Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive

Text and Photographs by Dick Waterman; Introduction by Peter Guralnick; Preface by Bonnie Raitt; Thunder’s Mouth Press (2003)

This collection is summed up best in the opening dedication: “To lovers of the blues . . . ” featured across the page from a 1968 photo of a young Buddy Guy.

Waterman’s book is a feast for the eyes on some of the most classic personalities in blues: John Hurt and Son House sharing a conversation (1964); Muddy Waters (1965); B. B. King (1966); Howlin Wolf (1965); Luther Allison and John Lee (1995); Albert King (1969); Otis Rush (1971); Big Mama Thorton (1972). And on and on, it seems as if they are all included.

Companion personal essays accompany each photo grouping with behind the photo experience commentary of Waterman’s time with the players. Looking at the photos, you realize Waterman’s fortunate exposure to this time and place. Reading about his interactions with these artists capture for the reader this glorious musical period. It’s easy to become jealous of the closeness he shared with these unique individuals.

Very rarely are we able to offer a true blues collectible in book form. Between Midnight and Day comes in a very special edition printed as 1 of 450 copies signed by the author. Also, an archival photo of B. B. King signed by Dick Waterman is laid in the folding protective box.

This book is also available in hardback and over-sized paperback.

I love to see what other bookstores are up to online and see if they have a bookstore blog. How lucky was I when I ran across “The Green Apple Core”, the bookstore blog for The Green Apple Bookstore in San Francisco. On their blog I found a delightful series of videos done by the bookstore staff entitled “The Book vs. The Kindle”. I think there are about 10 rounds. The one below is Round 3 and it’s about sharing.

Want more? Check our their blog! I recently featured another one of their videos on our blog about The Invisible Bridge from The Book of the Month series. Thanks to Green Apple for kindly sharing with us!

Remember when I mentioned there was a good adventury book about cave divers coming out in June? Well, June’s here and so is Blind Descent by James Tabor. If you read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, this is very similar, just…opposite. The two teams of climbers in Into Thin Air headed up the same mountain, to a known goal, an established elevation, along prepared paths. The two teams of cave divers in Blind Descent search for their own caves on opposite of the globes, looking for new routes to greater and greater depths, with no way of knowing if the dead end would come within 10 feet or 1000 feet.

Another contrast I found interesting is that the struggle for the Everest climbers seemed to be mostly physical — the body simply isn’t designed to operate well at that altitude, with so little oxygen, and the combination of the physical strain and the mountain storms brought even the fittest athletes to the edge of survival. But the cave divers face something else — not simply the physical effort of climbing down thousands of feet, but the psychological weight of stepping off into thousand foot drops, with nothing but a rope and harness holding one in place. The divers would dig paths through channels so narrow one arm had to be extended straight forward to dig out the dirt, the other arm wedged tight against the body, or swim through underground lakes with a solid rock ceiling extending to the water’s surface, pulling 100+ pounds of equipment with them, the disturbed silt making visibility no further than arm’s reach.

I don’t want to reveal anything about the personalities and efforts of the two teams — that’s the great pleasure of the book, really, finding out what kind of driven-to-the-point-of-obsession person it takes to push oneself and others into these unknown caverns, as well as the sadness of the book, as the physical strain and psychological battle tears down those divers who were not up to the task. I’ll simply say this: Tabor does an excellent job laying the groundwork, filling out his cast of characters and then setting up the race to the center of the earth. Sometimes the names of the caves and locations got a bit jumbled in my head, but that may be the fault of this reader rather than the writer, and in the end, it’s not really necessary to be able to locate each cave on a map — I always understood enough to keep pace with the progress of each team.

Krakauer remains the standard-bearer for this genre (and imitators are plenty), but James Tabor does a commendable job here. This was a book that I read obsessively for 3 days, reading sections aloud to my wife, and then immediately passed to her to read when I was finished. Well worth the time.

