Mack McCormick Still Has the Blues
The Houston folklorist with one of the most extraordinary archives of unreleased recordings and unpublished interviews in the world is 71 now and has had health problems of late. Who will save the legacy of the man who saved Texas music?
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In 1960 McCormick brought together and edited nine years of country, folk, blues, and zydeco songs that he and other folklorists had collected. He whittled them down to two albums, A Treasury of Field Recordings, Volumes 1 and 2, and wrote long, detailed notes in booklet form at a time when most albums had cursory back-cover liner notes. The albums were a revelation, showing how musically rich Houston and East Texas were—Saturday Review called the first volume "one of the most exciting and valuable folk music collections in years"—and established McCormick as a leading American folklorist.
"THE WAY TO DO FIELD RESEARCH," he told me, "is always from a standpoint of ignorance. Don't decide beforehand what you want to find—leave your preconceptions out of it. I've always found it exhilarating to knock on doors. I'd stop in a town, knock on someone's door, and say, 'I'm lost.' Or people would be playing dominoes and I'd say, 'Can I watch?' Get friendly with people. After awhile, ask a bunch of questions at once, get them agitated, sit back, and they start answering them."
His method involved what he called a grid search: He would take a block of four or eight counties, start in one, head east, return via the next county north, and then crisscross counties in subsequent trips, stopping in every grid on his map. He'd go to the county seat first, find some men talking on the front porch of a store, assume the guise of innocent ignorance, and ask questions. "As soon as enough people tell you about something or someone," he said, "click, you've got it." Back in the car he'd jot notes and move on. At the motel that night or back at home, he'd type or write up his notes. Later they'd go into one of his many file cabinets.
One name that kept coming up on grid searches in Grimes County was a sharecropper named Mance Lipscomb. With the help of Strachwitz, McCormick found the never-recorded Lipscomb in 1960 at his two-room Navasota home and got him on tape. McCormick talked Strachwitz into making Lipscomb the first release for his new label, Arhoolie, and the debut featured McCormick's exhaustive liner notes, showing how the artist was a connection to the pre-blues past—a "songster" who had been playing ballads, reels, hymns, dance tunes, and blues for most of his 65 years. McCormick had a real rapport with Lipscomb, and while Lipscomb's wife, Elnora, kept their grandchildren quiet in the other room, McCormick recorded him in the bedroom, so close their knees were touching. A year later, in a Houston studio, the two recorded again as McCormick's mother lay dying in a hospital a few blocks away. When Lipscomb sang "Motherless Children," McCormick began weeping and ruined the take; Lipscomb did the song twice more, though both men had a hard time keeping their composure.
In 1960 McCormick signed on with the U.S. Census Bureau and asked to cover Houston's Fourth Ward. When his day working for the government ended, he would pound the pavement for another four hours, and soon he had uncovered a fascinating pattern: In one urban neighborhood there were two hundred professional piano players. They played a style of rollicking barrelhouse that, McCormick found, went back to a man named Peg Leg Will, who used to play for people on the porch of an Italian grocery store. Young folks would hear Will play and hop up on the piano, imitating him and eventually coming up with their own neighborhood style, one that was different from the barrelhouse playing in the Fifth Ward, just a few miles away. It was what McCormick later called a "cultural cluster—an outburst in place or time when something previously unknown becomes part of our culture; that point where innovators bring forth a new language, slang, music, religion, game, ritual." McCormick had something of an epiphany about the distinction between neighborhood and state, how a local style will become a regional characteristic—"The thing," McCormick wrote me later, "that visitors sense when they say to themselves, 'This is Texas, this is not Vermont, and it is neither the weather nor the rocks which make it so.'"
Where do things come from and why? Drunk with the music and the stories he was hearing, McCormick began to hatch grand plans: a massive book on the origin of the blues and another on the Texas blues. He had a co-writer on the latter, English blues scholar Paul Oliver, and throughout the sixties the two sent research and chapters across the Atlantic. In his fieldwork McCormick was finding that the trails of many of the dead Texas bluesmen were still warm. For example, he found and interviewed the family of Blind Lemon Jefferson, who had died in 1929. Jefferson's sister, Carrie, who lived in the tiny north-central town of Wortham, told McCormick that her brother didn't want people to know he was blind, so he would nonchalantly escort her around Dallas, plucking the guitar he carried as an echo device to guide him. She gave McCormick a real treasure, a photo of her brother that had never been published (only one picture of him has been). In it, Jefferson is leaning against a building, plump and relaxed, his tiny glasses on his face.
