Ralph Stanley

Dolly Parton

Bill Monroe

Photos courtesy Art Museum of Western Virginia

Related

• Where: Art Museum of Western Virginia
• When: Through March 23
• Of note: McGuire and musician Mike Seeger will appear at a museum reception March 6.
• More information: Call 342-5760 or visit www.artmuseumroanoke.com

John Hartford leans toward the neck of his banjo, like it's leading him somewhere. Emmylou Harris looks elegant as a runway model with her tight jeans, white blazer and big, brown eyes.

Chet Atkins holds a guitar with one hand and a cigar with the other. The craggy faces of the Highwaymen -- Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash -- are proof the road has been a long one.

For anyone with at least a nodding acquaintance with country music, "Nashville Portraits: Photographs by Jim McGuire," at the Art Museum of Western Virginia through March 23, is almost as entertaining as the songs themselves.

McGuire, who has lived and worked in Nashville since 1972, makes his living taking pictures of musicians. The list of stars who have used his photographs for album covers reads like a Nashville Who's Who: Ronnie Milsap, Conway Twitty, Keith Whitley, Ricky Skaggs, Reba McEntire, the Judds, Emmylou, Clint Black, Tim McGraw and Cash. And that's only a start.

"I've got 35 years of this stuff," explained McGuire, who selected 60 pictures for the exhibit out of -- well, who knows how many? "I've never counted," he said.

McGuire's experience as a photographer dates to his days in Vietnam, where an officer volunteered him for reconnaissance work. It was 1964. McGuire took pictures of Vietnam villages while hanging out of single-engine airplanes.

He began taking pictures of country musicians in the early 1970s in New York City, where he was working as an assistant to a fashion photographer. McGuire was enamored then of the photographs of Irving Penn, whose "Small Trade" series depicted workers posing formally with the tools of their trades. For his own photographs, McGuire painted a canvas background that he still uses.

"I've always loved that basic, simple style of putting someone in their street clothes on the same piece of canvas with their tools in their hands," he said. "I just started to do it for myself."

The one-time dobro player moved to Nashville hoping to become a record producer. Instead, McGuire found a city with more work for photographers than photographers to do it, and drifted back to his original trade.

"I came here just to check it out and never left," he said. "It was a good time to be here."

'Straight to the soul'

Through the decades, McGuire has taken not only formal photographs of the musicians for publicity work, but also other pictures only for himself. It is the latter photos we see here.

"The works in the exhibition are remarkable in their ability to shatter the veneer that separates audiences from their musical heroes," said David Brown, the museum's deputy director of art. "That can only be accomplished by the unique ability of Jim McGuire to go straight to the soul of all these friends of his. ... These images parlay those close relationships. Lucky for us."

These are staged photos, but revealing, too. McGuire, after all, has known some of the musicians now for decades. Shy Nanci Griffith seems to hide behind her guitar in 1980. Dolly Parton smiles sweetly in 1974. George Strait tips his hat in 1982.

McGuire has been doing this so long now that some of the musicians in this show were photographed several times. We see them growing up, growing somber, growing old.

John Hiatt has the same smoldering eyes in his 50s that he does in his 20s. Steve Earle looks brash and very young in a photo from the 1970s. Two decades later, the brooding figure in dark glasses strumming his guitar looks like he's been to hell and back (Earle's struggles with heroin are well-known).

Politically correct, it is not. Every other musician seems to have a cigarette in his or her hand.

A fair number of the people in these photographs are now dead, including Keith Whitley, Jennings, Atkins and Cash, which lends the show something of a memorial feel. "I really didn't have that in mind" starting out, McGuire said. "As time goes on, I realize it does have an historical context to it now."

Though it features plenty of legendary names, "Nashville Portraits" was never intended to be just a gallery of stars. McGuire -- who has a special fondness for bluegrass and the "outlaw" music of Jennings, Nelson and others -- has given us a wide swath of Nashville, including bona fide stars, songwriters and ace session men.

"It was important to me to include some of the other people -- people that were maybe not so well-known. I think in the end it's a good mix."

None of the photos was cleared with their subjects before the show was put together, McGuire said. On the other hand, many of those people are his friends.

In any event, "The only complaints I get are from people who want to know why they're not in it," McGuire said. "I get that a lot."