McGuire’s images captured a youthful and magic time in country music.
The country music era of the 1970s and 80s launched the careers of some of the genre’s most beloved artists. Photographer Jim McGuire was there during that raucous and creative time and captured many of the most legendary performers and singer/songwriters of the era. Ironically he never considered photography as a living while serving in Vietnam.
“In 1963 I was a weatherman in the Air Force having fun chasing tornados around Oklahoma,” he remembers. “I had one more year to serve and was given a choice to spend it there in Midwest City or volunteer to help set up landing strips in some remote jungle country that I had never heard of. So at age 22, I volunteered for duty in Vietnam to get out of Oklahoma. I was soon made the camp photographer because I was the only SOB who knew how to use camera. I developed my first rolls of B&W film in an old Army tent at night, mentored by a 75-year-old Vietnamese photographer who ran one of the only family portrait studios in the Mekong Delta. So I went over a weatherman and came back a photographer.”
When McGuire returned home from Vietnam, still intrigued with his new found skill, he moved to New York City and worked, as he describes it, “as a darkroom slave for three years at $65 a week.”
But it would prove to be a smart decision as the late 1960s was a creatively amazing time to be in New York. Beyond the evolving folk and pop music scene, many of the great black & white photographers were working there and in their prime: Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Wingate Paine, and Bert Stern, among others.
“I had always been drawn to black & white images from LIFE magazine and the great 50s black & white films … but it was Irving Penn’s small trades black & white portraits that stopped me in my tracks. He took trades people off the street, plumbers, electricians, butchers, and photographed them with the tools of their trade. So simple and elegant and so powerful. It made me realize that photographing something so seemingly ordinary in black & white made it seem more important somehow … and I liked that. It was a revelation and I wanted to do that with country music and photograph performers and songwriters. I fell in love with country music in 1953 and I can remember the exact moment.
“I was a 12-year-old Boy Scout delivering beer to my camp counselors when I first heard Hank Snow singing ‘Spanish Fireball’ — his hypnotic guitar rhythms, and velvety voice coming out of a ratty loudspeaker that night in the counselor’s lounge. My love of country music started that day and has never left.”
Seeing Penn’s black & white portraits of working people standing in front of a hand-painted canvas background in their “work clothes” and “tools” opened up a whole new way of looking at people for the young photographer.
“I was so taken by the power of those plain images that I had to try it myself. So I spent days hand painting a canvas that looked like Penn’s backdrop and invited a local teenage bicycle gang that terrorized my neighborhood on 22nd Street and Third Avenue, to come in for a portrait. They were like the Hells Angels except a generation younger and rode ‘chopper’ bicycles instead of Harleys. I copied Penn’s famous portrait of the Hells Angles exactly … except with this teenage gang and sent him a black & white print explaining how his work had so influenced me. I still have the hand written note he sent saying how ‘amusing’ the image was.”
This was the beginning of what would become Jim McGuire’s iconic Nashville Portraits, all against that hand-painted canvas. The very first ones were of singer-songwriter John Hartford and his Areo Plane Band. It was shot about 2 a.m. after a gig at a club in the Village. In the darkroom as he printed his first images of Hartford, Vassar Clements, Tut Taylor and Normal Blake, he knew he was on to something.
In 1972 he moved to Nashville to be surrounded by the music he loved. The result is almost 700 album covers for the likes of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, Carole King, Townes Van Zandt, John Hartford, Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire to name a few, plus his extensive B&W Nashville Portraits series. Here are a handful of some of his most revered images along with his own thoughts and remembrances.
Johnny Cash and Dr. Billy Graham, 1978. Two legends in their own fields of endeavor, they were great friends for many years. 
Chet Atkins, 1976. Known as “Mister Guitar,” Atkins was a trailblazer who is widely credited for the creation of the so-called “Nashville Sound.” One of the most influential and best-loved guitarists in the history of the instrument, he became the president of RCA Records and produced many classic country albums. 
Carole King, 1978. Active as a singer, songwriter and pianist since the 1960s, King has been inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. McGuire photographed her during a recording session in Austin, Texas. 
Guy and Susanna Clark, 1978. Texans Guy and Susanna Clark, both singer-songwriters, first came to Nashville at the time that McGuire did, in 1972. They became fast friends when McGuire shot the cover photographs for Guy’s first studio album ‘Old Number One,’ which was released by RCA Records in 1975. In the 1970s, when this photograph was taken, the Clark’s Nashville home was a haven for emerging songwriters and musicians. Guy Clark has served as a mentor to many other songwriters, most notably Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell, and numerous artists have recorded Clark-penned songs. The couple divorced in 2012. 