I was born on Father’s Day, 1968, in Springfield, Missouri. When I hear someone nowadays cry–“Oh, who would want to bring a child into this world?”–I marvel at what my then 28-year-old Dad, Carl Yates, faced bringing a son into 1968:
Vietnam was raging. The Tet offensive had just shaken the nation and flared again that May.

In April Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and seven days before my birth, authorities arrested and charged James Earl Ray, a fugitive from a Missouri prison at London’s Heathrow Airport. That April, people in Kansas City, Missouri, rioted, looted, and burned their own neighborhoods in fury. And twelve days before that Father’s Day, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed, the second Kennedy Dad had supported and lost not to a ballot but a bullet, to violence and hate.

History’s mayhem, mere anarchy loosed on the world. Study history from newspapers, any period, any place, and you will find the light and hope of new birth always glittering beside the blood-dimmed tide of Armageddon. Matter ever wins out over antimatter by the least margin of victory.

Having written and published Morkan’s Quarry, a novel about a father’s love for his son and that son’s loyalty in return during that old American catastrophe, the Civil War, I got questions from reporters about me and Dad. What was that relationship like? What in the book has to do with a father and son in real life?

Saint Paul gives me the best answer, “Show me the son whom the father chastiseth not.”

We are two willful, very verbal men. Dad is the son of an auctioneer prodigy, my late grandfather Roma Yates, famous in Dallas County for conducting major auctions when he was but a child of eleven years. Dad still practices law in the Ozarks. And he had long hoped one of us children, especially his son, would carry on that tradition in the law firm he headed: Yates, Mauck, Bohrer, and Elliff.

Dad’s jaw dropped when I told this story; I was answering some needling uncle’s question: “Why did you become a writer and not a lawyer?”

Well, Dad wrote speeches for a former governor of Missouri, and ran “Walking” Joe Teasdale’s first campaign. I would have been four then. And my father was pulled every which way—he had just left a sure thing to start his own law firm; the airport board was wooing him; he was embroiled in politics. He was becoming somebody. Yet he stole every minute he could with his son. He came home in a rush, grabbed a yellow legal pad and pencil, and said, “Troup, come here. Sit on my lap, and we need to write this speech for Joe.”

Any time with my busy father, any activity, I was thrilled. I remember his block letters—neither of us write in cursive. And then he would stop and read aloud what he was writing, that booming, deep voice in my ears, and the feel of his heart-and-lung power against the curve of my spine. I have no memory of substance, but I do know the speeches were endowed with that Baptist hill preacher’s rise, the son of an auctioneer’s sense of rhythm and repeat, of pause, of quiet, of reason, enticement, then crescendo. And the light in his eyes as he wrote, as the spark fired his mind and singed the page in those graphite letters, precise as if burned into stone.

How could a child leave that loving embrace and not feel sure that what a boy did when he became a full-grown man was to write?

Poor Dad! He had hoped to blame his son’s writing ailment on Mother, maybe, who took me to every museum in St. Louis and Springfield, and entrusted me to the Brentwood Library so many afternoons, I could help patrons down the Dewey decimal trail.

He came to grips with my pathway, though, when the writing program at University of Arkansas admitted me and I had the same admission and opportunity at the writing program at Dad’s law school alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. Mystified but pleased, he advised me to take Arkansas’s package because Ellen Gilchrist studied at Fayetteville and U of A had a university press that published her.

Dad followed my publications with enthusiasm and hope, but with heartbreak and empathy when publishers didn’t want the novel, my story of a father’s love for his son, and didn’t want the story of civilians in a maelstrom in the Ozarks. Publishers wanted everyone to fall in love, babes with beaus, and wanted the war to be rousing and heroic, and maybe set somewhere famous, please.

Matter wins over antimatter. Ever against the blood-dimmed tide is the cry of birth, the pencil and block letters scratching into the blank page, and the sentences rising there, crying hope, shouting rise up to victory.

