Fred McDowell: The Alan Lomax Recordings

Track List

1, "Shake 'Em on Down"
2, "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"
3, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"
4. "Fred McDowell's Blues"
5, "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus"
6, "Drop Down Mama"
7, "Going Down to the River"
8, "Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down"
9, "When the Train Comes Along"
10, "When You Get Home Please Write Me a Few of Your Lines"
11, "Worried Mind Blues"
12, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

In 1959, when he traveled through the American South on his "Southern Journey" field-recording trip, Alan Lomax made no plans to visit the Mississippi Delta. He had spent considerable time there some years earlier, in 1941 and 1942, when he and a team of researchers from Nashville's Fisk University had undertaken an extensive sociological study of Coahoma County in the heart of the Delta, with Lomax directing the musical investigations on behalf of the Library of Congress. That had resulted in the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Honeyboy Edwards; a trip to Robert Johnson's mother's house brought the news that "Little Robert" was dead, but Lomax was able to meet Johnson's mentor, Son House, who made for Alan his first recordings since House's slender pre-war output for the Paramount label. It was a hugely successful expedition to what Alan later called "the land where the blues began." But signs of a shifting in taste, among players and listeners alike, were evident even then: records of jump blues and big-city jazz beginning to fill up the "Seebird" (Seeburg) jukeboxes; talk of migration north to Chicago among the more talented of the Delta musicians, Muddy Waters foremost among them; and the increasing electrification of the combos that stayed behind to play in the small-town clubs and country jukes.

It was during the Coahoma County study that Lomax first visited the Mississippi Hill Country, the uplands to the east and northeast of the Delta. While doing research in Clarksdale, Alan had met a blind street singer and harp-blower named Turner Junior Johnson, who advised him to seek out Blind Sid Hemphill, the musical patriarch of the Hill Country. Lomax found Sid at his home in Senatobia, Tate County, and went on to record from him and his band some of the old-time black country dance music played on banjos, fiddles, fifes, drums, and quills that had survived in the hills, away from the social and economic changes roiling the Delta, and relatively isolated from the urbanized black music filling the airwaves and the jukeboxes.

Nearly twenty years later, in 1959, Lomax returned to the Hill Country instead of the Delta, hoping to find some of the raggy old dance tunes still holding on. He wasn't optimistic, worrying that he'd find, as he had on many other occasions, "that the best people had passed away or withered and their communities had gone to pieces." But not only were Hemphill and his friends and family still going strong in Tate County, Lomax discovered in neighboring Panola the string duet of the elderly Pratcher brothers, with their repertoire born of the minstrel and medicine-show eras, as well as the fife-and-drum music of the Youngs, Ed and his brother Lonnie. What he didn't expect to find, however, came by Lonnie's porch one evening: a diminutive farmer in overalls, carrying a guitar. He was Lonnie Young's neighbor, and had just finished his day picking cotton. His name was Fred McDowell. Alan's travelling partner and assistant, the English folksinger Shirley Collins, recounts that at first they resented the younger man's intrusion, but when Fred started to play, they realized they were in the presence of a master musician.

"Alan Lomax recorded me for the first time. I remember he was at the Pratcher brothers' house doing some recording, and somebody sent for me and said I should bring my guitar along. I did come by and played a little for Lomax, and he asked could he come to my house on Saturday night to record, and I said sure. So come that Saturday night, the house is full of people come to hear me recording and wanting to record, too. But right away Lomax said, 'I'm not interested in nobody but Fred.'" (Quoted in Bruce Cook, "Listen to the Blues", 1973.)

In the '20s and '30s, A&R men from commercial record companies scoured the southern states in search of talent for their "race" and "hillbilly" catalogs. They set up temporary studios in hotels, warehouses, and vacant storefronts and took out advertisements in local papers inviting people to come out, audition, and maybe even make a record. This turned up hundreds of artists who might well have otherwise remained unknown, but Fred McDowell was not among them. At the time Fred was in his teens and had just begun playing guitar, picking out the notes one string at a time on borrowed instruments, to songs he heard locally and on records by artists like Tommy Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Alan Lomax, too, had missed Fred, during his earlier trip through Panola and Tate counties in 1941, right about the time McDowell moved down from Memphis. He had yet to appear on the local picnic circuit; Hill Country tastes were still largely tuned to the sound of the Hemphill string band. Besides, although Fred had been playing weekend parties throughout the Memphis countryside for a decade or more, it was his move to Mississippi and his exposure to a new community of gifted musicians that expedited his musical development. Nearly twenty years later, however, a talent as big Fred's in a community as small as Como could not stay buried for long. It was inevitable that the two strangers making their way around town with a 26-pound, two-track reel-to-reel tape machine and talking of making records would run into it.

