Life Story: Melinda Arceneaux-Swearingen's 'Work Was Seminal'

Melinda Arceneaux-Swearingen at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic in 1976 Credit: Courtesy of Scott Newton

This “Life Stories” profile is part of a collection of articles remembering Vermonters who died in 2024.

In the black-and-white photo, she’s perched in front of the stage, the crowd behind her out of focus. The young woman’s face radiates confidence, the visage of an artist at work. Her trusty 35mm camera hangs around her neck. It’s July 4, 1976, the U.S. bicentennial, and she’s photographing the celebratory picnic thrown by Willie Nelson in Gonzales, Texas. She peers into the camera aimed at her. For once, she is the subject of the photo. Her eyes are ablaze.

It’s one of the most enduring images of Melinda Arceneaux-Swearingen, taken during her years photographing some of the biggest names of rock and country music. She kept it by the side of her bed until she died after ongoing health problems on March 18, at age 76, at her home in Montgomery Center. A much larger print of the photo also hangs in her home state in the gallery of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, where an exhibition of her work is running until July 2025.

“She told me that when she looked at the picture, she was reconnecting with the young woman that she had let go a long time ago,” said Hector Saldaña, the music curator at the Wittliff Collections.

Born in Dallas in 1947, Melinda Arceneaux began her photography career while working at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library archives at the University of Texas. She shot various political events and candidates, with her work appearing in Time and Newsweek. She was living in Austin at the time, after marrying Rick Lee Wickman in 1968.

Her passion, however, was photographing musicians, not politicians. She quickly established herself as a force within the Austin music scene in the late 1960s, taking pictures of the likes of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Marcia Ball. She shot many of the photos in Jan Reid’s seminal book The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, as well as album covers for artists such as Waylon Jennings and Nelson. She later shot stills for classic films including The Blues Brothers, Popeye and Coal Miner’s Daughter.

Melinda gave up professional photography during the last 30 years of her life. Instead, she took on what her son John Nicholls described as her third career and became a librarian — like her mother, Reba, before her — in her adopted home of Montgomery Center. She worked at the Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans before moving to Enosburg Falls High School.

“I definitely grew up with parents who had a lot of creative accomplishments,” said John, a voice actor who lives in St. Albans and played in area rock band Near North. John’s father and Melinda’s second husband, Allan Nicholls, is an actor, musician, writer and film director whose work includes films such as Dead Ringer, Nashville and Slap Shot.

Melinda with John and Allan Nicholls Credit: Courtesy

Many of Melinda’s photos were hung on the walls of the family home, but her son failed to notice until he was older just who was in them.

“One day, I realized that Bob Dylan is in one of the pictures, and I’m like, ‘Hey, I have that guy’s poster on my bedroom wall,'” John recalled. “It was strange; she wasn’t embarrassed or trying to hide anything, but I’m certain that she believed she would never have an audience.”

Melinda met Allan on the set of the Robert Altman film Health in the late ’70s, after she had moved on from music photography to shooting stills for films, a more lucrative gig. They eventually bought a house in Allan’s home city of Montréal, raising their two sons, John and Andrew, there. One day, while driving to Jay Peak Resort, Melinda noticed an old Victorian house off Route 242 in Montgomery Center. The place had a long history, including as a boardinghouse and art gallery.

“She saw it from the road and knew it was the one,” John said. “It was one of her visions: She just knew this was going to be her home, and she loved that house.”

Melinda with Allan Nicholls and sons John and Andrew Credit: Courtesy

The family soon moved to Vermont.

Allan and Melinda divorced in 1991 but remained friends. Over the years, he tried to get her to exhibit her photography, but she would always decline. “I think she was nervous about showing her work, but she really deserves the recognition,” he said.

She married Edward Bruce Swearingen on the Fourth of July in 1993, celebrating with a jazz band on the porch. She settled into a new phase of family life, breaking out the camera sparingly to take nature shots or family portraits. She also worked on her art projects, notably illustration and calligraphy, two of her passions. (Edward died in 2010.)

She stored her extensive collection of photographs and negatives from her Austin days in the basement of the house. A flash flood in 1997 destroyed much of her work, which so broke her heart that she couldn’t even look at what remained. She had the detritus moved into boxes in the loft of her barn and refused to so much as go near them for the better part of 20 years.

“She was sure all of her work was lost and would be forgotten,” John said. “She’d say things like, ‘No one cares, and no one will ever know.'”

Back in her home state, however, the music curator at the Wittliff Collections was helping to ensure that Melinda’s fears would not be realized.

The Melinda Wickman Swearingen exhibition at the Wittliff Collections Credit: Courtesy

“Part of the beauty of what I do is discovering something like Melinda’s story,” Saldaña said in a phone call from his office at Texas State University. “I mean, how can it be that the Annie Leibovitz of outlaw country could almost be lost to history? It’s unbelievable — her work was seminal. When she took those photos of Waylon and Willie, people don’t realize that these weren’t household names yet. She had a lot to do with that happening.”

When Melinda first took photos of Nelson, Saldaña noted, the legendary country singer had just signed up for an open mic. “That’s how far back she went with the Austin scene back then. She was a singular figure but burned very brightly and then disappeared; she left and started working on movies.”

She was a singular figure but burned very brightly and then disappeared.Hector Saldaña

While preparing a Jan Reid exhibition at the Wittliff Collections, Saldaña came across four of Melinda’s pictures from Reid’s book and started to wonder what had become of the photographer who took such formative images.

“There was a lot of mystique around Melinda down here,” Saldaña said. “It was her photos that really put a face to the music coming out of Texas, but we only had four of them. So I knew I had to find her.”

Eventually, Saldaña connected with Melinda, flying to Vermont in 2022 to meet her and try to procure more photos from her catalog. That’s when she told him about the flood.

“That flood had just utterly broken her heart. It was traumatic and very, very emotional for her,” Saldaña said. He coaxed her into investigating what had been recovered from the flooded basement.

“Lo and behold, not all was lost,” he said.

Together with Melinda, Saldaña curated 19 never-before-published photographs from her surviving negatives and put together her show at the Wittliff — the first-ever collected exhibition of her work.

“It’s wonderful seeing her finally acknowledged in this way,” her son John said of the collection. “It brought her a lot of happiness to know her work wasn’t forgotten.”

John hopes the exhibition helps highlight the quality and heart in his mother’s photos.

“She was so interested in finding beauty in the mundane,” he recalled. “Yeah, she knew how to put together a picture, but she also wanted to find out who was behind the photo, what was bubbling underneath the surface.”

What John remembers most about Melinda is her dedication to making sure people were heard.

“I didn’t really put that together until near her death,” he said. “But it’s a through line for her entire life, whether it was making sure I was heard as a child, which she always did for my children as well, or photographing these musicians that, at the time, were not being taken seriously as artists.”

In her later years, he said, Melinda started leading group meditations and would always dedicate them to “the forgotten ones.”

“She was a wonderful, soulful, humble and very, very sharp woman,” Saldaña recalled. “Her death hit me quite hard because I was so hoping she would get to see her exhibition.”

Melinda did take a virtual tour of the show before she passed. Seeing her work preserved and presented with the honor it deserves moved her to tears, particularly the massive shot of her at Nelson’s Fourth of July picnic.

“Melinda epitomizes the mission statement of the Wittliff Collections or any institution like the Smithsonian or Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Saldaña said. “This is history, and we can’t afford to let it slip through the cracks.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “‘The Annie Leibovitz of Outlaw Country’ | Melinda Arceneaux-Swearingen, May 28, 1947-March 18, 2024”