Pam Laws sings with the contentment of a seasoned vocalist who respects and loves what she does.  Musicians and audiences say that she conveys feelings which transcend the elements of the song.  A seventeen-year veteran of performing and recording, Pam toured the former Soviet Union, opened for B. B. King and Ray Charles, and was a guest soloist with the symphonies of the Tallahassee, Florida and Greenville, South Carolina.  In recent years, she has enjoyed more concert work in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.  She has also performed in New York City and San Francisco.

The Crescent City Jazz Band offers a unique combination of scholarship and performance.  Driven by a desire to preserve the legacies of early jazz artists, the CCJB has crafted a unique style of performance based on education and entertainment.  As members of the band, Barry Martyn and Dr. Charles Chamberlain of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University have managed to combine renditions of authentic jazz styles with information on the history of jazz and its performers. They have paid particular attention to the Goodson Sisters, Sadie and Ida, Billie and her husband, Dee Dee Pierce, jazz legends and Florida natives.  The CCJB pays homage to their forceful and rhythmic lyrical and musical style.  Their performance is sure to be as educational as it is entertaining.

The Goodson Sisters provided many traveling blues acts with backup musicals. The six musical sisters were born at the turn of the twentieth century. Mabel, Della, Sadie, Edna, Wilhelmina and Ida Goodson were raised in Pensacola, Florida., by a devout Mt. Olive Baptist Church Deacon who expected his daughters to cultivate respectable music such as hymns and gospels.  By her late teens, however, Sadie had gained a reputation as a top pianist in Pensacola, eventually playing with Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. Billie and Edna Goodson toured Florida with the Mighty Wiggle Carnival, and Ida played for silent movies, clubs and dance halls.

The Goodson Sisters' careers took off after they moved to New Orleans in the 1920s. Later on they experienced career revivals during the 1940s and 1950s, and their association with the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band generated national attention. Ida continued to play piano at Pensacola’s Mt. Olive Baptist Church until her death in 2000.

The music of the sisters has been researched by Dr. Charles Chamberlain of Tulane University and will be performed by the Crescent City Jazz Band.

Prentice Herman Polk (often referred to as P.H.) was born November 25, 1898 in the rural mining and mill town of Bessemer, Alabama, the sole son in a family of four children.  Eighteen years later he enrolled at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) where he discovered photography and formalized the fundamentals of his creative philosophy.  Polk later returned to teach and serve as official photographer for more than forty years, in addition to maintaining his own studio in Tuskegee from 1928 to 1984.

Polk earned a reputation as an important American artist in the early 1970s when the body of work he produced roughly between 1920 and 1950 became widely known.  His exhaustive documentation of scientist George Washington Carver inside and outside of the laboratory, his numerous skillfully arranged studio portraits of family members, the social, political, and intellectual elite around the Institute, and his candid portrayals of various individuals from nearby rural communities established the basis for his critical acclaim.  His subjects were afforded the identical technical consideration in terms of composition, lighting, background treatment, environment, and retouching whether he worked in his official capacity at the Institute or created an image in his private studio that was either commissioned or self-motivated.  As a result, Polk created photographs that are as important for their technical example as they are for their historical value.

rileyhousemuseum@netzero.net

Main Page
Background | Components | Membership | Board
Upcoming Events | Collections | Map