Winona and Naomi Judd of The Judd's visit the Valerie E. Wong photography gallery of Del Mar, Calif.

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The Judd's
have visited our gallery a few times over the years and Naomi became a collector of ours the first time in.
Here is a cute story about two of the visits.

Click photo to enlarge.

Winona Judd, Willie Weeks (their bass player, and now a Seewald sponsor himself), collector Naomi Judd and the beautiful Valerie Seewald at the Valerie E. Wong Gallery, Del Mar Plaza. July of 1994.

Michael Seewald writes:

     "The year previous to this photo Valerie and I were in Oahu, Hawaii, where I was working on a new series. One of our art consultants informed us that the Judd's had just come in and that Naomi had purchased one of my Estonia photographs, as a gift for her Estonian pastor.

I said 'the who'? She said "no, not The Who, the Judd's. The famous country western singers." Not following country western music all that much I had not known of their fame, and when I found out I was pretty ecstatic.

     The following year, Willie Weeks, the bass player for the Judd's, came in and was looking around. Valerie approached him and asked where he was from. When he mentioned 'Nashville' Valerie replied "ooh, we have collectors from your area, the Judd's."

     He just replied that he loved the images he was now viewing, and wanted to get one or two for himself. At that point, I came in and Valerie mentioned he also wanted to sponsor the Southern Europe series that I was going to make. ( eventually he picked 'Lido, Venice Italy'.)

     After purchasing 'Nepal Pots, '89' and signing up as a sponsor, I asked him what had brought him to Del Mar. "Well", he confided, "your wife mentioned the Judd's had collected. Actually, I'm the bass player in their band, and we just arrived today. We play at the Del Mar Fair as part of the closing, July 4th ceremonies."

     I said 'really? Maybe you could get us some complementary tickets, right?' To my surprise, he assured us he would.

     (I meant fair 'entrance tickets', valued at some $6.00 each. Usually most of the bands, all quite big names that play there, are free. I assumed, wrongly, that they would be also. I didn't know that the fairgrounds charged some $30 to $40 per ticket extra for their concert, and that they where sold out to boot! (No pun intended.)

Side-note: the concert ended up being really, really great, and Michael Bolton joined Winona for most of the songs... a special tour they were doing then. We were so blessed to see such an energetic, professional performance.

     Anyway, Willie left, only to return about an hour later with Naomi and Winona. After they looked at my newest work I asked if I could take the group photo, pictured above. They all agreed. As they were leaving I asked Naomi how her pastor had liked the Estonian photograph. She looked at me a little sheepishly, bent over and whispered, "well, I kinda kept it"! "

Click photo to enlarge.

Winona and Naomi Judd with Michael