Customer Reviews

The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell

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Over the past year I have been doing a review of all the major country blues artists that I can get material on. High on that list would be the performer on this CD, the legendary Mississippi Fred McDowell. Before discussing this CD, however, let me put this blues man in context. I first heard Brother McDowell and his magnificent slide guitar riffs as a backup to some of "Big Mama" Thornton's early blues numbers like "Little School Girl" and "The Red Rooster". I have also noted elsewhere that McDowell performed a very important service to the continuation of the country blues tradition when he provided mentorship to the great modern folk/country/blues singer songwriter Bonnie Raitt.

Ms. Raitt has profusely acknowledged his influence and just a peep at her own work demonstates the truth of that influence. Furthermore there is another place where McDowell has demonstrated his vast influence. That is on The Rolling Stones. Their main blues influence might have been another Delta product, Muddy Waters, but the Stones did a cover of McDowell's "You've Got To Move" (and gave him the royalties for his cancer treatment) on their Sticky Fingers album that has withstood the test of time. All these anecdotes are presented for one purpose- to show, if anyone needed showing, that Mc Dowell rightly takes his place with the likes of Bukka White, Skip James, Son House and Mississippi John Hurt as the legends of country blues.

For those not in the know the theme of the country blues is about rural life, about picking cotton in the Delta (or hard scrabble farming elsewhere) and, most importantly, about those Saturday night bouts with booze, women and worked up passions that could go any which way, including jail and the graveyard. McDowell follows that tradition although on a number of cuts here, those in which he is accompanied by his wife's singing along, he will also pay homage to the deeply religious expression of the travails of black existence at the turn of the 20th century Jim Crow South.

The most famous exemplars of that tradition are of course Blind Willie Johnson and the Reverend Gary Davis but others, including McDowell have taken a turn at that end of the blues spectrum in order to sanctify "the devil's music". Needless to say you must listen to "You've Got To Move", "Levee Camp Blues", "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and "Kokomo Blues" here.

Ever wonder where Bonnie Raitt got that funky version of "Kokomo Blues"? Well, check out Fred McDowell's classic recordings from 1964, where he feels acoustic, but plays electric... A funky, slightly grungy electric style that is tremndously soulful. McDowell's slide work doesn't seem technically advanced, but it is charged with power, and completely arresting. Raitt took that power and smoothed it out a bit -- you might find you like the unburnished originals even more! Nice selection of some of McDowell's best recordings on the Arhoolie label.

A great collection of songs by one of the premier bluesmen. McDowell's slide guitar is staggeringly powerful. I've never heard anyone quite like him. The one major drawback here is that "61 Highway" isn't included, but you could throw together any 20 songs of McDowell's and it would be amazing. The man could do no wrong when it came to the blues. It's simple stuff: If you like music, you need this.

The blues man known as Mississippi Fred is one musician that any blues fan can really appreciate. His music influenced many blues and rock musicians including The Rolling Stones, Jonny Lang, and Bonnie Raite. His amazingly clear and crisp slide guitar rifts sing to you and really give the blues guitar fan what they are looking for.

I've been a fan of Fred McDowell, who always pronounced his name MACK DowWELL, for more than 40 years. His music has inspired not only my guitar playing, but also my blues playing on the banjo which has gotten some reknown among old time music buffs and my fiddling. His personality shines through in his music and speech on his recordings. He was sharp, gritty, and real, very real.

Fred was never a professional bluesman in the African American context of Mississippi where he came up. He was a tractor driver and sometime preacher who was "discovered" actually early in the folk revival in the late 1950s. He became better known later in the early 1960s when he graced the Newport Folk Festivals and began making records of his own like this one(he had earlier appeared on anthologies of Mississippi music put out by Alan Lomax, I believe).

Fred 's music shows how the great blues recordings and performances of the great stars of 1930s blues like Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Big Maceo, and the local Mississippi masters like Son House and Bob Johnson filtered down and were mixed with the on going tradition of continued acoustic players like Mr. McDowell.

This reality even more present in Robert Johnson, conflicts with the popular ignorance that Mississippi slide blues represents some kind of more original, more authentic, more traditional, or more African version of the blues isolated from the major currents of urban recorded blues of the 1920s, 1930s,and 1940s. In fact in the generation of bluesmen represented by Fred, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters the blues is in constant dialog with the big city bluesmen and blueswoman of the 1920s and 1930s who were the dominant blues artists of the acoustic period. Perhaps because McDowell did not have the pressures to manufacture "new" blues because he was never a commercial recording artist, and, thus, in Fred's recordings get a richer picture of the way that tunes by Leroy Carr or Big Maceo informed the Mississipi bluesmen and blueswomen.

There is a more personal style in some of the lack of polish, and some of the simplicity of McDowell's playing that is missing in a more masterful player like either the early or the revived Son House or Bukka White, let alone a total syncretist like Bob Johnson. For the most part, McDowell retained the acoustic sound, although he also played electric, and probably would have gone electric if he wasn't playing for a "folk" audience.

My favorite on this CD is what is called "Fred's Worried Life Blues" which Fred sometimes called "You ain't gonna worry my life any more."

Anyone familiar with the Blues realizes this is a version of the great "Worried Life Blues," a masterpiece made famous in the late 1930s by Big Maceo and Tampa Red recording for Ezra Melrose on Bluebird in Chicago. If you have not have that track, buy one of their CDS with it. In fact, Tampa and Maceo's version is so good, that you should buy the CD even if you do not have a CD player, so it can be the first music you hear on the CD.

Like so many tunes of similar great lineage, Fred transforms it into a personal statement. While I have spent hours playing big Maceo and Tampa's version on repeat, I will never forget Fred's great lines like "If I had money like Henry Ford, I'd have a new woman on every row." I perform and have recorded this tune in Fred's style.

Fred's a good person to know from his music. His music is a unique picture of a stage of the blues not often found on record, closer to traditional folk culture, and not under the pressures that the bluesmen and blueswomen who became commercial recording artists were under.