Juke Joints, Roadhouses and Southern Parables : The Documentary Lyricism of Photographer Birney Imes

COLUMBUS, A COUNTY SEAT OF 23,800 IN NORTHEAST Mississippi, is as pretty as an antique ball gown. In its well-preserved but not over-dandified historic district, more than a 100 stately pleasure domes survive from the antebellum era, and goo-goo clusters of architecture and history buffs regularly trek through the broad, shady avenues to marvel at restored showplaces with nobby names like Shadowlawn, White Arches and Rosewood Manor. It’s a slow, rocking-chair kind of place where everyone seemingly knows everyone else and the residents are likely to wave to you from their lawns and trellised verandas. Still, the overall feel of the place is modern, if not quite postmodern. A franchise-choked commercial strip spreads like a weed patch along the east-west highway, and downtown--where a little known but gifted photographer named Birney Imes keeps a studio above the old Princess Theater--is still intact and vital.

In 1990, Imes positioned himself among the cream of Southern documentary lyricists with the publication of “Juke Joint.” The book comprises a series of paradoxically lush-colored, yet stark images taken in the lowdown black honky-tonks and rural dance halls of the Mississippi Delta, some 200 miles from Columbus--places with names like “The Out of Sight Club” and “The Uptight Cafe.” For weeks, I pored over Imes’ dreamy, almost unpeopled photos, admiring his delicacy in capturing the decor and ambience of an insular black subculture--Imes himself is white--and savoring the juicy strangeness of the Delta milieu.

The photographer’s strongest images, endearingly funky and executed in classic documentary style, recalled James Agee’s dictum about the camera being the central instrument of the age. “(The) camera can do what nothing else in the world can do,” Agee wrote, “. . . perceive, record, and communicate, in full unaltered power, the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing and which are in great degree . . . lost to every other kind of art.”

When I called Imes to make hasty arrangements to visit his hometown, he was agreeable to getting together, although he said he was “right busy” making prints for his first Southern California exhibition (at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica through Aug. 28). He went on to say that he had various pressing domestic obligations, such as coaching a Little League ballgame, preparatory to leaving with his family the following week for a long-planned vacation in England. “Have you ever been to Mississippi?” Imes asked politely. I told him I’d once set out on a quixotic quest to meet William Faulkner. I got as close as Faulkner’s front gate, came to my senses and went home to Texas. “The same thing happened to me with Walker Percy,” Imes said, laughing. “Come on down. We’ll drive around and see some of the countryside.”

I took lodgings at the Amzi Love Bed & Breakfast, a hospitable haven built in 1848, and I was just unpacking when Imes dropped by from his house in the next block with a set of galleys for his new book, “Whispering Pines,” named after a gritty country roadhouse that gradually desegregated itself during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Imes, who is 43, has clear hazel eyes and a halting, shy, Jimmy Stewart-sort of delivery. Even exchanging our brief how-do-you-do’s, he struck me as a man who ponders things, turns them over in his mind.

There are several stories related in “Whispering Pines”--hard and compassionate, devilish and rhapsodic--but the principal one belongs to Blume Triplett, a backwoods product of Mississippi’s segregationist past. Until about a generation ago, strident and often violent resistance to the mixing of the races kept the state and, indeed, the entirety of the Old Confederacy, on the wrong foot in the national parade. Kick-started by the civil rights movement and grounded in the traditional interconnectedness of blacks and whites, an organic change began to take hold. “Whispering Pines” conjures a place and a time and a process--the palpable world of a highway beer joint--through an internal narrative and a cast of characters worthy of a great Southern novel.

“It must have been 1975 or 1976 when I first set foot in the Pines,” Imes relates in a lucid accompanying essay. “I had just begun photographing seriously and would spend hours driving back roads looking for a . . . situation to photograph. It didn’t take long to stumble upon the place . . . the rusting cars, the hedge in the parking lot dividing the White Side and the Black Side, and the stuff . . . inside and out: coin scales, pinball machines, jukeboxes, lawn mowers, old campaign posters, newspapers, guns, cigar boxes and beer signs . . . .