When the package came to our old home place, luckily my Sissy was there in from New York with her young daughter. Sissy had the phone with a camera and snapped this picture. Dad has just cut my novel free of its mailer. Sissy says he stood silenced and trembling with joy, trembling, for a full five minutes, his hand on the book his son wrote. And then he held up his son’s first novel, and she snapped this picture. Victory! Victory!

Don’t tell my publisher. Don’t tell booksellers. Please don’t even tell my wife. I have this picture and need no other good fortune to make me feel this book succeeded beyond any dream. Victory!
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

*    *    *

Steve Yates’s novel Morkan’s Quarry is new from Moon City Press. He lives in Flowood, with his wife Tammy and is assistant director / marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson. He’ll sign Morkan’s Quarry at Lemuria, Saturday, June 12 at 1 p.m. But on Father’s Day, he will be working for the Press at meetings in Salt Lake City. And that’s what his Dad would want as well!

It’s June!  Joe was right.  It’s very hot.  It’s very hot but, for the most part, our air conditioning works in Lemuria, making the store the perfect place for you to shop for…Father’s Day presents!  Father’s Day is on June 20th this year and so I’ve gone and picked – fathers in mind – some new books that have been doing well.

This first book, Parisians, is number one on my blog because I want to read it.  Badly.  It got such a good review in the New York Times a few weeks ago and if that doesn’t do it for you, then the sub-title of “An Adventure History of Paris” should.  I get the impression that it’s this very readable, exciting account of all sorts of characters who lived in Paris at various points in the city’s history – Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Hitler, Proust, Zola, Charles de Gaulle…It’s like a people’s history of Paris.  It looks great.  From the review:

“Robb is no stranger here. The acclaimed British author of biographies of Hugo, Balzac and Rimbaud, he first experienced the city as a boy, when his parents treated him to a week’s holiday as a birthday present. But, as Robb learned, Paris is too volatile and complicated, too historically dynamic, to be illuminated by any one person’s life. His solution: to write, as he explains it, “a history of Paris recounted by many different voices,” a series of character studies arranged to commemorate the shifting streets and sundry plot lines that give meaning to the city.”

Book number two has also been selling well: Winston’s War, by Max Hastings.  It also got a good review in the New York Times.  There are so many books about Churchill out there – he’s got his own shelf in the history section – that it can be overwhelming.  This book is a portrait of the man exclusively during World War 2 (it begins in 1940), glorious moments and awful blunders and all.  Hastings “rejects the traditional Churchill hagiography”, and, as the review puts it, presents some interesting food for thought:

“In the end, the war went well for freedom and the survival of civilization, and for that we must ever after thank the Winston Churchill of 1940. Had Churchill died in January of that year, Hitler might not have been defeated at all. Is it possible that, if Churchill had died in January 1942, Germany might have been defeated sooner?”

Book three is a brand new book on the Hoover Dam that’s already being compared to work by David McCullough, who has written books about other feats of mankind such as the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge.  Colossus, written by Pulitzer-Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, is a grand saga of the dam’s conception, design, and construction – it is also, by default, an account of the effect the Depression had on American culture.  The Wall Street Journal, in their review, said:

“Mr. Hiltzik clearly explains the technological and physical difficulties posed by the dam project, but he also fixes the endeavor in its time and captures the personalities of the people involved. … With the U.S. lately facing ever more difficult challenges and the can-do spirit apparently on hold, “Colossus” may inspire in readers a longing for a new building project on the Hoover’s scale, something that will summon up once again America’s famous self-confidence and daring.”

The last book I’ll mention is by Nathaniel Philbrick, whose name might be familiar because he wrote Mayflower, which did (and continues to do) really well.  The Last Stand is about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and promises to be just as readable as Philbrick’s other works.  He’s a good storyteller, it’s a fascinating story, and it promises to be an interesting read.

There are, of course, many many other good Father’s Day gift ideas: Matterhorn, The Pacific, The Passage, The Imperfectionists, The Marrowbone Marble Company… come in and have a look!

Susie