Fred McDowell was born around 1905 in Rossville, Tennessee, just a few miles north of the Mississippi border and another fifty from Como. From an early age he farmed cotton, peas, and corn with his family. Music was all around him. In Rossville, he remembered, "there wasn't hardly any seen who couldn't play guitar." Two of the better players he recalled were Raymond Payne and Vandy McKenna, neither of whom ever recorded. Fred watched them and picked up what he could. The first song he learned to play was "Big Fat Mama Blues" ("Big fat mama with the meat shakin' on your bones") from a 1928 record by Mississippi blues-man Tommy Johnson. "I learned it on one string, then two, note by note," Fred explained to a student years later. "Man, I about worried that first string to death trying to play that song." By his own account, Fred was a disciplined autodidact, which no doubt explains why his sound was so in-tensely individual.

"I never could hardly learn no music by somebody trying to show me. Like, I hear you play tonight, well, next week sometime it would come to me what you was playing. I'd get the sound of it in my head. Then I'd do it my way from what I remembered."

Fred's uncle Gene Shields played slide guitar with a filed-down piece of rib bone from a cow. "I was a little bitty boy when I heard him do that and after I learned how to play, I made me one and tried it too. Started off playing with a pocket knife." Eventually, he would settle on a glass bottleneck (preferably from a Gordon's Gin bottle), which provided the most clarity and volume.

McDowell moved west from Rossville to Memphis in 1926 and took a series of labor jobs beginning at the Buckeye Oil Mill. He had begun experimenting with the slide guitar style that he had seen his uncle playing, and that he would eventually make uniquely his own. Two years later, while working in Mississippi, he heard Charley Patton at a juke joint in Cleveland, and set to adapting some of his songs. Weekends found him sitting in at Saturday night parties, fish fries, and country picnics where the music was all about working for six days and shaking it for two. Yet he did not own his own guitar until 1940, about the time that he moved to Mississippi.

In the Hill Country, Fred joined his sister, Fanny Davis, who had relocated to Como after their mother died in Rossville. There he met his wife, Annie Mae, a Como native. Soon he was traveling throughout the region for work, which brought with it exposure to a variety of music. Sid Hemphill, the Pratcher brothers, Ed and Lonnie Young all playing something quite other than blues grounded his musical community around Como and Senatobia, while a blues guitar player and singer named Eli Green emerged as a valued teacher and frequent traveling companion throughout the Delta. "When You Get Home Write Me a Few of Your Lines" (Side B, Track 4) is a song Fred learned from Green, and one of the most impressive in his repertoire.

In addition to the old-time country dance music made by the Pratchers, the Youngs, and Blind Sid, the Hill Country was and continues to be fertile ground for African American congregational music. Singers like Viola James, James Shorter, Fred's sister Fanny, and his wife, Annie Mae, were all highly regarded performers in churches like Hunter's Chapel in Como, Independence Church in Tyro, Free Springs Methodist in Harmontown, and Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist in Senatobia. Always catholic in his repertoire, McDowell was as adept performing or accompanying sacred material as he was blues as he told a Sing Out! interviewer in 1969, "I play most anything I hear anybody else sing." Fred showed no evidence of internal discord over combining the sacred and the profane in his repertoire, a struggle that famously tormented his fellow Mississippian Son House, Here McDowell seamlessly follows his sister's plaintive rendition of "When the Train Comes Along" with a hot-blooded "When You Get Home." A 1964 LP of Fred's, entitled (speciously) "My Home Is in the Delta," devotes its first side to blues and its second side to spirituals and hymns sung with Annie Mae, among them "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" and "Amazing Grace."

The goal of Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip of 1959 and 1960 was to demonstrate the diversity of vernacular expression still thriving in the American South, from the old-time banjo breakdowns of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the ring shouts of the Georgia Sea Islands. In the Hill Country, the spectrum extended from the picnic proto-blues of the Pratchers, representative of an older, fading collective tradition, to the music made by Fred McDowell, an integration of various traditional, vernacular, and popular influences into an artistry all his own. Some of the prison singers Lomax met at Parchman Farm had similarly synthetic repertoires, as did country gospel songwriter and arranger E.C. Ball of Rugby, Virginia, and Arkansas cotton-country bluesman Forrest City Joe, But Fred embodied this synthesis most succinctly, and his interpretative and compositional abilities only deepened during his era of international success.