“At the center of it all was Blume Clayton Triplett, born in . . . 1902. Blume had moved . . . nearby . . . in the early twenties to open a mechanic shop . . . . (In) 1921, Blume married Eppie Cunningham, and it was for Miss Eppie that he built the Pines almost thirty years later . . . .

“By the time I walked into the Pines, Eppie had been dead a couple of years and the place was a shell of its former self. Food was no longer served; Blume held court on the White Side with an occasional (customer) stopping by to visit, drink a beer and reminisce . . . . Rosie Stevenson . . . operated the Black Side.

“My visits were usually long; we would spend hours telling stories, sharing meals, listening to the jukebox and making pictures. There was a sense of family among Blume, Rosie and the rest of the neighborhood, all sharing a common history. And there was always something going on--a dog to bury, a birthday to celebrate, a chitlins supper for the regulars . . . . I loved the place, and I loved the people passing through it . . . .

“Blume’s health began to decline, and he moved over to the Black Side so Rosie could better take care of him. The White Side, clogged with debris he had collected over the years, became known as the ‘archives.’ Though Blume’s last years were spent without sight, he enjoyed receiving a steady stream of visitors, smoking cheap cigars, listening to blues music . . . until a ruptured appendix put him in the hospital in 1989. He never returned to the Pines . . . .

“Rosie, who will inherit the property, says she has no plans to reopen . . . . Even now when I go in and walk through those rooms I enter some sort of reverie. It’s as though I’m the curator and sole patron of a forgotten museum . . . .”

Imes photographs the faded domain of the Pines--the grizzled Triplett, the sweet-faced Rosie and a large supporting cast of poor black and good ol’ boy patrons--with a sense of transfixed wonder. It’s a signature trait carried over from “Juke Joint’s” vision of Southern-slash-American culture as a constant interplay of “found” and refound materials, an inextricable blend rather than separate, autonomous cultures.

But “Whispering Pines” is looser and larger than “Juke Joint”--and vastly deeper. Cultural snobs will have a hard time with the book because it celebrates a larger-than-life, cruder-than-dirt, stereotypical “cracker”--a feral old duff not even near the fringes of respectable society. Imes sees and captures in Triplett an odd human instrument whose slow and painful demise suggests the close of one chapter of our national history and the opening of another. The gentlest of Imes’ images memorialize Triplett in post-mortem cigar-box assemblages of the old pack rat’s prized trinkets and relics. The rest of the photos are raw and indelible, suffused with the gorgeous and appalling spectacle of the real. When I closed the book near midnight of my first day’s stay, I realized exactly what had drawn me to Columbus. Over a period of 15 years, keeping tabs on a country barkeep’s allegiances and life changes, Birney Imes had photographed a parable of the New South.

DRESSED IN KHAKI SLACKS AND A BLUE cotton shirt, with an athletic spring in his step, Imes looks like a boyish but very sharp young professor. He called for me early the next day and we had coffee with his wife, Beth, who is also an artist as well as the longtime director of Columbus’ arts-in-the-schools program. The couple’s children--Peter, 15, John, 13, and a daughter, Tanner, 11--trooped through the large kitchen on their way to year-end classes, all of them resembling one or the other of their striking parents.

Imes showed me a well-thumbed copy of “Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists From 1940 to the Present,” chortling fondly over the “outsider” contributors’ blunt-spoken statements of purpose. Fat cardinals pecked at a feeder outside the window, and a distant carillon pealed out “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.” The Imes house, a modernized 1 1/2-story Victorian, seemed modest and lived-in compared to the columned shrines nearby. But it was far removed in psychic miles from Blume Triplett’s dilapidated fiefdom.

In his beat-up Honda, Imes drove me through the historic quarter, pointing out landmarks--the Friendship Cemetery, with its ranks of Union and Confederate markers from the Battle of Shiloh, and the former rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church that served as Tennessee Williams’ first home. Imes is uncommonly well-read, and we began a continuing discussion of the Southern writers we admired, ranging from Faulkner to Breece D’J Pancake and Richard Ford (who wrote the introduction to “Juke Joint”).

