For the past 30 years, John Wegrzyn of Belleville has enjoyed an unusual hobby: He makes rubbings of the graves of legendary musicians. He has tracked down the tombstones of Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Louis Armstrong, capturing the writing there on old album sleeves.
Now an exhibit at the National Blues Museum in downtown St. Louis shows off the blues portion of his remarkable collection. Wegrzyn, 62, says it’s his second time having his work featured at the museum, and he particularly likes this arrangement. “One of the guys who works there, he goes, ‘This works out nice, because we’ve got our museum set up from the infancy of blues, and then when they walk into the last room,’ where my exhibit is, ‘it’s the end of their life at that point, and the legacy lives on.’”
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A big music fan who works in the medical field, Wegryzn stumbled into the graveside visits. A friend visited Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris and brought back a rubbing for Wegryzn. “I just kind of put it in a tube and set it aside for a couple years,” he says. But then, on the way back to Illinois from a blues festival, he decided to try to find the grave of Fred McDowell in Como, Mississippi. “We didn’t know where the grave site was. We didn’t know where the cemetery was. We just knew where Como was,” he recalls. “We figured, It can’t be that hard to find, right?”
As it turns out, McDowell wasn’t buried in the town’s major cemetery, but Wegrzyn met some people there who not only attempted to give directions, but decided to personally show him the way when their instructions proved a bit too complicated. “So we followed him in his truck and went back [down] all these dusty roads and dirt was just flying everywhere,” he says. “And up there on this little hill was Mississippi Fred McDowell’s grave.” How better to commemorate a memorable trip than with a rubbing?
Wegrzyn’s previous job in sales required some travel, and he could often find ways to squeeze in a side trip to visit with a dead legend. These days, he’s mostly planning dedicated trips to seek out new icons. That includes a quick jump across the river to St. Louis, which holds the final resting place for not only Chuck Berry, but swing legend Louis Jordan (he’s in Lemay’s Mt. Olive Catholic Cemetery). Chicago houses a plethora of blues greats, many of them at the same cemetery, and he recently returned from a trip to New York City, where he captured John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and more. “You wind up in Queens,” he says. “I think I spent $120 just on tolls.”
His collection continues to grow. Even though the 30 rubbings or so in the National Blues Museum exhibit have been up for months already, Wegryzn is still adding to the display. A few weeks ago, he proudly installed a new rubbing of Bessie Smith, whose Philadelphia grave proclaims her “the greatest blues singer in the world.”
He doubts he’ll ever stop making the rubbings: “I kind of look at it like I’m getting their spiritual autograph.”