The Atlantic and Prestige releases of the "Southern Journey" material brought McDowell's music to an increasingly blues-hungry public turned on by the efforts of impresarios like John Hammond and the Newport Folk Festival. The versatility and depth of Fred's repertoire made him one of the most popular blues-men of the era. He quickly and nimbly adopted the electric guitar, though not at the expense of his distinctive chops, and he was sensitive to differences in audiences' tastes. (Before a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964, he wrote Arhoolie Records' Chris Strachwitz, asking, "Should I bring an electric guitar or a plain one?") A few years later, he explained in "Sing Out!," "I'm using the electric guitar for the sound: it sounds louder, and then it plays easier, too. But my style's the same."

Influencing as it did McDowell's landsmen and musical heirs R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, that style put the blues of the Mississippi Hill Country on the map, counter-poising the heavily chorded, song-based Delta blues with a droning, "groove"-based approach that has often been compared to the music of West African griots. Alan Lomax wrote in 1993 that Fred was "quite the equal of Son House and Muddy Waters but, musically speaking, their granddaddy."

"I look at it this way," Fred told "Sing Out!," "If you've got a gift, you do that, you don't know what may turn up in your favor." It was a gift that sent him around the world to perform, and it was represented on more than a dozen al-bums between 1960 and 1972, when McDowell died in Memphis. A year earlier the Rolling Stones had covered his "You Got to Move" on their Sticky Fingers album. The Stones "made much of him," Lomax later remarked. They "wined and dined him, and bought him a silver-lame suit, which he wore home to Como and was buried in, for he died soon after, much reduced by the life that fame and fortune had too late introduced him to."

But at least Fred McDowell had received the introduction, beginning that early fall evening on Lonnie Young's porch, when, hearing his recordings played back to him, "He stomped up and down on the porch, whooping and laughing and hugging his wife," as Lomax remembered. "He knew he had been heard and his fortune had been made." Fred's sister Fanny patted Alan. "Lord have mercy," she exclaimed. "Lord have mercy!"

FRED

MCDOWELL

THE ALAN LOMAX RECORDINGS

Track List

1,   "Shake 'Em on Down"

2,   "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"

3,   "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

4. "Fred McDowell's Blues"

5,   "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus"

6,   "Drop Down Mama"

7,   "Going Down to the River"

8,   "Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down"

9,   "When the Train Comes Along"

10,   "When You Get Home Please Write Me a Few of Your Lines"

11,   "Worried Mind Blues"

12,   "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

(Instrumental Reprise)

The Deepest Blues and a Hit of Acid Rock Make a Sweet Music Festival in Memphis (1966-1969)

The [Memphis Country] Blues Festival [was] an occasion unto itself, quite unlike any other. The aging troubadours of the first truly American music converge to unfold the eternal story once again. Their audience, happily disregarding the erosions the years have wrought upon these performers, hears what it needs to hear—especially the echoes of an earlier, rougher, more joyous, simpler era. (Choose your own fantasy of the American South during this century's opening decades.) Two of the most important blues festivals in recent memory were the Memphis [Country] Blues Festival and the [1969] Ann Arbor Blues Festival...Stanley Booth's article on the memorable Memphis festival gets inside that event to the meaning of the blues, while Bert Stratton tells what it's like to be 19, totally inexperienced as a promoter/festival organizer, and suddenly to find a full-scale blues festival growing out of your daydreams. 

Even the Birds Were Blue

By Stanley Booth - Rolling Stone - April 10, 1970 

At about five o'clock in the afternoon on the second day of the Memphis Country Blues Festival, the old blues artists Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods were huddled together on folding chairs at the front of the stage at the Overton Park Shell, just getting into "Shake 'Em On Down," when a gang of men began moving a long series of big black amplifier crates from one side of the rear stage to the other. Hearing the clatter, Woods stopped playing harmonica and cast a worried glance backwards over his shoulder.  "I thought it was a big ole train a-comin'," he said. The crates were stamped WINTER, because they contained the many amplifiers of Johnny Winter, the Columbia Recording Company's $300,000 cross-eyed albino Texas electric blues bonus baby, and I mention them because they will serve adequately as a symbol of what nearly killed the Memphis Country Blues Festival in its fourth year.

To understand the Blues Festival, you must know that Fred McDowell, the best living Mississippi bluesman, has been for most of his life a sharecropper, sometimes making a year's profit (after paying his bowman for rent and equipment) of as much as $30; and that Furry Lewis, who is virtually all that remains of Beale Street, worked for the City of Memphis 43 years, collecting garbage, sweeping the streets, and then retired without a pension. No matter how they could play and sing, they were still just a couple of [black men in the South]. They and others like them had been recorded on labels like Bluebird and Vocalion in the early days of race records; then, with the Depression and the WWII recording ban, they were forgotten. Through the days of the first electric blues bands, the Sun Records era of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, the late Fifties rhythm-and-blues, and the rock revival of the Sixties, the old men whose music provided the foundation for it all were ignored. When they were not ignored, they were exploited.

