Stephen “Andy” Anderson has spent most of his 74 years with two loves in hand at the same time: music and a camera. The combination has produced one of the more remarkable bodies of work on the Gulf Coast — thousands of photographs of musicians in small clubs, and a mission to document every historical marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, one roadside stop at a time.
Music and Photography, Hand in Hand
“The two of them always kind of went hand in hand for me,” Anderson says. “I’ve always loved music, and I’ve always loved photography, though there have been some periods in my life where I wasn’t as busy with it.” Those periods were the exception. He was shooting concerts as a teenager, freelancing over the years for newspapers and magazines, and building a full career in graphic arts at Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula — the yard that has built most of the U.S. Navy’s big-deck amphibious ships.
Since 2013, he has been the photographer behind The Southland Music Line, the online publication created by writer and musical archivist Johnny Cole, covering the musicians and venues of the Gulf South. One of their ongoing projects documents the Mississippi Blues Trail, the historical marker program started in 2006 by the Mississippi Blues Commission.
The Treasure Hunt for Blues History
The Blues Trail now counts more than 200 markers — 216 at the most recent count — most of them in the Mississippi Delta, widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the blues, with others scattered across the state and beyond, including two in Alabama’s Muscle Shoals area. Anderson has photographed close to 100 of them so far and hopes eventually to get them all.
“People come from all over the world to see these markers because these people and places are so historic,” he says. “Sometimes they are hard to find, so it’s almost like a treasure hunt. It might be in a field where at one time there was a juke joint or something, but the building itself is gone.”
Using a Blues Trail smartphone app, he started the quest in 2019 with an easy first stop — a marker two miles from his Pascagoula home, recognizing the Jackson County Fairgrounds as the longtime site of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Blues & Heritage Festival. From there the map filled in: markers in Moss Point, Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay St. Louis along the coast; then the long drives — Clarksdale in the heart of the Delta, more than 300 miles from his front door, plus Jackson, Hattiesburg, and the Black Prairie country of northeastern Mississippi.
Making a metal sign covered in text and historic photographs into a compelling image is its own photographic problem, and Anderson has a consistent answer: shoot it like a portrait, with care for light and context, the way he would shoot a musician. It’s the same approach he has taken since 1969, when, as a student at the University of Southern Mississippi, he carried a pawn-shop Yashica to concerts by Chicago, Boz Scaggs, and the original Allman Brothers Band.
Katrina, and Starting Over
There is a hinge in the middle of the story: 2005, when Hurricane Katrina flooded his home with five feet of water and destroyed roughly 80 percent of everything he had ever photographed — prints, slides, negatives, and most of his camera equipment. “It was probably 80 percent of everything I had ever done,” he says. The loss was so heavy he nearly quit photography altogether. Instead he rebuilt, embracing digital cameras and computer-based editing, and has shot thousands of images in the nearly two decades since.
The famous faces in his archive stretch from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter to B.B. King, Johnny and June Carter Cash, Snoop Dogg, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Muhammad Ali. One of his photographs even landed on the cover of a Jimmy Buffett biography, “A Good Life All the Way.”
These days he gravitates toward smaller, intimate venues over arenas, where a patient photographer with a friendly manner can earn a musician’s trust. Cole, his Southland Music Line partner, describes the qualities that make the partnership work: “He arrives early and doesn’t mind staying late to get the job done, and even when it’s not an ideal setting, he’s going to find the right spot to get the best possible picture. He does great work, and he’s truly a joy to work with. It would be hard to imagine the Southland Music Line without Andy’s fine photographs.”
Why the Markers Matter
The Blues Trail itself is worth understanding as a public-history achievement. Since 2006 the program has erected interpretive markers across Mississippi — and, eventually, in other states — documenting the clubs, radio stations, churches, train depots, and crossroads where blues history happened. Many of the buildings are long gone; the markers are often the only physical proof. That is exactly why Anderson’s project matters: a photographic record of every marker is, in effect, a backup archive for the backup archive.
It is also a traveling guide. Fans plan whole vacations around the Trail, driving from marker to marker across the Delta — through Indianola, Tutwiler, Clarksdale, and Greenwood — often using photographers’ images online to scout what they’ll find. Anderson’s shots give travelers a preview and give the markers themselves a second life beyond the roadside.
Halfway through his marker hunt, with his seventy-fifth birthday approaching, Anderson shows no sign of slowing down. The camera bag stays ready, the app stays loaded, and the Gulf Coast’s music rooms still get their call. The man from Pascagoula is still on the Blues Trail — and still trying to get them all.
A Coast That Runs on Live Music
Anderson’s catalog doubles as a portrait of the Gulf Coast’s venue culture. From the casinos and clubs of Biloxi and Gulfport to the bars of Ocean Springs and Pascagoula and the beach bars of the Alabama shore, the region sustains a circuit of rooms where touring acts and regional bands play five or six nights a week. It is the kind of scene that national coverage rarely mentions and locals would find impossible to live without — and it depends, in part, on the unofficial record-keepers: the writers, archivists, and photographers who show up every night.
The Southland Music Line, Cole’s publication, has built its coverage around exactly that ecosystem, and Anderson’s images are its visual backbone. In an era when club photography is often a phone held up for a minute, his patience — arrive early, stay late, wait for the right light — shows. Musicians notice, too; trust is currency on the club circuit, and Anderson has spent decades earning it.
The Photography of Loss and Recovery
There is also a lesson in the Katrina chapter of his story. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, August 29, 2005 is the dividing line in most families’ histories — what survived, what washed away, what was rebuilt. Anderson’s studio of a lifetime went under five feet of water. That he rebuilt at all, and that the second act produced more work than the first, says something about the coast itself: everyone who stayed made a version of that same decision.
It also explains why the Blues Trail project resonates with him. Both are acts of preservation against the odds — a photographer rebuilding an archive, and a state nailing historical markers to posts in fields where the buildings are gone. Memory on the Gulf Coast has always required deliberate effort. Anderson has made a career of supplying the effort.
His marker count stands near 100 of 216. At his pace — a run of coastal stops in a day, a Delta weekend a few times a year — the full set is a project of years, and he treats it that way. The photographs, meanwhile, live online at The Southland Music Line and in the albums of every musician he has ever shot, which is, if you ask around the region’s clubs, a lot of musicians.