Meet three creatives who channel the soul of the color through history, music and handmade art.

Story by Barry Kaufman + Photography by Lisa Staff

Across the color spectrum, blue holds a special kind of magic. It’s the hue of Lowcountry skies and waters, of Gullah porches and denim jeans, of jazz clubs and ancient dyes. For three remarkable locals — historian Peggy Pickett, artist Patte Ranney and musician Cool John Ferguson — blue is more than a color. It’s a legacy, an aesthetic and a rhythm that flows through everything they do. From indigo to turquoise to the soulful strains of the blues, these creatives show how deeply blue can connect us to place, to past and to each other.

Peggy Pickett

Meet the woman behind the woman who shaped South Carolina with indigo

Long before Sea Island Cotton became the cash crop that spurred South Carolina’s rise to prominence in the antebellum South, our fortunes were inked in the rich tones of the indigo plant. Banking on the wealth of the English textile industry, our state provided the plant that produced an entire array of shades for the aristocracy and gentry of the British Empire, eventually constituting a third of our exports. Until the Revolution, it was the biggest economic engine in South Carolina. 

And it owes its entire existence to a 17-year-old girl who was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. The daughter of a British officer named George Lucas, Eliza was born in Antigua and moved to the Charleston area as a teen, when her father had inherited a trio of plantations. When he was recalled to Antigua to fight, George left his teenage daughter in charge of all of them.

“Eighteenth-century women were helpmates. If the husband went on a trip, the women would handle their business. Eliza’s mother was not capable of taking over three plantations, so Eliza’s father put Eliza in charge,” said Peggy Pickett. “He sent her seeds and told her to experiment with them. It took her five years, but she proved indigo could grow here.”

Pickett speaks from a place of authority. As a historical re-enactor who spent two decades portraying the women of Virginia’s historic triangle: Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown, she was drawn to Eliza’s story after making her move to South Carolina.

“I originally wasn’t going to continue with that because I didn’t know as much about South Carolina’s history,” she said, “But then on a tour at Coastal Discovery Museum, the docent was taking us around and showed us the indigo plant. When she started talking about this teenage girl who developed it, I thought that couldn’t possibly be true. Then I did some reading.”

“Some reading” became a full-on immersion into the fascinating life of a woman who changed the entire state’s fortunes. This resulted in a regular series of talks, with Peggy in character as Eliza, as well as a biography she wrote, Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Colonial Plantation Manager and Mother of American Patriots, 1722–1793.

“When I started to do the Eliza programs, and people asked how she could do all these things as a woman in the 18th century, I thought I should write a book that explains all of this,” she said. “Fortunately, Dr. Constance Schultz, professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, had just finished digitizing Eliza’s letters… It was wonderful to be able to read them.”

And it gave Peggy a newfound respect for a historic figure who did so much. 

“Women did have responsibilities in the 18th century. They were not just ornaments who sat around and looked pretty,” she said. “They were quite capable of taking care of business.”

The father, the husband and their impact on Eliza Pinckney

Some may look at Eliza Pinckney’s accomplishments and assume that she didn’t need any man to help her out. This is, after all, a woman who was given responsibility for three of her father’s plantations at the age of 16. She not only kept them profitable but used their fields as testing grounds for a crop that would transform trade across the state. 

But the old saying about there being a great woman behind every good man goes both ways. And Eliza’s father, George Lucas, might just be the template for girl dads everywhere.

“It was her father who oversaw her education. He encouraged her to work with plants. He firmly believed in education for his sons and daughters, which was unusual in the 18th century,” said Eliza’s biographer Peggy Pickett. “And Eliza took full advantage of it. She soaked up knowledge like a sponge. She was truly the right woman who was born to the right father.”

Even when she married, her husband, Charles Pinckney, continued to encourage her brilliance. With his support she spurred on silk cultivation on their lands, expanding on the exporting empire she’d helped birth. “She was always doing something, and she was fortunate to have men who would encourage her.”

Patte Ranney

Weaving desert light into coastal life

New Mexico and The Lowcountry are about as far apart as two places can be, and that’s not simply a matter of the miles between them. New Mexico rises and falls along the clashing borders of primeval tectonic plates, soaring into the peaks of the Rockies and dormant volcanoes, descending to desert flatlands carved by ancient rivers. Its art, its culture, form around the nucleus of the Native American tribes who call it home, woven in rich textiles, forged in silver and wrapped in the ever-present brilliant shade of turquoise. 

The Lowcountry has no mountains. Our flatlands are carved by rivers that still very much thrive. And our art takes on a decidedly different shade, informed by the rich blues of the Gullah. And yet there we see the one connective tissue between two places that may as well be on different planets. If haint blue is the signature shade of the Lowcountry, then turquoise defines New Mexico. 

Local artist Patte Ranney may have called the Lowcountry home for more than 50 years, but her artistry shines with the dazzling turquoise of the desert. 

“I’ve always made things. And as I would make various things, they would collect in my workspaces. My husband said, ‘People would buy this,’ but I’d never take him seriously because I wasn’t sure,” she said. “It wasn’t until I completed my work at Outside that I started selling, and I discovered people wanted my things.”

The former naturalist embraced her new life as an artist with vigor, opening These Two Hands Studio and selling her wares at The Hilton Head Community Market on Saturdays, the Hilton Head Farmers Market on Tuesdays, at regular pop-up events across the Lowcountry and through her Instagram page (@thesetwohandsstudio). 

