still, I enjoyed it a lot. One fellow did come down into the audience with the transmitter type microphone and wandered up and down the aisles singing, with one of the guitar players following close behind. He eventually had to haul him up onto the stage by his armpits as apparently they had to vacate the building by a certain time. Finally, the three singers were escorted out and lastly, the drummer was helped out. He came up to the edge of the stage and faked like he was going to throw his sticks into the audience. He threw the first one up over his head and the guitar player caught it. He threw the next one into the audience, and I swear it came right at me. It hit my friend on the chin, I couldn't catch it fast enough, and fell on her coat on the seat behind her.

I grabbed it at about the same time as the lady behind us. She didn't want to let go but I was stronger than her. Beside, my friend is almost blind, does a lot of pyscho-therapy with blind and vision impaired people and it hit her in the face for Christ's sake, so I held onto it and presented it to her. First time that's ever happened to me, I mean anything even similar -- baseball at a game, etc.

Thanks for the tip Tom, I'll look for the magazine.