Photos capture country music’s past
In 1973, when all the music photographers were covering the fashion and hairdo excesses of stadium acts like Led Zeppelin, Henry Horenstein was watching Jerry Lee Lewis light a stogie in his room at the Ramada Inn in Boston.
Nobody was paying much attention to the country-western acts, as they were called before it became “new country,” with stars wearing wireless microphones hooked to their cowboy hats.
There were no light shows, no sound systems, no backstage passes. Horenstein had the touring country musicians to himself, and now all of those black-and-white images are getting their San Francisco commercial debut at Scott Nichols Gallery.
“I’d been a history student, and I was trying to capture the last days of that disappearing world of country music,” Horenstein says. “If you were a musician in those days, you were doing your best to stay out of the cotton fields and coal mines.”
The exhibition, which opened Jan. 9 and is on view through Feb. 24, is called “Henry Horenstein: Tales From the ’70s,” and it comprises 24 prints from two volumes, “Honky Tonk” (published in 2012) and “Histories” (2016). Much of it was shot at music clubs in Boston, where Horenstein freelanced for Rounder Records. This led to magazine assignments for the likes of Bluegrass Unlimited, which paid $10 but also got him backstage and in the homes of the players for a visit on the porch.
“The images are a place in time. They capture the innocence and the naivete of the South,” says gallery owner Scott Nichols, who has been collecting and exhibiting 1970s music photography since he opened his gallery 25 years ago.
Half of the Horenstein show is portraits of the musicians and their fans dancing, recognizably drunk but never stoned. He’d follow the fans to the bars after the shows. In one photo titled “Last Call, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville, TN,” a woman is holding a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, in 1974 when Pabst was nothing but cheap beer and not some kind of retro cool symbol for hipsters.
There are no hipsters in these photos, or hippies. When Horenstein shot the performers at the Grand Ole Opry, he also shot the primitive backstage area with curtain ropes, lights and props. If he got lucky, he could capture the performers’ wives waiting backstage, looking bored in their bouffants.
When he went to Coeburn, Va., to shoot a portrait of Ralph Stanley at home, he ended up also shooting portraits of Stanley’s neighbors at home, on the couch with plastic on the lampshade and a doily clock overhead. The neighbors at home made the cut for the show. Stanley at home did not.
Also featured in the exhibition are Waylon Jennings smoking in a cramped dressing room, an unnamed woman smoking at her kitchen table, and a cowboy with 13 empties in front of him at the Kingfish Lounge in Baton Rouge in 1975. There is a long and probably sad story behind every one of these images and Horenstein, 70, is expected to fly out from Boston to share them during the gallery’s artist reception set for Thursday, Feb. 8.