Blues in Black and White: The Landmark Ann Arbor Blues Festivals as Photographed by Stanley Livingston
With Text and a History of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival by Michael Erlewine
144 pp., $29.95, University of Michigan Press

Thanks to the American-roots-aping rock 'n' roll of the British invasion, a small contingent of Michigan blues freaks lost their minds in the late '60s, digging record crates from Detroit to Chicago to hunt down these imitators' sources. When they learned the blues weren't dead, but actually alive, well and now electrified, hiding in plain sight near their own back yards, it was a revelation.

As with any true religious experience, the next step was sharing the good news; in 1969, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, the first large-scale, all-blues fest in the country, was born. Forty years later, Blues in Black and White documents this heady time and ambitious undertaking in a loving, stunning set of pictures shot by late Ann Arbor commercial photographer Stanley Livingston, who died of a heart attack at age 69 in September.

The images and stories collected in this book ooze with the kind of obsessive fandom and sense of importance typically reserved for (but by no means exclusive to) men in their late teens and early 20s. There's a reason these pictures, and the festivals they document, happened not just at a particular point in time, but also a place: the Midwestern college town of Ann Arbor.

Almost any blues name you could think of played the 1969 and '70 festivals, and Livingston shot 'em all, from headliners to sidemen. In high-contrast black and white, the pictures frame each player's personality: the holy-ghost terror of Son House; the glitzy flash of Lightnin' Hopkins; the wild-eyed joy of Hound Dog Taylor; the transporting stare of Howlin' Wolf.

The drama is in electrifying performance shots — such as Freddie King squeezing sweat from his guitar neck, Mance Lipscomp sitting in a lone spotlight, strumming into the dark — but the impromptu portraits and backstage hangout sessions with the likes of Roosevelt Sykes, Johnny Shines and Freddie McDowell reveal these are also the kind of guys you'd like to drink a beer with.

"Stanley would take pictures in exceptionally low-light situations, and you can see the hairs on Howlin' Wolf's chin," says Tom Erlewine, who designed the book and was Livingston's apprentice at the time of the first blues festivals. "His fanatical attention to detail led to high-quality photos, but he was rapturously in love with these blues musicians."

Part of that love came from a "common way of being" between Livingston, a laid-back guy who spent more time working on his craft than talking about it, and his subjects. "They were not like young, white rock 'n' rollers," Erlewine says. "They were just getting together and loving each other backstage and having a big reunion. It wasn't posturing, it was people having a good time. Big Mama Thornton pulled up with a bucket of boiled eggs and beer. She was selling eggs and beer out of her station wagon."

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