Vassar Clements, 1972. Originally from South Carolina, Vassar Clements, a legendary Nashville fiddler and session player, was entirely self-taught. Over the length of a 50-year career, he played on more than 2,000 albums and performed with a wide range of artists – everyone, or so it seems, from Woody Herman and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to the Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffet. His career began when he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys as a teenager in 1942. Though he was a major influence in the developing “blue grass movement,” he cited big band swing music as a significant influence over his own style and musical development. 
Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, 1983. Rosanne Cash, the daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian, was married to Texas singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell from 1979 until 1992. A successful, Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter in her own right, she has had more than 20 top 40 country singles. Her work draws from many genres, including pop, folk, blues and rock and roll. She is also a published author and respected amateur painter. Considered a part of both the mainstream and alternative country traditions, Rodney Crowell (born 1950), originally from Houston, is closely associated as a songwriter with his contemporary Steve Earle. (Both were influenced by fellow Texans Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.) He performed as part of Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band in the ’80s before striking out on a successful solo career. An earlier Crowell-led band, The Cherry Bombs, included such future luminaries as Vince Gill and Tony Brown in the seventies. Now, he is also a successful record producer. The couple divorced in 1992. George Strait, 1982. Known for his unique style of Western swing music, Texas native George Strait began his solo recording career at MCA Records in 1981. A member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, he has been nominated for more Country Music Association awards than any other artist. He holds the record for the most number one songs on the Billboard Country Music charts, and over the length of his long career has had more albums certified gold, platinum or multi-platinum than any other artist except Elvis Presley and The Beatles. It is unlikely that his record of 54-plus number one records will ever be broken. Marty Stuart, 1978. Almost completely preoccupied with country music from a very young age, Stuart taught himself how to play the guitar and mandolin. He emerged as a 14-year-old instrumentalist, so accomplished that he was invited to join Lester Flatt’s band. After ill-health forced Flatt to break up his band, he worked as a sideman with Vassar Clements and Doc Watson before joining Johnny Cash’s band. He stayed with Cash until 1985 before embarking on his own successful recording and performance career in Nashville. A member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1993, he remains an avid collector of country music memorabilia and a fan himself. He has served on the board of the Country Music Foundation (for a time as its president) and has written numerous magazine articles related to the music and its writers, producers and performers. 
Jerry Jeff and Susan Walker, 1977. Originally from Oneonta, New York, where he was born in 1942 as Ronald Crosby (he adopted the stage name “Jerry Jeff Walker” in 1966) he has become an icon in Austin, Texas, since moving there in the early 1970s. The song “Mr. Bojangles” is, perhaps, his best-known work, and it has been recorded by dozens of artists, ranging from Bob Dylan and Nina Simone to Philip Glass and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. After a lengthy series of records for MCA and Elektra, produced after his move to Austin, he gave up on the mainstream record industry and founded his own independent label, Tried and True Music. His wife, Susan, is its president and manager. Jerry Jeff and his work are chiefly associated with the country-rock outlaw scene that also included such artists as Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. His birthday bash has become a near-legendary event that attracts top musicians and thousands of fans to Austin. Tammy Wynette, 1987. Once known as “The First Lady of Country Music”, she was a talented singer-songwriter who, during the 1960s and 70s, simply dominated the country music charts. (In 1968 and ’69, she had five No.1 hits, among three of her signature songs, “Stand by Your Man,” “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.,” and “Take Me to Your World.” In all, she had 17 No. 1 songs, and her work, along with that of Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and Lynn Anderson, helped to define the role of the female country singer, influencing many of the younger singers who followed them. Many of her songs seemed, at least to her fans, to be influenced by her tumultuous private life. Married five times – productively in the case of her marriage to singing partner, George Jones – she was often ill, surviving numerous hospitalizations and surgeries. She succumbed, unexpectedly, to a cardiac arrhythmia at the age of 56 in 1998. Emmylou Harris, 1983. This was shot for the cover of her ‘White Shoes’ album on location at the Tennessee Fine Arts Center at Cheekwood (now the Cheekwood Museum of Art) in Nashville.
To see more of McGuire’s images, visit www.nashvilleportraits.com
2 Comments
Fabulous bits of some of the best people and music! The stories these people could tell!!
Thanks Lee, McGuire showed a very specific time in Nashville that illustrated the incredible amount of talent brewing then.
Thanks for reading.
Bill Reynolds