All Around Cowboy

You can’t fake a room like this one. The White Water Tavern has been running live music off West 7th in Little Rock since 1976—a juke joint that Robert Palmer wrote up in the Times, that Lucero put in a song, that Esquire named one of the best bars in America. Levon Helm played it. Billy Bragg played it. There are ashes in a beer bottle on a shelf above the bar. The dusty cedar walls hold every word that’s been sung inside them. For a lot of people this place is a totem—the artist, the sorrow, the loneliness, the heartbreak, the love, the perseverance, the beauty of their lives, all of it soaked into the wood.

So I put Mood Swing’s All Around Cowboy line in it and asked Matt White to shoot. Matt has run the tavern and photographed hundreds of the musicians who’ve come through it. He wasn’t a hired camera. He was the room’s own memory, pointed at the clothes.

The concept was simple and I held it hard: no styling against the venue, only with it. Red on red under the purple wash. A hand on the jukebox instead of a pose. Bodies leaning into each other by the bar the way people actually lean at last call. The hand-stitched cowboy on the back of that jacket is the same figure the tavern has been putting on its stage for fifty years.