Cruising back toward downtown, Imes spotted a friend named Jackie Ball and pulled over to the curb. Ball, a stocky black man with a sweat shirt knotted around his neck, approached the car and leaned down at the window. “Hey, Birney!” “How y’ doing, Jackie? Meet my friend here.” Ball pressed my hand with a hard, measuring grip, and the two of them exchanged a minute’s small talk.

“Jackie is on the City Council now. He gives everybody hell, I guess,” Imes said, driving on. “He’s a really great guy and a good friend of mine.” He glanced across at me to see if I was alert to his meaning. “Jackie sort of changed my life, in fact. We met back in the late ‘60s when the schools were first being integrated. We played sports together, ran track and all. He showed me a whole world I’d never known about before, and that kind of blew things open for me.”

Imes parked under the Princess Theater marquee. “Columbus was smaller then, if you can imagine it, and there was almost no crossover between blacks and whites. It’s a better, healthier place now. Listen, are you hungry yet? There’s a pretty good soul-food place a couple of doors down.” Our check for dressing and gravy, butter beans and iced tea came to a total of $5.50. And everybody in the small cafe eventually drifted by to say hello to Imes, pat him amiably on the shoulder and wish him good luck on his trip “overseas.”

Imes graduated from the University of Tennessee (Class of ‘73) with a history degree but no clear sense of direction. He traveled around the country for a while, sampling the territory and the possibilities from Massachusetts to Southern California. Then he returned to Columbus and took a job at the family newspaper, where he taught himself the nuts and bolts of photography. Imes’ father, like his father before him, is the owner and publisher of Columbus’ daily Commercial Dispatch.

At the paper, Imes handled the assignments of a journeyman staffer--shooting high-school football games and wrecks on the highway--but he also began to develop full-page photo essays twice a week. The work plunged him into exploring the unmapped purlieus of “the Prairie,” a nearby rural area whose inhabitants--people like Blume Triplett and Rosie Stevenson--still lived in ways largely untouched by contemporary history. Imes photographed coon hunts, river baptisms and hog killings in the Prairie’s scattered black and white communities, ingratiating himself with the locals by “visiting” before breaking out his camera. His standard approach was to make friends, then to make pictures, and he usually returned later with prints of his work to cement the relationship.

Imes left the paper after a year and a half, but committed to photography by now, he opened a shop of his own, shooting family portraits and the like to pay the rent and support his frequent returns to the back country. His commercial work eventually grew to include advertising accounts and editorial assignments for such publications as the Washington Post Magazine and Texas Monthly. He also served as the set photographer on “Mississippi Masala.”

Meanwhile, his “own work” as a self-taught artist also flourished. At the 20-year mark in his career, Imes’ photographs have been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum’s Phillip Morris branch and the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography. In a 1991 group show at the Tartt Gallery in Washington, Imes’ Delta images were displayed along with the works of William Christenberry, Keith Carter, William Eggleston, Debbie Fleming Caffery and Clarence John Laughlin--a generation of distinguished Southern photographers.

We had been talking in Imes’ handsome, Spartan studio above the old movie house for almost an hour, with the photographer relating his vita in candid and often whimsical anecdotes. But when I asked about his relation to those leading Southern lights featured in the Tartt show, he paused and let out a little sigh, seeming flustered. With some prodding--”Who helped you learn things?”--he said finally: “Well, I mean, I can throw out names of people whose work I was drawn to--Robert Frank . . . Josef Koudelka. And I think everyone who photographs in color owes something to William Eggleston. And to many others, you know.” Well, I thought I knew. In a coded, guarded way, Imes seemed to be saying that his ambitions surpassed the regional. He meant to be world-class.

Restive, Imes rose from his chair and I switched off the tape recorder. He crossed the room to the tall windows overlooking the street and stood peering out for a minute. Then he turned back to me, smiling and motioning toward the door. “Let’s go for a ride,” he suggested.

