Sweet Old Song: The Artists

POV

22 years ago

The Artists

Howard Armstrong
"There are lots of prejudices in this country. That's why people are ashamed to tell their age. They're afraid they're going to be cast aside or left out of activities. But that never bothered me. 'Cause I can saw on that fiddle just as loud as I ever sawed on it, as far as I'm concerned. We didn't come here to stay forever. But you can make use of what time you do have."
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Barbara Ward
"Those who paved the way for me, they who have all passed, watch over me and remind me that it is my turn to give back, to help someone along the way. Nana said to me that life is a series of chapters. Each chapter is up to you, to begin and end."
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Artwork

Autobiographical Recollections
Since his boyhood in Tennessee, Howard has been documenting his experiences and imaginings in watercolor and oil paintings. Barbara is helping to archive this rich collection, most of which has never been exhibited.
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Soft-Sculpture Figures and Masks
"I'm committed to my art because of what was given to me by my mother and the generation before me... And I know my work moves and changes people, especially children."
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Illustrated Children's Book
Howard and Barbara have worked together on more than 50 illustrations for a children's book about Barbara's experiences growing up. The story begins with the death of Barbara's grandmother who raised her, the event that led Barbara to look back at her childhood.
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Howard Armstrong

Howard Armstrong was born in 1909, and his life reflects many of the struggles and opportunities of 20th century America. His great grandfather was a slave owner, and his grandparents were slaves. He grew up in LaFollette, Tennessee, a segregated town where his father, a talented craftsman, musician and preacher, worked as a factory worker and waiter to feed his children. Despite extreme poverty, Howard found outlets for his irrepressible creativity.

Howard's father taught his children to play a variety of stringed instruments, several of which he made. As a young teenager Howard joined a band led by Knoxville fiddler Blind Roland Martin and organized his younger brothers into a band. Howard also picked up his father's passion for drawing and later studied art at Tennessee State Normal School in Nashville. Throughout his life he would use his love of sketching and painting to document his life experiences, and sometimes made a living as a sign painter.

In his late teens Howard worked on the L & N Railroad as a waterboy before joining up with Carl Martin, Blind Roland's stepbrother, who became a lifelong musical partner. In 1930 they made their first recording in Knoxville along with Howard's brother, Roland Armstrong. For several years Carl and Howard toured the South and Appalachia, playing wherever people would offer some change when they passed the hat - from coal mines to medicine shows and white society dances. They would play whatever the crowd wanted to hear: swing, blues, country, folk, spiritual and foreign songs.

In their travels they met guitarist Ted Bogan and in 1933 the trio joined the Great Migration north, arriving in Chicago in time to perform at the World's Fair. They worked as street musicians and made recordings with well-known artists like Bumble Bee Slim and Big Bill Broonzy and performed with greats like Memphis Minnie.

During World War II, Howard worked in Hawaii for the civil service and witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war he found it hard to support his family as a musician. String band music had faded from popularity, and he was forced to support his family by working on the assembly line in Detroit's auto industry. Howard retired from Chrysler in 1971, and a revival of interest in oldtime African American music brought Martin, Bogan and Armstrong together again.

The band made several records and performed together until Martin's death in 1979. For his contributions to American music, the National Endowment for the Arts recognized Howard as a national treasure in 1990. In 1995 he recorded his first solo album, and continues to perform with a younger generation of musicians.

Note: We are sad to report that Howard Armstrong passed away on July 30, 2003 in Boston. He was 94.

Barbara Ward

Barbara was born in 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her parents were musically talented and she fondly remembers sitting between them at the piano while they played and she pounded on the keys like a drum. Her mother was a great dancer and scat singer, and she would dance from room to room while doing chores around the house.

Barbara's father died suddenly in 1947, leaving her mother alone with five children. Barbara wasn't allowed to go far from the house, so she set up a "store" on the front porch to sell things she made, mostly stories and dolls. The first person to buy one of her dolls was a Harvard student from Holland who took an interest in Barbara and helped her enroll in art and music classes.

After Barbara graduated from high school in 1957, she studied dance and theater in New York. In the 1960s, she toured for four years as the lead dancer in the Billie Pope Dance Company and then became a dance teacher and choreographer. During this time she also worked as a set and costume designer.

Barbara's fabric art first drew attention in the mid-1970s, when the black dolls she had been creating for friends were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She had been working with fabric since her great grandmother first taught her to sew as a child, but it wasn't until this exhibit that she began to think of herself as a visual artist.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Barbara worked as an artist-in-residence at Northeastern University. She learned that her work had strong similarities to West African ceremonial masks, and received a grant that allowed her to go to Nigeria to learn more about the Okakagbe tradition of fabric applique. She then developed a method of teaching this tradition in art centers and schools in the U.S.

In the 1980s, Barbara's sculptural figures became more abstract and monumental. Some incorporate cloths from different countries, creating a multi-ethnic "everyperson." Barbara explains that her work celebrates cultural differences and questions, as she says, "the masks behind which we all hide." Two important works celebrate the strength of African American women in the 19th century. One of these, "Let My People Go," is dedicated to women who helped slaves escape on the Underground Railroad.

In the 1990s, Barbara began managing Howard Armstrong's band and later became a back up singer and percussionist. She also began archiving his lifetime of visual art, biographical stories and photographs. In 2002, they were collaborating on a children's book. Barbara was writing the story based on a traumatic time in her childhood, and Howard was illustrating.

Autobiographical Series

"Art is a wonderful thing, but you don't just snap your fingers and do it. Your hand is not a camera. It takes time. You need shadows, perspective, proportion."

