According to friends and colleagues, Paul Averwater was “Memphis’ stage manager,” an honorific he earned after decades of helming concerts and awards shows with professionalism and aplomb.
“He wasn’t a musician, but every musician in this town knew him and loved him,” said filmmaker and producer Willy Bearden, who worked with Averwater for 20 years on the annual Blues Music Awards ceremony.
Ronald Paul Averwater, 57, died Sept. 24 at his home of pancreatic cancer, after months of relative music-business inactivity, due to the coronavirus shutdowns that caused the cancellation of many of the events that Averwater managed.
For 20-plus years, Averwater had been the stage manager for the Memphis Botanic Garden’s Live at the Garden concert series, the National Civil Rights Museum’s Freedom Awards, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, the Blues Foundation’s Blues Music Awards, the Germantown Performing Arts Center and the main stage at the Memphis in May Beale Street Music Festival, to name a few.
A scion of the Amro Music company that was founded by Mil Averwater in Memphis in 1921 and that in its heyday operated a chain of stores around the Mid-South, Paul Averwater was around music his entire life.
As a teenager, he worked at Amro stores, familiarizing himself with equipment and selling instruments to musicians of all ages. The stores sold school band instruments, sheet music, pianos, church organs and other musical paraphernalia.
“There’s not many notes that have been played in Memphis in probably 30 or 40 years that didn’t have Paul in there somewhere, whether he provided the musical instrument that somebody learned to play on or set up their stage for them or whatever,” said Joe Whitmer, event producer at the Blues Foundation.
As a stage manager, Averwater helped oversee all the elements of a concert presentation, from the building and equipping of the stage to getting the acts onto and off the stage on time, and everything in between.
Often working with a tour manager, he sometimes had to assuage the sensitive egos of truculent stars, “but he could handle the most stressful situations with grace,” Whitmer said.
“We know the artists on the stage are working their craft, and that’s their art,” he said. “Paul’s art was making sure the stage was prepared for the artist. If you’ve got a happy artist, you’ve got a great show, and that’s what Paul delivered, happy artists performing for excited crowds.”
Said Bearden: “He had a grasp of technology, the temperament that comes from confidence, and the wide-open joy of someone who is doing exactly what he was meant to do.”
“He didn’t say a lot, he just handled things.”
“We didn’t use anyone else but him,” said GPAC executive director Paul Chandler, citing “Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis” and Dr. John’s Louis Armstrong tribute show as examples of incredibly complicated touring shows that Averwater managed without a hitch.
A graduate of Christian Brothers High School and Christian Brothers University, Averwater leaves his wife, Janet Rosser Averwater; a son, Christopher Brunson Averwater; his mother, Patricia Averwater; a brother, Richard Joseph Averwater; and a sister, Theresa Siligato.
“Memphis has lost a true giant in the music industry and music production,” Whitmer said. “Anyone in Memphis, if you’ve ever seen a national or international touring artist in concert, I can’t imagine that Paul wasn’t there, working in some shape or fashion on that stage. I can’t imagine working at Memphis in May next year and not having Paul as a backup.”