“I work in four different mediums because I just can’t stick to one,” she said with a laugh. “I work a little bit in each one every day, moving from one to the other. When I set up the loom for weaving, it’s a very meditative process. If I have a challenge with silver, I weave to think it through.”

Running through all of her art is the signature turquoise of southwestern art, a byproduct of the place that has fueled her artistry since it was just a hobby. 

“I’ve been going to a place called the Ghost Ranch for more than 15 years. I study out there with not only a master silversmith, but with silversmiths from the Navajo and Hopi traditions,” she said. “I think people are drawn to my aesthetic because it’s a southwest style in the southeast.”

Tales from the Ghost Ranch

If Patte Ranney’s art, crafted through her These Two Hands Studio and sold at markets across the Lowcountry, seems to have a decidedly southwestern flavor to it, that’s no accident. For over 15 years she has honed her craft at an Abiquiu, New Mexico, retreat known as the Ghost Ranch.

“It’s probably best known as being Georgia O’Keefe’s retreat after she left New York,” said Ranney. 

At the Ghost Ranch, immersed in the techniques and tones of the Native American tradition, Ranney has honed her skills in silversmithing at a place as varied as the artists who call it home. Painting, pottery and movement programs all intertwine with mindful meditation and hiking, each peppered by the singular beauty and tranquility of the desert. 

“There is something about that place and the people who tend to congregate at the Ghost Ranch that really touch me,” she said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an ocean.”

Fortunately for us, the Lowcountry does. So Ranney can draw her inspiration from the desert and share it with all of us here on the coast.

Cool John Ferguson

A lifetime of music, faith and foot-stomping blues

The blues is a genre of music defined by its legends. Did Robert Johnson actually go to the crossroads and sell his soul to the devil in exchange for his history-making guitar skills? No, he probably just practiced a lot. Were so many of those early traveling blues men actually sent by Hoodoo figure Papa Legba? Again, probably not. It just makes for a better story.

The legend of Cool John Ferguson, however, is a little simpler to verify. The Beaufort native will happily tell it to you himself, even if he admits he only heard it secondhand.

“My parents used to tell me that I started playing guitar around the age of 3,” he said. “My mom had this guitar in the closet, and there was something mystical about it. So I got a couple of chairs and pulled the guitar down and played. One day she caught me playing it, and I thought she was going to give me a whipping. Instead she just let me play it. It was a Harmony with one single pickup and two knobs.”

Encouraged by his parents – who had to physically help him hold the guitar at first – he began his self-guided walk down the road of the blues. As a southpaw, he would play the guitar upside down, essentially learning how to play backwards. But it wasn’t long before he proved his chops.

“When I was in first grade, they used to let me play my guitar on stage to calm the other kids down. It just came naturally. I didn’t have any formal training until high school.”

Learning by ear, replicating the riffs he’d hear over a transistor radio broadcast from Jacksonville’s WAPE, he honed himself into a blues man from a young age. But it wasn’t just the secular excitement of Green Onions or Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” that inspired him.

“We were a very religious family. I’d play at church on Sunday, and ‘Just A Closer Walk With Thee’ was the first song I learned to play all the way through,” he said. Growing up in Beaufort to a father who was head deacon at the Beaufort New Church of Christ and a mother born and raised in the Gullah culture, his style of the blues was flavored by the church and the native spirituals that ring through the Lowcountry’s forests. “I still have connections and roots from the Gullah. Some of my music represents the style with those straight, hard-driving beats. You take blues and gospel, and you mix it all together.”

Seeking a change of pace from Beaufort, he relocated to Charlotte, where he began working as a studio musician as well as a solo artist and a supporter of the Music Maker Foundation. The group, dedicated to helping working musicians meet their day-to-day needs, was a perfect fit for Ferguson, and he was a perfect fit for the world outside of the Lowcountry. His inimitable style, forged in the Gullah tradition and crafted on his own, saw him recording with such legendary blues men as Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne, Beverly Watkins, B.B. King and Taj Mahal, who once said that Ferguson was “among the five greatest guitarists in the world.”

And as far as his talents have taken him, he’s still a Beaufort boy at heart, famously playing at Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park to send off the great Joe Frazier following his death. 

“I left in a way I can always come back,” he said. “I can always come back.”

Cool John’s life on the road

If you want to hear how well the foot-stomping, call-and-response rhythms of Gullah music sound when run through the mind of electric blues man Cool John Ferguson, look up the album “With These Hands.” It’s a little harder to find on Spotify, which broke that particular album off from the rest of his discography, but in his mind it best represents the influence of Gullah music on his work. 

“There are two of them that tie in: ‘Black Mud Boogie’ and ‘Mr. Brown.’ That one’s really Gullah Geechee. Some of the words you can’t understand,” he said. 

And as much as his music is rooted in the religious and spiritual background of his upbringing, the life of a traveling blues man is definitely a tad more… secular.

“So many crazy stories from the road. Most of them involve women,” he said with a laugh. “One came up and grabbed my guitar during a show in Durham, saying, ‘If I’m not going to be your woman, I’ll take your other woman.’ She broke a $2,000 Stratocaster. I had some wild days. I’m glad I survived it.”