"We didn't have water in our house, you know. A pump flowed from Spring Hill and ended right here. That's where black people did their laundry. It was cold as ice, that water was. Just clear as crystal. When we were kids, we all had chores. When my turn came, I had a four-legged dish washer -- an old hound dog. It worked real good until Mama found out."

"That was under the house where I lived. The cat thinks I'm disturbing his domain. There wasn't a cat in the neighborhood that liked me. I'd pull the hair out of a cat's tail to make a paint brush. I'd tie it to a goose quill with thread."

"Old Blind Roland Martin, the one leading the band, would say, 'I've got to have so much to play that song.' So he'd pass the hat around. And he could count that money better than you could. He couldn't see, but he'd reach in that derby hat and fumble with it. He'd say, 'Oh, I've got to have more.' And he wouldn't play another lick until he got it. It wouldn't take him long to get it either. I'd go home and have my pockets jingling. It was lots of fun."

"The four of us brothers had a string band. At that time my dad was waiting tables at the hotel in Jellico, Tennessee. That's where he met the great Metropolitan Opera singer, Grace Moore. We went up there and played at the hotel. Miss Moore thought F.L., the youngest, was about the cutest little thing she ever saw. He was about 6 years old. We wore suspenders and they'd pull them and drop all the tips down there. He had so much silver in his pant leg he could hardly walk. And I dumped him upside down. Quarters, nickels, dimes and paper money went everywhere. Back then people could rent a house for eight dollars a month. So he had a small fortune in his pants."

"In Detroit I worked on the assembly line at Chrysler. I did spot welding mostly. I enjoyed it. I worked for them until I retired. If I worked on the day shift, I was done until the next day and I could play gigs at night. When you're retired you can play day or night."

"This is Carl (Martin) with all the little kids gathered around. I think this was Colombia or Brazil. We were on tour with the State Department. We played nearly every country in South America. We would go to one country and stay two, maybe three days."

Soft-Sculptures and Masks

"Soft sculpture is a relatively new direction in contemporary art. Over the last two decades, it has been an arena in which black women sculptors have dominated. ... Using her awareness of contemporary sociopolitical as well as cultural issues, Barbara Ward has not only freed her inner creativity from conventional art or aesthetically safe pursuits, she has also contributed hugely toward expanding the boundaries of what art is in the late twentieth century."
-- Edmund Barry Gaither, Director of the National Center for Afro-American Artists; From Callaloo, Vol. 12 No. 4

"I always made clothes and dolls, and it was nothing new. I was focused on dance and theater and never in my wildest imagination did I take what I was doing as an 'art form.' And all of a sudden, the dolls that were sitting in my backyard appeared in the Museum of Fine Arts and they had a new term, 'soft sculpture.'"

"This is called 'I Had a Dream,' based on my grandmother. Just before she was beginning to be very forgetful, she began to reveal a lot of her dreams to me. I made this around 1987. That's when my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I used to bring this piece with me to the nursing home. And I worked on it in stages at the nursing home to see if she would react to it. I think the colors attracted her. She would touch it."

"This mask was influenced by the West African cloth appliqué tradition. I cut out small pieces of material, like quilting, and I layer them onto a wearable mask."

"My goal is to use soft sculpture imagery to visually state our experiences, to expand the knowledge about ourselves and others from different racial backgrounds. My inspiration comes from living."

"I usually write a story on the back of every one of my pieces. Since I've been playing in the band, and playing blues tunes, I got turned on to the idea of celebrating some blues memories of women singers in particular. Because they weren't so celebrated as the men were. And still aren't. This particular one is called ''Queen of the Blues.' And I decided to name pieces in the series after famous blues tunes. This one says, ''He may be your man, but he comes to see me sometimes. Lord have mercy.'"

Children's Book

"The book brought us closer together. He got to know a lot about me. Every once in a while I'd say, 'I have an idea for a drawing' and he'd say, 'Wow, that must have been something.'"

"I lived with my mother until I was eleven years old and then without any explanation I was suddenly living with my grandmother. I was kind of confused growing up. I didn't know who wanted me. So the book really deals with the anger of a child not understanding what I was feeling."

"The four grand ladies who raised me. Those great-aunts and great-grandmothers. It's a mysterious drawing. First thing anyone will ask, ''Who are they?' These ladies are the voices I hear all the time. Because I missed them so, I wanted to convey to children the value of elders. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about those ladies."

"When Nana died, I felt I'd lost another mother. Losing her made me look at my own mortality. I was compelled to tell this story. Nobody except somebody who loved me, felt the pain, could convey that as (Howard) did. The drawing conveys such gentleness, and the fine line between life and death."

"I get this anxious feeling going to the gravesite where my grandmother is. And when I get there, there's nothing there. You know, that's reality. There's nothing but grass, dirt and headstones. And it's closure. It helps you to let go."

"After school I would go to have lunch with Nana. She was running the elevator at the Cambridge Savings Bank. As an adult I would have nightmares about that lightbulb, and I realized it was the bulb in the basement of the bank. I asked my great-aunt, and she explained that blacks weren't allowed in the 1940s to eat in the cafeteria of the bank. And so that I would not experience that racism, Nana would bring fresh flowers from the yard and a fancy tablecloth and set up a 'tea party' in the cellar. So I never saw the ugliness of that space."

"That's my great-aunt who passed away after my grandmother died. They were very close sisters and she said she didn't want to live anymore. She called us one day and asked us to bring our instruments over to sing. I never knew Aunt Cora liked the blues."