In 1992, photographer Bill Steber first traveled through the Mississippi Delta, driving north on Highway 61 out of Natchez along the fabled Blues Highway. He stopped in Leland, met Son Thomas and photographed him with one of his full-size folk-art caskets. The journey, Steber acknowledges, forever altered his life. Through the “Stones in My Pathway” project, Steber found a way to combine his passions for photography and music by beginning an ambitious photographic survey of blues culture in Mississippi with an old Hasselblad camera and lots of black-and-white film. Since then, he has set out to document every living blues musician associated with Mississippi, as well as most of the state’s juke joints, churches, river baptisms, hoodoo practitioners, traditional farming methods, folk traditions, and every other cultural tradition that gave birth to or influenced the blues. His work has been an integral part of Living Blues, the Oxford American, and many other blues publications.
