The Music of Their Lives

In January, I had the privilege of working with Fayetteville Observer staffer, Raul Rubiera, on a project for Black History Month. Raul has worked on this project for a few years in the past and it is his baby. Still having video skills from school, but no opportunity to apply them yet, I was eager to work on a project to dive back into the medium. Together, we photographed and took video footage of four Fayetteville residents, all over the age of 70, for which music played a profound role in their lives. It was challenging, time consuming, frustrating at times, but overall, completely and utterly worthwhile. It ran as a Sunday Life feature with interviews on each subject, as well as videos each day leading up to the Sunday story. Getting to spend time with each of the people involved in the project--Bill Curtis, William McLeod, Ernestine Smith, and Walter Drake---was an honor and increased the quality of the time spent with them, immeasurably.  These are some stills I took that ran with the story, as well as a link (here) for the videos. Raul was an editing powerhouse and edited three of the four videos that ran. My little contribution was editing Mr. Dake's video (the fourth and final one in the series). Please take a moment to read about these incredible people and listen to their stories.