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Dick Waterman, a steward and chronicler of the blues, dies at 88
February 1, 2024
He shepherded the comebacks of renowned bluesmen like Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, managed singer Bonnie Raitt for 15 years and documented the music scene in thousands of vivid photographs.
Dick Waterman, who helped safeguard a rugged pillar of American music, the blues, as a writer, photographer, manager and promoter, rekindling the careers of revered singers and guitarists like Son House and shepherding the work of younger musicians such as Bonnie Raitt, died Jan. 26 at an assisted-living center in Oxford, Miss. He was 88.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said K.T. Leary, a longtime friend and executor of his will.
Mr. Waterman was 28, writing for a Boston-area music magazine called the Broadside, when he discovered the blues one day in July 1963. He had grown up in Plymouth, Mass., more than 1,000 miles from the cradle of the blues, the Mississippi Delta. But while reporting on the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, he caught a set from singer and guitarist Mississippi John Hurt, who had toiled in obscurity as a sharecropper, his records gathering dust in bins, before being located by musicologists and brought onto the stage.
Hurt’s Newport performance was a revelation, intimate and hypnotic. “I never saw anything like it,” Mr. Waterman recalled decades later. “A little old Black man with an acoustic guitar went out in front of 15,000 people and brought them all up on the porch with him. He was magic.”
For Mr. Waterman, the spell never really wore off. Over the next few years he set journalism aside and became a manager and promoter, helping bring new attention to a generation of older bluesmen who had been overlooked for decades, even as their music came to exert a pivotal influence on younger artists from Bob Dylan to Canned Heat, Cream and the Rolling Stones.
“Perhaps no one alive has known more blues masters more intimately,” journalist David Friend wrote in 2003, profiling Mr. Waterman for Smithsonian magazine. A 2019 feature for American Blues Scene called him “A Blues Savior,” noting that while ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had lugged his recording equipment through the South a decade earlier, helping to ignite a folk music revival through his recordings of older bluesmen, it was Mr. Waterman who “pulled them out of ‘retirement’” and brought them up to the stage.
Mr. Waterman worked as a manager for prewar legends such as Hurt, House, Skip James, Bukka White and Mississippi Fred McDowell. He founded what is often described as the first blues-only booking agency, Avalon Productions. (He named it for Hurt’s Mississippi hometown.) He managed a younger generation of bluesmen, including Buddy Guy, Luther Allison, Magic Sam and Otis Rush. He promoted concerts for Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor and Cat Stevens. And he was credited with discovering Raitt, the Grammy-winning singer and guitarist, whom he met when she was a freshman at Radcliffe College and represented for 15 years.
Through it all, he carried a Leica or Nikon camera, taking pictures that serve as a vivid and intimate chronicle of popular music — Dylan, Joan Baez, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, the Stones — and especially of the blues artists that he came to know and love. His photos capture an electric Guy, knees bent and eyes shut, picking the guitar at an outdoor concert in Cambridge, Mass.; House, dapper and fedora-clad, gazing into the distance next to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia; Hurt, looking weary at the 1964 Newport Folk Fest, looking on as James plays backstage. (Within five years, both men would be dead.)
Mr. Waterman’s photos, direct and often poignant, reflected the intimacy and rapport he had with the musicians he chronicled and represented.
“Dick knew the meaning of rent money, medical bills, proper billing and payment; how to get a person from some small town in the Delta up to the big East Coast cities for gigs and back,” Raitt wrote in the preface to Mr. Waterman’s 2003 book “Between Midnight and Day,” a collection of his pictures and stories. She added that “by gathering so many greats under one roof” — Avalon Productions — “Dick was able to collectively bargain to [ensure] each artist got to play the best gigs and be paid what they deserved. He steadfastly guarded every aspect of his artists’ professional life and was often their [families’] solid rock during personal crises as well.”
Mr. Waterman started booking blues shows in early 1964, helping bring Hurt to Cafe Yana in Boston after seeing the musician at Newport. That summer, he embarked on a cross-country trip that made national news and cemented his place in blues history.
