Melinda Wickman Swearingen, a photographer who captured iconic images of the Texas outlaw country music scene, died March 18. She was 76.
A funeral home in Swearingen’s final home of Saint Albans, Vermont shared the news with an obituary.
Born in Dallas and raised primarily in Wichita Falls, Tex., Swearingen moved to Austin in the late Sixties, where she worked at the LBJ Presidential Library archives at UT-Austin. As a budding photographer, she documented university political events, earning credits in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine.
By the Seventies, Swearingen had switched from shooting political figures to musicians. Immersed in the progressive country flowing out of Austin venues like the Armadillo World Headquarters, Threadgill’s, and Vulcan Gas Company, she captured artists including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Marcia Ball. When it came time for writer Jan Reid to cover the scene in his landmark book The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, he enlisted Swearingen – an old flame – to procure the photographs.
Apart from the artwork in the original edition of Reid’s 1974 book, including the cover image of Michael Martin Murphey, Swearingen’s most famous images adorned Wanted! The Outlaws. The 1976 compilation album brought together Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser.
After her Austin music heydey, Swearingen worked as a still photographer for television shows and movies including The Blues Brothers, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Robert Altman’s Popeye, which famously shot on a film set village in Malta. She relocated to Vermont in the Eighties.
Her photographs are on display in “Melinda Wickman Swearingen: Outlaw Odyssey,” an exhibit at the Wittliff Collections, which is free and open to the public at Texas State University. The exhibit presents 19 rare and unpublished photos of Nelson and Jennings, including outtakes from the Wanted! The Outlaws sessions. Hector Saldaña, the archive’s Texas Music Collection curator, posted on Facebook:
“Her documentary style photos were among the first to put a face to the new Austin sound. It was her photos on RCA’s “Wanted! The Outlaws” album which helped define the genre and its Willie and Waylon mythology. She didn’t get to visit the new exhibition “Melinda Wickman Swearingen: Outlaw Odyssey” — the first of her career — but she helped curate it and was so happy that she’d been rediscovered. She took great pride that her surviving photo archive is now being preserved at The Wittliff Collections and that she was part of the ¡Viva Terlingua! exhibit, too. We had become friends; we were making plans.”
A service will be held in Montgomery Village on April 20. “In lieu of flowers,” Swearingen’s obituary reads, “a donation could be made to the Wittliff Collection in her honor, or better yet, be generous with someone in her honor, do something kind and unexpected for one of the ‘forgotten ones’ as she would say.”
Updated January 3, 2005: Vermont alternative weekly Seven Days ran a remembrance of Swearingen in its end-of-year Life Stories issue. From her son John:
“She was so interested in finding beauty in the mundane. … 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.”
A selection of her music photography, Melinda Wickman Swearingen: Outlaw Odyssey, is on exhibition at The Witliff Collections through July 6, 2025.
This article appears in March 22 • 2024.