Two weeks ago in a conversation about the blues, I pulled up our profile of Norman Vickers to illustrate his story of watching a forgotten Blind Willie McTell playing 1950s drive-ins in Atlanta before the ’60s folk revival would give the blues legend’s career a second wind. I said it was an honor to have people with these life experiences informing our coverage, supporting what we do at The Syncopated Times, and to have them as friends. Few have supported us with the gusto of Dr. F. Norman Vickers.
He was there from the first days of the paper, one of but a few contributors to early issues. He was a frequent correspondent, offering encouragement, and continued contributing reviews of albums, and especially of books he had bought for the Jazz Room at the Pensacola Library, a room he had created in the 1980s. His last communication to us in late September noted that the F. Norman Vickers Artist in Residence Fund, established in 2013 to bring jazz musicians and educators to Pensacola for high school and college workshops, instruction, performances, and related community enrichment had achieved a sustaining level of funding. Consider that he was already 82 when he started that fund! He never stopped working on projects to help encourage the jazz community.
Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Norman Vickers was exposed to live boogie woogie piano playing and the jazz broadcasts o