IMES DROVE WEST across the Tombigbee River and turned south on U.S. 45 into the Prairie. The highway, almost empty of traffic, wound through low, rolling hills and lush farmland cultivated in patches of cotton and immense tracts of soybeans. Hedgerows of green ash and red oak lined the fields, and dirt lanes snaked off toward hidden farmhouses. The day was warm, edging toward steamy, and we rode through stretches of sun and shadow with the windows rolled down and a hint of rain in the rushing air. We talked casually at first, then fell silent. The land and the towering thickets of trees gave off a dense, primeval hum that enfolded you after a while.

Fifteen miles from town, Imes pulled off into a tangle of undergrowth that I didn’t immediately recognize as a parking lot and rolled to a stop at the end of a cinder-block building resembling a stock shed. The old WHISPERING PINES sign lettered along the roof line had faded almost to invisibility. Across the lot, two black men in work clothes emerged from a screen door and wrestled an ancient dresser into a pickup truck. Imes greeted them pleasantly and called out, “Where’s Rosie?” “She’s inside, sir.”

“Welcome to the ‘archives,’ ” Imes said and led the way into the gloomy partitioned rooms, cautioning me to watch my step. Almost at once I slipped on a mangled 45-r.p.m. record, part of the litter scattered all over the pocky slab floor. Ragged and nearly impassable aisles ran through boxes, crates, cartons, piles, stacks, heaps and bunches of miscellaneous goods and trash. Years of grime and dust covered everything. Rosie Stevenson stepped forward to greet Imes and to shake my hand with a friendly, appraising look. “Ain’t it a mess?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “I’m gonna need me a lot of hands to ever get it all cleaned up.”

“Well, a whole bunch of it’s gone already,” Imes said. “You giving some more stuff away?”

“Yes. Those men out yonder are workin’ at my house. I let ‘em have those old dressers in the back and some other little things they might use.”

“Triplett never threw anything away?” I asked. “Anything at all?”

“No,” Rosie said, “he never much did.”

Imes laughed and pointed to a tottering cairn of cigar boxes, scores of them stacked halfway to the ceiling. “Beth came out once and asked him for five or six of those for a Sunday School project, and it was like she was asking for pearls or something. He finally let her have ‘em, but under pressure.”

“Set in his ways.”

“Yes, he was,” Rosie said. “But I worked for him, and he was everything to me. You could say he was just like a father, a brother, a husband or what-have-you. We had some real good times out here, him and me and all of us.”

“There were booths when I first started coming by,” Imes said, walking around. “Peoples’ names were carved in them. There was a door that said ‘Yellow Canary Dining Room,’ and the one over there said ‘Colored Dining Room.’ ”

“How did the dividing line start to break down?”

“Oh, it was more fun on the Black Side,” Imes said. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Rosie nodded with a smile, “it was more fun. I worked both sides, and peoples over here would say, ‘Rosie, why can’t I go over there? Seems like y’all’s music is better over there than ours.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s all right with me. If Mr. Blume don’t care, go on.’ Sometimes he would say they could, and sometimes he’d tell ‘em no. Then it got to where he didn’t care. He sat on (the Black Side) all the time anyway, and then everybody else would come on that side. It was just a natural thing.”

“Step back through here,” Imes beckoned. He led the way along a dogleg hall and opened the door on a dingy, cluttered little cubicle with one small window. “This is where Blume lived in his last 10 years. The bed’s gone, but otherwise it’s pretty much the way he left it. After his eyesight went, Rosie would put him to bed at night and he’d stay here until she came back the next morning. She cooked for him, did everything for him. And really, she was his closest kin and her family was part of his extended family.”

Toeing around in the mulch on the floor, I spotted a spent .38 shell. Imes picked up a folded $10 bill and stood pensively turning it over in his hands. Just then--” ’Scuse us, please”--the workmen entered and began to move a three-legged dresser out of a closet. “Oh, this is hard to watch,” Imes said softly, retreating to the Black Side, where he walked around in little circles with his hands in his pockets.

