Howlin’ Wolf and his band, dressed in white shirts, smart trousers and brightly shined shoes, laughingly stoop to pick cotton in a field in Arkansas. A young B. B. King poses with one foot on a piano stool, holding a book of gospel songs. Elvis Presley hangs out backstage, surrounded by black teenagers in Native American costumes, at a concert presented by the rhythm-and-blues station WDIA; a sign overhead proclaims, ‘’Profanity or Obscene Language Will Not Be Tolerated on this Stage.’’ A tearful Aretha Franklin joins Coretta Scott King at a conference after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968. In a career that stretched back to World War II, Ernest C. Withers captured some five million images. They have become an archive, not just of Memphis musicians, but of public and private lives, civil rights marches and church
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