Walk the span of one long hallway at the Center for Missouri Studies and the Missouri sound will make your ears bleed — in the best possible way.
Astute historians and self-aware artists will tell you there is no single Missouri sound. The state’s position between coasts and beyond riverbanks means many strains meet here, creating something faithful and strange.
The photographs composing the current Music in Missouri exhibit recognize this reality, playing measures of jazz, blues, ragtime, folk, rock, hip-hop and symphonic music within one long, unbroken song. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, these pictures make a glorious noise.
An opening panel reminds viewers that everything the State Historical Society of Missouri, housed within the building, does is meant to “evoke a sense of confluence — of rivers, cultures, ideas and people.” The exhibit makes that idea manifest with impressive images, the majority rendered in black-and-white, gesturing toward the push-and-pull of European and Black influences on the state’s music.
Kevin Walsh is used to tracing musical streams back to their source. A radio-show host, columnist and former record-store manager, he has seen the local music scene from nearly every conceivable angle. Walsh, who works for the State Historical Society as a security guard, appreciates how the exhibit ordered the information he’s absorbed.
“I’ve been put in a position of being aware of lots of different types of music ever since I’ve come here. I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since,” the Pennsylvania native said. “And to have somebody lay it out in a linear, narrative fashion — incomplete as that could be — it pleased me enormously.”
Take your first paces through the exhibit, and you find portraits of folk musicians wielding all manner of stringed instruments. Their eyes either stare right through you or gaze just out of frame; in their looks, the sense these musicians indeed contain centuries’ worth of stories and songs.
You anticipate the great crash of cymbals held aloft by Joseph Otten, the first musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Text around Otten’s photograph shares how European immigrants, especially German sojourners, elevated the classical form within Missouri’s borders.
Local hero John William “Blind Boone” appears, seated outside a train depot in Clarksburg, surrounded by dozens of men ranging from adolescents to adults. Why these men flanked the legendary ragtime pianist is left to the viewer’s imagination.
Ragtime, blues and jazz — the sounds most often associated with Missouri — are well-represented beyond Boone, in photographs of Tom Turpin and W.C. Handy. Wilbur “Buck” Clayton lifts his trumpet heavenward, as if in a moment of spiritual ecstasy. The radiant Josephine Baker beams at herself in a mirror, the smile on her face like a song unto itself.
Though unnamed, portraits of two female musicians — a trumpeter and singer, respectively — suggest these artists changed some people’s nights, maybe even their lives. Wearing a mess of something resembling spruce needles atop her head and pronounced eyeshadow, Caroline Syberg, captured in a St. Louis cafe, looks as if she wants to devour the viewer.
A Missouri State Highway Patrol surveillance photo documents a more libertine scene at the Ozark Music Festival, which brought 150,000 concertgoers to Sedalia in 1974. It’s hard to read a sea of topless backs and know who’s who.
Images of Black bandleader Benny Sharp speak volumes about the St. Louis rock scene in the early-to-mid-1960s. In one photo, the guitarist brandishes his instrument behind his head; while rock ‘n’ roll was alive long before that moment, the photograph reads like a creation myth, a thunderclap moment in which the genre was perfected, if not invented.
Something other than abandon crosses the faces of young people dancing to rock ‘n’ roll in other images. They wear expressions of deliberation and concentration, as if locked in a great exchange. There is no moment other than now, and they are giving everything they have back to the music.
As the State Historical Society’s assistant director of manuscripts, Laura Jolley has processed several collections of artifacts related to folk music. She felt a renewed connection to the acoustic musicians seen in the exhibit.
“These were men and women who not only were musicians and singers, but they collected everything about their favorite music,” Jolley said of lessons she’s learned in other contexts. “… I just learned to love a good fiddle tune after that.”
Developed to great size, the exhibit’s images convey both significance and a wealth of intimate details, Curator of Art Collections Joan Stack noted.
“They stand here and just look and look and look, and just keep finding more things in the photograph. What’s on the floor, what’s on the wall,” Jolley added, recounting viewers’ experiences.
She immediately pointed out a hat within one photograph, hidden in plain sight and resting on a hook well above the head of its guitar-playing owner.
Details abound and establish the soul of these pictures. An intrepid character might reverse-engineer the amplifier setup of Sharp’s band by tracing how wires find their outlet homes. An earthy portrait of folk singer Lee Elliott — cradling his guitar, pipe hanging from his lips — sees the torn-up, rotted-out floor beneath him and traces the grain of wood that hadn’t seen a paintbrush in decades.
Elsewhere, the exhibit features a poster from the final dates of seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo — including two nights at The Blue Note. A final panel juxtaposes the details of St. Louis hip-hop icon Nelly’s career with the image of a 1946 block party; the pairing implicitly observes that Black Missourians have long expressed shared, distinct joy through music.
In the exhibit, both Jolley and Walsh detect a sense of movement — and not merely in its swinging hips or fingers gliding from fret to fret. Jolley sees and hears “reasons people came” to Missouri and all they left behind to find a “place where they actually could find their way musically, and actually have a chance.”
If you leave the state to chase any other profession, touting your Missouri roots doesn’t necessarily open many doors, Walsh said. “But if you’re a musician, you get a little bit of a nod from ‘em.” These photographs sound out the kind of artistic richness that keeps heads nodding within and without the state.
Music in Missouri is located in the second-floor Corridor Gallery. Exhibits are open for viewing from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. Masks and social distancing are required. Visit shsmo.org for more details.