William “Bill” Lester is returning to his roots.
Nearly 50 years after he hosted his first art show in Jackson, the former Northsider is returning home for a one-man show on November 2.
For the longtime artist, the show marks another milestone in an eclectic career that has included painting, teaching, making turkey calls and restoring and caring for an historic blues site in the Mississippi Delta.
Bill remembers his first show well, a one-man event at New Stage Theatre. “The entire world through the eyes of Cole Porter,” he said. “Eudora Welty bought one of my water colors for $25.
“It was not a fortune, but a pretty good price,” he said. “I enjoyed meeting her.”
That was in 1970. Since then, he has had showings across the Southeast, except in Jackson. This show will mark the second time his work has been exhibited in the capital city.
However, Bill still has a great love and fond memories of the city, having spent most of his childhood on the Northside.
“We moved to Jackson when I was 10. My father died in Memphis, so we moved here to be closer to other family members,” he said.
Bill still has family living here today, including his brother, John, a seafood wholesaler, and his late brother Bob’s wife and family.
Bill’s family grew up on Manila and Naples street, within walking distance of Boyd Elementary.
In high school, Bill attended Murrah, where he was a standout on the Mustang football team.
“I returned punts and kick offs,” he said. “I was too small to play for Ole Miss.”
Bill picked up art at a young age, and was inspired by his mother, Marguerite.
“My mama was a watercolorist and I liked watching her paint. I tried it and had a knack for it.
“The more I did it, the better I got. One day, I was about 12 years old, she said “one day you’ll be better than me,’” he recalled. “I won’t say I got better than her, because I paint differently, (but) I kept working at it and made a lifetime career out of it.”
After graduating high school in 1967, Bill attended Ole Miss, where he graduated four years later with a business degree.
“My great-grandfather came here in the late 1880s and had a farm in Estill, Miss. I got a business degree first, because I thought I might farm. Then, I thought I might not and went back to school and got a master’s of fine arts. A job came open (at Delta State University), so I took it. By the time the farming thing worked out, I had been teaching about four or five years, and I decided I’d stay here and do this.”
Bill taught art at Delta State for 37 years, eventually becoming department chair. He retired five or six years ago, but not to kick up his feet. Rather, he wanted to focus on his other job, a position with Dockery Farms.
“I became executive director of the Dockery Farms Foundation.”
The foundation raises money to restore the historic Dockery Farms.
The farm, which is located outside Cleveland, is a post-Civil War plantation that many consider to be the birthplace of Blues.
Legendary Delta bluesmen, including Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Son House, all performed there in the 1920s.
“There was an isolated group of people here – several thousand – and (they would pay) 25 cents to listen to them play all night,” he said.
Musicians could easily rake in $200 to $300 from the farm’s sharecroppers, “a big chunk of money in the 1920s,” he said.
Bill learned about the plantation and its stories from Tom Cannon, the nephew of Charley Patton.
The two worked at Dockery for years, many years before Bill landed the position as foundation executive director.
“He knew his uncle very well. He saw all the blues (legends) sing here,” he said.
Bill met his wife Tennie while teaching at Delta State.
“She came to an art show to see one of the other professor’s work … I saw her and went over and talked to her,” he said.
The two were married in the early 1980s and have one daughter, McLeod. McLeod and her husband Jason have three children.
Shortly after getting married, Bill, who had befriended the Dockery family, was given a two-acre site on the Dockery Farms estate, and built a house there.
“Mr. Will started (the farm) in 1895. It was an alluvial floodplain swamp. There were no fields. He came here and realized the dirt was the same (kind) that was in the Nile River Valley.”
The farm became a thriving cotton plantation, but was production of the crop ended in the 1950s when cotton prices dropped, he said.
“After three or four years, the gin had been sitting idle, and it was hard to start it up again, so they said ‘the heck with it,’” he said.
Mostly corn, soybeans and rice are grown at the site today.
Since taking over the foundation, Bill has raised money to restore the farm, including its filling station. He is now working on the cotton gin and has plans to restore the seed house.
“Twelve years ago, the family asked me to oversee the site, restore it and be caretaker of it. For the last 12 years I’ve been doing that. It had gotten to be more of a responsibility there, and I had been at Delta State so long, that I thought (if I retired) I’d be enjoying it even more.”
When Bill is not working for Dockery, he’s involved in other projects as well. He continues painting, and makes about 100 turkey calls a year, which he sells each year at the National Wild Turkey Federation convention in Nashville.
“About 30 years ago, I got start turkey hunting and the calls we were able to use didn’t sound like turkeys to me,” he said.
He was inspired to make his own after learning about the “wing bone” turkey calls made by Native Americans.
“I ran into a guy who was in 80s and he had a wing bone call,” he said. “It sounded just like a turkey and that’s what I had to (make).”
Bill has been making his calls for about 20 years.
“I’ve sold several thousand. I spend all summer making them. I don’t take orders, but if I have one when (someone calls), I’ll sell one,” he said.
Bill’s show is slated for Thursday, November 2 at Brown’s Fine Art and Framing.
The show will feature turkey calls, water color landscapes, oil paintings and other works.
For more information, log on to brownsfineart.com.