Just about the only people who ever really cared for the old Delta bluesmen were a few vintage Southern beatniks. Although struggling for their own survival, they recognized a spiritual tie and responsibility and saw to it that the old men worked whenever possible. Charlie Brown, poet, hermit, actor, snake trapper, entrepreneur, was probably the first to hire the old men for public appearances, at the Bitter Lemon and O So coffee houses in Memphis in the early sixties.

A Biography of Charley Patton (Part 1)

A Biography of Charley Patton (Part 1)

David Evans won a Grammy award in 2003 for “Best Album Notes” for the following essay in Revenant 212, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.

Charley Patton died on April 28, 1934, some three months after his final recording session. During the preceding five years he had become the most extensively recorded of the early Mississippi folk blues artists, leaving behind a legacy of fifty-two issued songs as well as accompaniments of other artists. 

Patton was the first recorded black folk artist to comment directly and extensively on public events that he had witnessed or experienced and to treat events in his own life as news. He was also the first recorded black folk artist to mention white people from his own community in his songs, sometimes unfavorably. He did all of this while continuing to live his life in the Mississippi Delta, a region which featured perhaps the most rigid racial caste system in the entire nation.1 

Charley Patton was almost certainly born in 1891, making him more or less a younger member of the first generation of folk blues singers, the originators of this genre. It is known that Patton himself learned some of his music from other artists who were a few years older. He is nevertheless the earliest Mississippi blues artist about whom we have much information, although much of this information comes from the last five years of his life during which he made his recordings. He was extraordinarily influential on other Mississippi blues artists and was a role model in both music and lifestyle for many of them. Among the many artists he is known to have influenced or inspired are Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, “Son” House, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, and Roebuck “Pops” Staples. Bukka White, a great Mississippi blues artist eighteen years Patton’s junior, recalled saying as a child that he wanted “to come to be a great man like Charley Patton.”2 White was not alone in his great respect for this man. It is probably fair to say that Charley Patton is the only black person of his generation to live virtually his entire life in Mississippi who still has a national and international impact and whose name and accomplishments are known to many outside his immediate family and community over a century after his birth and almost seventy years after his death. This piece does not purport to be a full-scale biography but is mainly concerned with matters of personality and with reaching an understanding of the social context of Patton’s life and music. It is based largely on the internal evidence in Patton’s songs that contain biographical details and allu¬sions and on interviews with relatives and associates of Charley Patton, particularly his sister Viola Cannon, his niece Bessie Turner, his nephew Tom Cannon, and Tom Rushing, a figure in one of his songs.3 

Previously published accounts4 of Charley Patton’s life, character and personality have been based on the evidence of his records as well as interviews with fellow blues artists (especially “Son” House), friends, relatives, ex-wives, and girlfriends. The first publication to give much significant information about Patton was a booklet by Bernard Klatzko published in 1964 as the notes to a reissue album of some of Patton’s records.5 Klatzko obtained his information during a brief field trip to the Delta in 1963 with fellow researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow. Although their interviews of a number of Patton’s relatives and friends were brief and superficial and contained some errors, Klatzko was nevertheless able to piece together an outline of Patton’s life that served as a useful starting point for further research. As for Patton’s lifestyle and personality, Klatzko revealed that he was popular with women and had married several times, that he was fond of drinking liquor and tended to be argumentative. Klatzko also revealed that Patton traveled constantly and was well known in Mississippi. A subsequently discovered photograph showed Patton as having a rather light complexion and curly hair, clearly the product of a mixed racial ancestry. Based on the evidence of Patton’s performing style on his records, Klatzko speculated that the artist felt some sense of outrage, stating, “It must have seemed strange to a man like Patton who looked little different from white men to be relegated to a second-class status. At any rate, Charley’s outrage, whatever sparked it, was released in the blues.”6 Later researchers have largely ignored this speculation or tried to paint a portrait of Patton as a carefree entertainer. 

