Photographer/pizza guy Don Haupt Jr. gets the blues

The Delta blues songs Don Haupt Jr. sings tell of good and bad women and whiskey and the lives of bluesmen who played the guitar and sang just to tell their stories.

Haupt likes a good story.

Sometimes, he wrestles Delta blues from his Martin guitar like a man with an alligator on his hands. Other times, as in his rendition of the traditional "Corinna, Corinna," he gently coaxes out lovely chords that convey a sensitivity that emerges in another of his passions.

Some nights, Haupt waits patiently in the streets while his old 35 mm Minolta camera absorbs the painstakingly composed image of a building or manhole cover. Each one could take five or 10 minutes. "I gradually let it soak into the film," he says. He devoted four rolls of film to one manhole cover.

Other nights he cruises the streets in his 1997 Oldsmobile Cutlass delivering pizzas while listening to Pink Floyd and Blind Boy Fuller. A 26-year-old bluesman/photographer has to make a living.

He grew up nearby in Egypt Mills, Mo., the son of farmers. At Central High School he was a wallflower who drove a pickup around the back roads with his buddies listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes. "I was a redneck," he says.

Haupt also loved bluegrass and had a banjo. Nights he'd go out in the middle of a hay field and play all he wanted. "It sounded good to me but not to anybody else," he said.

He sings in coffeehouses in Carbondale, Ill., and often at Grace Cafe in downtown Cape Girardeau, where the Cafe Americanos he drinks are juiced up with four shots of caffeine. The black and white photographs hanging on the cafe walls are his.

The fact that his first guitar was given to him by a lesbian ex-nun who had given up the convent is another story. "She no longer needed it to play hymns," he said.

Picture this: Haupt at the old Raven coffeehouse on Broadway playing Led Zeppelin songs solo on acoustic guitar. Eventually he heard Eric Clapton's 1992 "Unplugged" album with its rendition of Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues." The Delta blues became his fixation.

Clapton has been the bridge to the blues for many white boys. One of Haupt's best musical experiences was a talent contest he entered at Southeast. Arriving at Academic Auditorium, he realized the contest was sponsored by a black fraternity, he was going to be the only white performer and his mission was to please a mostly black audience with his take on the blues.

His rendition of Lightning Hopkins' "Katie May" won the third-place prize.

Haupt's next performances are at 8 p.m. Jan. 4 at the Yellow Moon Cafe in Cobden, Ill., and at 8 p.m. Jan. 18 at the Book Bug, 127 W. Main St. in Jackson.

He bought his camera cheap years ago on Haight Street in San Francisco from someone who looked stoned. As in his musical tastes, Haupt's approach to the camera is classical. In the era of digital cameras, he lovingly describes the process of unspooling film and watching an image appear in his developing tray.

"It's magic," he says.

A Haupt photograph of a woman's neck was named Best of Show in the Art for the Health of It competition a few years ago. In 2000, he had a solo show at the Associated Artists Guild in Carbondale.

Currently Haupt's photographs are displayed at Grace Cafe in downtown Cape Girardeau and at The Book Bug.

Dr. Beth Horton, a physician who is a photographer herself, recently bought three of his photographs. One is a picture of a cat in a window in Little Italy. All the photographs shared one quality, she says. "They had a story."

Haupt is proud that he taught himself to do the two things that mean the most to him now. "I learn the most by making mistakes," he says.

Now Haupt, who is single, is saving his money to move in the spring to Eureka on the Northern California coast. A friend lives nearby. When the time comes, he'll just load up the Olds Cutlass with the free-thought bumperstickers and take off. "I'm going just to go," he says.

New coffeehouses and photographs await, more pizzas need delivering and new stories await telling.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182