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LRW: I was real shy about playing for the longest time. I had all that stuff in me and especially
down here on the Gulf Coast, things are just different here than they are up in the Delta. Down here
on the coast things are much more
transient. You’re in a coastal area where
they’ve never experienced what it’s like in

Delta. Some of them have never been to
north Mississippi, so they don’t have a clue
and it is entirely different and so I played
music down here for a long time with a
band. I had a band called the Liberators
and from 1991 to 2001, for ten years we
played all up and down the coast. We

played original music. It was coast based,
not like Jimmy Buffett but still singing
about those things along the coast and we’d throw in a blues tune for me every now and then, but
not really and we recorded two CD’s that people still ask for down here of that music. But during
that time I would still slip out from the band and I’d go do an occasional little festival here or there.

I did a couple up in Greenwood and Hollandale, some things like that, but after the band broke up,
not long after that, my dad died, then we had hurricane Katrina here and I lost my home. It took a
few years to build back my home and so during that time I was not doing anything musically really.
I was just happy to get my two main guitars floated on a mattress and never got wet. I had seven
feet of water in my house and at the last minute, I put those guitars up on the bed and walked out
the door.

BiTS: When you came back, they were okay?

LRW: Yeah, the mattress had floated up and it came back down and it was kind of laying a little bit
sideways, but I felt the top of the bed and it wasn’t wet and I grabbed those guitars and left
immediately. I lost ten or twelve other guitars and I lost all of my old blues pictures and I lost all the

old field recordings.

BiTS: How awful. There were many people who did lose that kind of stuff, but that’s just absolutely
awful.

LRW: It is. Every now and then it will flash through my mind and it just makes my stomach churn.

BiTS: At least you didn’t lose your life.

LRW: Well, that’s true and I got my two main guitars [laughing]. I do look at the bright side of life,
don’t worry.

BiTS: Tell me how you met up with Bill Steber, the photojournalist and musician?.

LRW: With Bill Steber? Well, Bill, it’s funny at one of those blues festivals I played in the early
nineties up in Greenwood, he was at that festival and that was one of his first trips to Mississippi to
start putting his photograph in blues documentation and he was funny because he said, “I remember