McCormick literally picked up Leadbelly's trail in the little communities at the end of the dead-end roads along the Red River where the folk singer lived as a young man in the early 1900's. Most Leadbelly scholarship concerns his life as a New York folk hero after he was famously pardoned twice—for murder in 1918 and attempted murder in 1930. McCormick talked to the relatives of two people Leadbelly had killed long before that: "He would go down those roads, get a woman, settle down for awhile, then get into a pattern. Drink, pick a fight, hurt a man. Drink, pick a fight, kill a man. He'd just get into fights all the time."
When McCormick wasn't taking notes or working on the book, he was making tapes: prison work songs, bawdy folk songs, truck-driving songs, cowboy songs. He began collecting things other than music, like toasts (the black poetry that would one day become rap), recipes, and oral histories. He took pictures of the work of visionary artists and chronicled local rituals. McCormick would buttonhole anybody who looked promising. At his home office he opened a file and showed me a page of typewritten field notes ("page 2096") that tells of his stopping in Fayetteville in 1962 and speaking to three musicians in a pickup truck on their way to play a dance. The leader, Lee Wormley, age fifty, "has only been playing a short while; then hired 2 youngsters to make rock and roll; Wormley keeps the kids in line and buys the hit records he wants them to imitate." Though McCormick didn't learn much from them (or from a former member of the band, who was "inarticulate, near moronic and almost certainly an inept musician"), the trip allowed him to write about the excellence of most Texas farm-to-market roads and then speculate that this had something to do with the great ease with which rural blacks were moving to cities. Even when he struck out with music, McCormick would score some history.
In 1964 he married a Houston girl, Mary Badeaux. While she worked as an administrator in the microbiology department at the Baylor College of Medicine, he wrote for magazines, newspapers, and educational TV shows in Houston and made a little money from the occasional folklore-society grant or wealthy patron. Throughout the decade, McCormick also booked some of his artists at clubs and helped them make records. He took Mance Lipscomb to play in Corpus Christi and also produced three of his albums for Reprise Records. He co-wrote some songs with Lightnin' Hopkins—one, called "Happy Blues for John Glenn," became a minor hit. Working with McCormick, though, wasn't always smooth. According to Strachwitz, "Mack could be gruff, almost dictatorial. He'd say, 'That's not the way it should be.' When he recorded Mance for Reprise, he made him do 'Trouble in Mind' several times. Mance got mad and said, 'I'll never sing that goddam song again.'"
IN 1965 REVERED FOLKLORIST ALAN Lomax, aware of McCormick's work, asked him to bring a Texas prison gang to the Newport Folk Festival to sing work songs. The Texas attorney general wouldn't permit it, so McCormick found a few ex-cons who wanted to go, including Chopping Charlie Coleman, known throughout the Texas prison system for his strength in the fields with a hoe, and drove them there himself. The singers had never sung together in front of a microphone, much less in front of 20,000 people, and McCormick was anxious to give them a brief onstage run-through. But the previous act wouldn't get offstage: It was Bob Dylan with his first electric band. In a matter of hours, Dylan would offend the folkies with loud rock and roll and change popular music forever, but McCormick didn't care about that: "I was trying to tell Dylan, 'We need the stage!' He continued to ignore me. So I went over to the junction box and pulled out the cords. Then he listened."
Later that year McCormick started a label of his own, Almanac Records. His first release was by Robert Shaw, a Fourth Ward piano player who had been playing since the twenties but had never recorded. McCormick again wrote a detailed booklet, connecting Shaw to Peg Leg Will. Nat Hentoff named the album "Best of the Month" in the December 1966 issue of Hi Fi/Stereo Review, noting, "McCormick promises more illumination to come from Almanac on such relatively unexplored themes as The Negro Cowboy; Truck Drivers: Songs, Lore, and Hero Tales; and the Legacy of Blind Lemon Jefferson." But Almanac never released another album, and those tapes remain in storage.
McCormick's field research brought him to the attention of the Smithsonian, and he began working there in 1968, when Texas was the featured state in the summer Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. His title was "cultural historian," and he sought anything and everything of interest: quilts, dolls, recipes, games, handcrafted chairs. McCormick even wrote to Lyndon Johnson and asked if he'd like to do a workshop on telling tall tales. "I knew he liked to do that," McCormick remembered. The president said no but showed up anyway, and for fifteen minutes told whoppers. ("He went over great with the crowd," McCormick told me.) Each year the festival featured a different state, and McCormick traveled there to do grid searches beforehand, knocking on doors and looking for people to bring to Washington: a silversmith, a sand-caster, a garlic braider, a cowboy singer, a dulcimer-maker. "It's healthy to have an idea who lives with us," McCormick said of his diverse finds. "You get an enhanced sense of who your neighbors are."
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