A character has passed from the scene, and Nashville is the poorer for it. Wilmer “Slick” Lawson died last month; now hundreds of friends and scores of intimates are bereft of their chief instigator, lead raconteur and irascible social conscience.
“Slick” since birth on account of an obstetrician’s slippery fumble as infant Wilmer was being delivered, Lawson somehow managed to contrive one last head-fake as a parting gesture. According to longtime friend Houston Thomas, Lawson is thought to have died Thursday, June 20, and yet was not discovered at his residence until two days later.
Trailing epithets like bread crumbs, Lawson will be remembered by his many different circles of friends as a photographer, motorcyclist, hot-air balloonist, accomplished chef, pilot, thrill-seeker, organizer extraordinaire and irrepressible bon vivant. Indeed, on the very day of July 4, 1976, Lawson rallied friends and neighbors to help him inaugurate an Independence Day celebration and street party that he co-founded with Pat and Dan Burton. This year’s 26th annual Whitland Avenue festival in the West End area will undoubtedly be most memorable for the absence of its honorary drum major and anthem leader wearing his trademark red bow tie and flourishing his conductor’s baton.
Whether one met him through motorcycling, ballooning or on the set of a country music photo shoot, Lawson’s uncanny gift was an ability to stir up a social gumbo of varied acquaintances who might otherwise never have chanced to meet. A Lawson gathering—fueled as often as not with his signature real Cajun gumbo—was never just a party; it was a process with its own roving cast, where strangers, like Chaucer’s Pilgrims, became familiars and co-conspirators. His knack, according to his photography protégé Michael Gomez, was to lead by sheer force of personality— “for better or, sometimes, for worse,” he adds. “Slick liked to throw meat into the cage to see what might happen.”
An irreverent sense of humor riveted the attention of his warier or more circumspect companions. “If the FedEx package said, 'Do not send cash’” Gomez recalls, “Slick would stuff a dollar bill inside and seal it up” in a private gesture of defiance. And if a stewardess were foolish enough to proffer peanuts during a flight, Lawson invariably declared, “I don’t eat in captivity.” Allen Sullivan can remember an occasion when Lawson and he were approached by students from the Free Will Baptist Bible College near Lawson’s former home on Whitland Avenue. “They said the school was about to host a large student conference, so they were canvassing the area looking for neighbors who might volunteer a night or two of room and board for out-of-town students,” he says. “Slick looked them straight in the eyes and said, 'If you don’t mind, I’ll take a 16-year-old redhead lass who hasn’t quite been saved yet.’ We never saw them again in this neighborhood after that.”
Friends initially drawn to Lawson’s infectious personality soon discovered a selfless generosity. Julian Tune, president of Old Hickory Aviation, remembers learning how to pilot hot air balloons from Lawson. “He gave me my first ride in 1976,” he says, when Lawson himself was still relatively new to the sport. “Neither of us knew what we were doing at the time, but I’ve been flying ever since. Slick never asked for a thing; yet because of him, I found my calling and have traveled the world doing what I love.”
After decades of garnering national recognition as a portraitist and photojournalist whose work appeared in the likes of Time, Life and People magazines, Lawson suddenly turned his back on photography a few years ago and declared himself a motorcyclist. “He called me one day,” said Gomez, “and asked me to come get all of his photo equipment and take care of it. 'When I need it,’ Slick said, 'I’ll call you.’ Essentially, he just handed me my career.” Understandably, Gomez has made it a priority to sift and sort through Lawson’s voluminous files of a lifetime’s photography. Together with Lawson confidante Cheryl Melton, Gomez hopes someday to showcase the artistic legacy of the man he unabashedly calls “my hero.”
An inveterate provocateur, Lawson never stinted to declare an opinion, however harsh, if he felt it were merited. In a last e-mail note to an acquaintance just weeks before his death, Lawson salted the wounds of one politician’s career-ending scandal by characterizing the man as a “fundamentalist serial leftist.” Yet when, years ago, Lawson first erected street-closing barriers on Whitland Avenue for one of the first July Fourth celebrations, he stood firm when confronted by the police. “A black police officer approached Slick and asked him who had authorized those barriers,” recalls David Eastland, Lawson’s own mentor as a balloonist. In high Independence Day dudgeon, Lawson replied: “Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy.” The officer, says Eastland, relented on the spot.
For all of his enthusiasms and bravado, Lawson wrestled his share of personal demons. Jim Lattimore, who co-founded with Lawson the Stealth Brigade of motorcycle aficionados, watched with regret as his friend succumbed in the last few years to illness and occasional poor judgment. It is testimony of the most eloquent sort, however, that Lawson’s closest friends stood by him until the end. “He may not have lived as many years as we would have liked,” said writer and friend Roy Blount at Lawson’s memorial service, “but considering how many hours a day he burned his candles at both ends, he probably outlived us all.”
One of Lawson’s last organizing efforts was the establishment last fall of the Natchez Trace Tour and Vintage Motorcycle Gallery at Cheekwood. According to Cheekwood events director Ann Clayton, the fund-raising motorcycle ride and exhibit is tentatively scheduled for an Oct. 13 reprise. Appropriately, this year’s proceeds are to be dedicated to an educational endowment in Slick Lawson’s memory. The intent is to fund an annual series of Cheekwood seminars conducted by prominent photographers nationally. “It may be hard to carry on this event without his guiding spirit,” says Clayton, “but we’ll be serving up as much pomp and circumstance as we can muster in his absence.”