About the time that Klatzko presented the first factually based outline of Charley Patton’s life, “Son” House was rediscovered. House had known Patton for the last four years of the latter’s life and was a Mississippi blues artist of comparable stature to Patton. House clearly found some of Patton’s character traits hard to comprehend or annoying. He told Stephen Calt and Nick Perls in an interview published in 1967 that Patton was argumentative, far from generous with his money, unable to read and write, and careless about his music, preferring to clown for the audience rather than take care to structure his songs coherently.7 In an article published in the same magazine issue as House’s interview, Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt (writing under the pseudonym of Jacques Roche) work from House’s assertions and paint an unflattering portrait of Patton as illiterate, self-centered, a drunkard, a glutton, and a hustler of women.8 

In the same year Samuel Charters, drawing upon Klatzko’s booklet and an interview with Patton’s last wife Bertha Lee, presented a more favorable image of Charley Patton and tried to interpret the meaning of some of his songs.9 Stephen Calt, however, soon returned to the offensive. In the notes to the then most widely circulated reissue album of Patton’s recordings Calt asserted that Patton “never learned to read or write and passed most of his time . . . in total idleness,” that he was a “perpetual squabbler,” “extraordinarily tight with money,” always courting women and entering sham marriages with them, beating his wives, and “eating out of the white folks’ kitchen.” Calt adds that Patton was “reportedly disavowed” by his daughter from one of his marriages. 10 

Scrapper Blackwell Legacy Celebrated

Scrapper Blackwell - 1959

By Rachel E. Sheeley Staff Writer

Blues guitarist and singer Francis "Scrapper" Blackwell was in his 50s when he met Duncan Schiedt and began telling him stories of his hey-day performing with Leroy Carr.

Schiedt was a photographer with a passion for early blues and jazz. He befriended Black-well in Indianapolis during the revival of interest in the musical genres during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Schiedt talked about Blackwell on Friday night during the Starr-Gennett Foundation's Gennett Records Walk of Fame Music Festival induction and awards ceremony at the Gennett Mansion in Richmond.

The Walk of Fame Festival continues Saturday with an afternoon of free concerts in the Whitewater Gorge Park's Starr-Gennett Pavilion starting at noon. Blackwell is the 32nd induc-tee into the Walk of Fame, which celebrates the musicians who recorded with Gennett Records in Richmond or New York City.

Blackwell, Schiedt said, heavily represents the archetypical legend — he was famous for a short period, forgot-ten by most of the world for more than 20 years, revered by fellow guitarists and experienced a revival of his career before dying as a victim of a mugging.

1959

A self-taught guitarist, Blackwell came to the public's attention as the partner of pianist Leroy Carr in the mid-1920s. Their June 1928 re-cording of "How Long, How Long Blues" was an instant hit.

In telling Schiedt about that era, Blackwell related a story about being sent to a Cincinnati record store to promote their music. Blackwell and Carr were hired to appear in the store window and pretend they were singing their hit while the record played over a loudspeaker.

Schiedt imagines it was one of the first incidents of "lip synching."

Blackwell also made solo recordings at Gennett Records in 1931-1932.

After Carr's death in 1935, Blackwell played in the Indianapolis area but faded from the scene, giving up music.

1960

In 1958, Blackwell was "rediscovered" and re-corded by Colin C. Pomroy (but not released until 1967). Schiedt first photographed Blackwell at a Democratic Party picnic in Indianapolis. "He was so picturesque," Schiedt said. "He got little recognition outside the city (of Indianapolis) and he was so important."

In 1959, Schiedt welcomed Blackwell into a makeshift studio his basement where Black-well recorded an album. It was released on the 77 Records label. Blackwell died in 1962.

"I remember him so well," Schiedt said. "He was a different kind of guy. He was very quiet, but when he played, he was just transformed."

In addition to serving as an expert on Blackwell during the award ceremony, Schiedt received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Starr-Gennett Foundation for his service on its national advisory board, for his work as a jazz historian and author, for his "many contributions to our understanding of the history of jazz" and for "helping define popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries."

Schiedt said he is pleased to be recognized, but feels more fortunate to have been part of the early group that thought it was important to pre-serve and share the Starr-Gennett legacy of recording.

Schiedt said he visited the Starr-Gennett buildings before they were completely demolished.

"Being able to come out on the site and see ... where it all began, it was a thrill to be that close," he said.

Jazz historian and photographer Duncan Scheidt

views a model of the Starr-Gennett building during

the Starr-Gennett VIP Reception in the

Gennett Mansion on Friday. 

He remembers making regular trips to Richmond in the 1980s to meet with like-minded people. He said part of the spark that helped the foundation develop came when Gennett descendant Laurel Gennett Martin be-came involved.

Today, there is an active preservation of the history, the Walk of Fame and the music festival to educate others about Gennett's role.

"We kept our eye on the prize, didn't we?" he said.