I could not resist doing a portrait of this beautiful man. A retired blues musician by his thirties and rediscovered in his sixties after a life of sharecropping in Mississippi, he took to his new-found success with grace and humility. Tom Paxton, who knew him, told me he always had a smile on his face, even in repose, mainly attributed to his religion, but partially to mischief. "Nearer My God to Thee" is the name of a song he often sang and a description of his spiritual state of being.

 

NOTE: Height: 18"