Mopping my brow against the muggy heat, I asked Rosie to tell me more about Triplett.

“You talkin’ ‘bout how he was with other people?” She reflected. “Well, there were times when I thought that he were mean. Then, in his older days, he were very good. He was kind-hearted.” She bent to pick up a packet of crumpled Christmas cards, smoothing them. “But you know, when all is said and done, I believe he’s with the Lord. I think, you know, he made some good choices and he made some bad choices. But put the good and the bad together, and I just say he was all right. He was all right.”

Smiling, Imes came over and handed Rosie the $10 bill. “This was on the bedroom floor.”

“It was?” She tucked the money into her handbag and slipped the strap over her arm. “Well, I’m goin’ home--it’s gettin’ hot. I’ll let you lock up. Got your key? OK.” At the door, she turned to wave--and pointed a mock-stern finger at me. “Now you be good , hear? And I hope you’ll be enjoyin’ your stay down here.”

Together and singly, Imes and I roamed around the Black Side, rummaging through Triplett’s jumbled collections. The agglomeration was stupefying: political leaflets, Bible tracts, soda pop signs, toys, stoves, defunct TVs, tools, newspapers and correspondence dating back 50 years. It was a redneck Xanadu, a catalogue raisonne of American junk.

After a while, Imes wandered back into Triplett’s bedroom, and I followed. This time I picked up the .38 casing as a souvenir.

“Was there often violence out here? Fistfights and so on?”

“No. Blume was pretty much a no-foolishness kind of guy. He always carried a gun, (but) he’d just run people off if they were troublemakers.” Imes went on to say that Triplett was neither a drinker nor a hard-core racist and basically aimed to get along with everybody. “He dearly loved celebrations and went to all lengths to stir one up. He’d write on dollar bills, little sayings, and give them to people for birthday presents. ‘Keep Me and You’ll Never Be Broke’--things like that.”

Imes peered warily into the empty closet, then turned away. He mentioned again that it was distressing to see the Pines being dismantled. “Blume made me the executor for his will, and I had the place pretty much to myself for a couple of years. I drove out, oh, once or twice a month to nose around, see what I could find. The things I was really interested in were his relics and letters. Gradually, I picked out things I knew that he prized, photographing some of the cigar-box assemblages here and some back at the studio.

“But when I first started coming to the Pines in the mid-’70s, I had no idea a book would ever develop out of it. I was just one of the regulars. There were always people coming through, and all kinds of stories and different things happening. Blume just sort of sat and absorbed it all--relished it all--and I don’t think there was anything stereotypical at all in his relationship to the black community. He felt in a family way toward much of the clientele. I think they all understood and loved each other in their own way, despite their faults or the (happenings of the) past. The transformation of racial attitudes was a very powerful thing to witness.”

Late in the afternoon, the sky darkened and thunder rumbled across the Prairie. “It’s about to rain,” Imes said, locking up, and we dashed for the car as the first drops fell. He drove a maze of country roads back toward town as the storm burst in blinding sheets.

Imes had recorded Triplett’s 84th birthday party, and he put the tape in the deck with a little smile. Over the thrumming rain, Triplett’s voice crackled with the force of nature:

“ This is Blume talkin’, and I just want to say a few words to all of y’all. I had a mighty good time today. My friend Birney Imes come down about 11 o’clock. He come by to get some barbecue, and then he got a peach pie and some chitlins. We been eatin’ chitlins. (SOUND OF A ROOSTER CROWING.) You hear my rooster cryin’, don’t you? He run in the door, he done come in. Birney’s been takin’ some pictures, a good friend of mine, and he took a picture of my rooster. He took a picture of all of us! And (we) went out from the kitchen and I got a 30-gallon cask drum out there, and I got a goose settin’ in it. And he took a picture of the goose. I got four Chinese white geese, one hen and three jacks. Birney took a picture of all of us!”