Accompanied by two other blues enthusiasts, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls, he set off for Mississippi in search of Son House, who had influenced bluesmen from Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters but vanished from public view. Although Lomax had recorded House’s singing and slide guitar playing for the Library of Congress, it had been two decades since anyone had reliably seen or heard from the musician.
Following tips and rumors, Mr. Waterman and his friends unsuccessfully searched the Deep South before learning that House had moved north and was living in Rochester, N.Y. That was where they found him, sitting on the front steps of his apartment building, according to a biography of the singer by Daniel Beaumont.
Over the next few days, the trio persuaded House that there was an audience for his music. He had no guitar, so they found him one to play, then recorded a demo that Mr. Waterman used to get House a spot in the Newport Folk Festival lineup. He soon got the musician a contract with Columbia Records, became his booking agent and arranged media coverage with help from his brother-in-law, an editor at Newsweek, which ran a story on House’s rediscovery.
Looking back on his odyssey through the South, which took place during a turbulent summer of civil rights demonstrations and Klan violence, Mr. Waterman said he was lucky to make it through the road trip unscathed. “We were three Jews in a yellow Volkswagen with New York plates, and we didn’t feel too welcome in Mississippi,” he told the New York Times in 2015. “The day we found out he was living in Rochester was the day those three [civil rights activists] were killed” near the town of Philadelphia, Miss. “We were in Rochester two days later.”
Mr. Waterman went on to manage House through concert tours and recording sessions, as the musician reached a wide new audience that had eluded him at the start of his career.
“He was the most intense person I ever worked with,” Mr. Waterman told The Washington Post in 2003. “I never sensed Son House was a paid entertainer. He brought total commitment, played the same for 15 people, 1,500 people, or 15,000 people. He’d say, ‘This is just a little old piece of blues and I hope you like it,’ and then he’d unleash it and it was like being under a waterfall. He’d start to play, his eyes would roll back in his head, the sweat would roll out on his face and he’d just go somewhere else, some other place in time.”
The younger of two children, Richard Allen Waterman was born in Plymouth on July 14, 1935. His father was a family physician, his mother a homemaker.
Growing up, Mr. Waterman listened to the New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory, later developing an interest in calypso. He turned to writing, filing news stories for local papers, while working to overcome a stutter. “Stutterers are better writers,” he told his biographer, Tammy L. Turner. “You get to the written word and you shine it and polish it until you get the written word to say exactly what you want.”
Mr. Waterman enrolled at American International College in Springfield, Mass., dropped out in 1956 to serve a three-year stint as an Army cryptographer, and returned home to study journalism at Boston University. He worked as a reporter at the Bridgeport Post in Connecticut, covering sports and traveling to New York a couple of times each week to listen to folk music in Greenwich Village, before settling in Cambridge and freelancing for the Broadside.
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Waterman moved to Oxford, where he booked concerts, wrote a newspaper column and stashed many of his music photos in drawers and closets around his home. A few were displayed around the city, and while their presentation was modest the images caught the eye of Chris Murray, the director of Washington’s Govinda Gallery, who was visiting town and soon began representing Mr. Waterman. He recorded Mr. Waterman’s stories, compiled his photos, published his book and organized the photographer’s first gallery show.
Survivors include his wife of about two decades, the former Cinda Shedore, and his sister.
After he retired as a manager, Mr. Waterman was interviewed for documentaries like “The Blues” (2003), a seven-part PBS series produced by Martin Scorsese. He was quick to dispense stories as well as advice, said Friend, who stayed in touch with Mr. Waterman after profiling him for Smithsonian magazine. In an email, he recalled a dinner in 2012 when Mr. Waterman offered guidance to his son Sam Friend, now a New Orleans-based musician.
“There is no single authentic blues,” Mr. Waterman said. “You will find the blues that expresses your blues. It might be through Son House. It might be through early electric blues. It might be through Bonnie Raitt or Luther Allison or Eric Clapton. But don’t force it. Your blues will come to you.”
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