Fred McDowell – The First Recordings

In late September 1959, musical archivist Alan Lomax came to the farming town of Como, Mississippi, to record that community’s most renowned local musician, a bottleneck guitar player named Fred McDowell whose style and repertoire was reputed to distill the signature work of several storied Delta musicians, particularly Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson.

He found much more, and less: By McDowell’s own account, he was a cotton farmer first and musician second, giving his only public performances at local house parties, barbecues or church services. He assumed no fame and was expecting none, though it would soon find him as a result of these recordings.

Lomax’s recounting of their first meeting in his 1993 book The Land Where The Blues Began suggests that McDowell was genuinely surprised by his solicitation to record, and was extremely pleased by the results. Offered up in a tone of quiet melancholy, the music he put to that tape was evidence of a musical vernacular that stretched back to the earliest days of the century, with a staggering variety.

Over the course of the 13 complete cuts included in this newly remastered set (four of which were previously released on a Prestige Records compilation in 1960), McDowell delved into blues with lyrics and melodies that flashed on at least a dozen precursors. Yet the percussive signatures of his guitar style — quietly rasping punctuations of glass against fretwire and wood, the sound of stung nerves and callused hands marking time — made them entirely his own. And as his future recording dates bore out, they represented only a small fraction of the blues, gospel, chants and hollers he had at his command.

The lyrical precision of the guitar lines on “Worried Mind”, an adaptation of Big Maceo’s “Worried Life Blues” that McDowell later recorded for both the Arhoolie and Testament labels, both echo and dodge the song’s melody. There, as much as anywhere in American music, is the sound of skill and yearning and every other dependable thing except cool spite being stifled by betrayal. In its peculiar kind of quiet, that guitar is terrifying.

McDowell was equally adept with tunes from the black gospel tradition of western Tennessee and the northern hill country surrounding the Delta valley in Mississippi and Arkansas, music that channels its celebrations into spare contemplation: The messiah it envisions is more physician than rectifier, the bestower of quiet peace rather than the herald of judgment. Five such tunes are presented here, including two takes of Willie Johnson’s “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning” (the first featuring McDowell’s wife Annie Mae on second vocal, the second a fragment of solo guitar), which are testaments to the kind of raw power the style demanded.

McDowell had a trembling, dry baritone, which he could make into anything from a low moan to a hard staccato bark. The Lomax tape captures that voice in the open air, its essential aching quality allowed to dissipate with the wind; applied to something as familiar as Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”, its tone drifts from calculation to bewilderment, the song’s undercurrent of lust being twisted back and forth with each verse. Then, a concluding tug that unravels everything: a final verse of McDowell’s own, a revelatory moment of regret and anger that makes the leering suggestions over into something they have never been before or since. “I’member way back/I’member way back/When I was the age of–/When I was the age of nine/Lord, I think about my schooldays/Sure do worry my mind.” A quiet rumble appears in the back of McDowell’s throat as he sings those lines, as if he might choke up and leave them unspoken. When he forces them through, their menace lingers behind after the words themselves have faded, saturating the track.

Joining him on three tracks are his neighbor Miles Pratcher on rhythm guitar and his aunt Fanny Davis on comb. Their accompaniment to “Shake ‘Em On Down”, McDowell’s signature tune at that time (he was still three years away from recording “You Gotta Move”, later covered on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers), doubles up the force of the rhythmic drone with a loping counterpoint that pulses just behind the lyric, clipping or extending each verse by degrees. When the comb blares, McDowell shouts; when the guitars jostle the tempo, he strings out a phrase, letting the words roll in his mouth and mix with laughter. It may be the record’s most buoyant moment.

Lomax managed to capture these glimpses of McDowell’s work in a surprisingly rudimentary form: The tape was cut with a portable mono reel recorder, yet its fidelity is high even by contemporary recording standards.