He tends the roots of American music

Until a few years ago, the world was unfamiliar with Cootie Stark. Blind for most of his life and living in a housing project in Greenville, S.C., he played music primarily on the streets, sharing the songs he learned from the bluesmen who came before him. He might have disappeared like they did if a young producer named Tim Duffy hadn't met him in 1995. It wasn't long before the 68-year-old had a new guitar and the first CD bearing his name.

To the artists Mr. Duffy works with, he is a man with solutions. Need to be warm? He'll buy a heating stove. Need to play? He'll find a guitar. He books tours and pays medical bills, arranges transportation and tombstones. Most of all, he makes sure that his ever-expanding roster of older musicians are able to carry on with an American musical tradition.

Out of a building next to his home in Hillsborough, N.C., Duffy and a tiny staff, including his wife and co-founder, Denise, run the Music Maker Relief Foundation, where they carry out their motto: "Keeping the bluest of the blues alive."

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the organization, which has channeled $2.5 million through its programs and helped 108 artists over age 55. Along the way the group has collected fans in the recording industry such as Eric Clapton, Moby, B.B. King, and Bonnie Raitt. Several are on the group's advisory board, while others, such as Taj Mahal - who calls the blues an "aquifer" that nourishes modern music - are members of its board of directors.

Even with the attention, raising money and distributing CDs are among the biggest challenges for the nonprofit group, which helps musicians from West Virginia to Nevada. To Duffy, his work is about saving and documenting a vital part of US culture - and treating the people who make it like family. "These people have given so much to an industry that has created billions of dollars off their musical traditions," he says by phone. "Why can't we pay back something?"

Duffy's passion for helping these "living roots" of American music was ignited back in 1989, when he was a graduate student in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was documenting the work of James "Guitar Slim" Stephens, who told him to look up another bluesman, Guitar Gabriel. Duffy then encountered one artist after another - all part of a tradition he had been told hardly existed anymore. "I realized there was this whole hidden world," he says.

Appalled by the choices many of the musicians had to make each month - between food or medicine, rent or the car - Duffy drove them to the grocery store, to pay bills, and to get to welfare lines, while trying to book them gigs, record their music, and swing record deals. It was a new model for maintaining the blues community, where only a few, like B.B. King, have made a living off their music.

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