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The Houston folklorist with one of the most extraordinary archives of unreleased recordings and unpublished interviews in the world is 71 now and has had health problems of late.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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During this time, McCormick was filling file after file with titles like "Bottlenecks and Hang-ups" (about the erroneous idea that Mississippi is the only place where people played bottleneck guitar; they did in Texas too) and "Wild Ox Moan" (about the unicorn legend reappearing as a West Texas myth). But all was not well with one of his biggest projects, The Texas Blues, for which anticipation had been building for more than a decade. By 1971 McCormick and Oliver had 38 chapters done, but their relationship was breaking down. One problem, says McCormick, was they were collaborating long-distance without the benefit of copiers, fax machines, or computers. Oliver says it was also a matter of different working methods. Plus, he says, "Mack could be insistent about saying, 'You will do such and such by such time.' I don't work that way." Both got so burned out that they stopped working together. They haven't spoken to each other in thirty years.
MCCORMICK, HOWEVER, HAD OTHER THINGS to think about. In 1971 his daughter, Susannah, was born, and he was in the middle of tracking down the most iconic American roots musician of the century, Robert Johnson, a dead bluesman about whom nobody knew much of anything—not even what he had looked like. He was thought to have lived and died in Mississippi, where he was poisoned by a jealous woman or an angry husband, and other folklorists had been on his trail. In 1970, while working for the Smithsonian, McCormick came across a copy of Johnson's death certificate. He found the names of a couple of witnesses to a murder that could have been Johnson's. An interview with them led him to the actual killer, but McCormick wouldn't write about it just yet—it was to be the last chapter of another book he was planning. He spent many more hours in Mississippi, knocking on doors, asking questions on the Rolling Store, a bus that served as a shop for sharecroppers. He eventually tracked down Johnson's two half sisters near Baltimore in 1972 and got the first known photos of the bluesman as well as first publication rights to use them and other family memorabilia. It was the find of a lifetime. Guralnick is still in awe of what McCormick did: "He never would have found Johnson had he been limited by the conventional approach. His work is a tribute to the untrammeled imagination."
So when the two-CD Robert Johnson box set came out in 1990, the one that has sold more than 600,000 copies, why wasn't McCormick's name mentioned in the 48-page booklet that accompanied it—and why didn't he, of all people, write the liner notes? No one knows for sure. (McCormick refused to talk to me about Robert Johnson.) But it has something to do with a blues fan named Steve LaVere, who located one of the half sisters in 1973, a year after McCormick did, and got her to assign to him the rights to administer Johnson's estate. LaVere subsequently went to Columbia Records with photos and his own story about searching for Johnson, and the label committed to releasing an anthology with him as a co-producer. When McCormick heard the news, he notified Columbia about his prior deal with the half sisters, and the project was put on hold, remaining so for sixteen years.
In the meantime, McCormick worked on his book about Johnson, tentatively titled Biography of a Phantom, and he finished one of his masterworks, the album Henry Thomas, "Ragtime Texas." Thomas was one of the grand old names McCormick had sought for The Texas Blues for decades—a mystery man who had recorded in the late twenties. Thomas' music, like Lipscomb's, wasn't purely blues but lay in the DMZ between blues and the music that came before—reels, ballads, ragtime, and gospel songs from the 1880's through the 1920's, many with the chirping sound of those quills. If McCormick was going to write the definitive guide to the origin of the blues, he had to know where it came from, and Thomas seemed to be a guy to follow. McCormick's interest became a mild obsession over the years, and as he did his grid searches, he asked questions about Thomas. He played Thomas' 78's for people, and some identified his accent as coming from northeast Texas. He got a tape of a Thomas song called "Railroadin' Some" that listed town names along the Texas and Pacific Railroad stretching from Dallas to the hills of East Texas, and he knocked on doors along the route, talking to old-timers who remembered the colorful guitar-and-quills-playing hobo nicknamed Ragtime Texas. McCormick tracked down a second cousin living in East Dallas whose sister had a battered family Bible, and there it was: Henry Thomas, born in 1874 on a farm in Upshur County.
As the Herwin label collected the 23 songs Thomas was known to have recorded, McCormick wrote a 10,000-word evocation of the man. "That essay," says Guralnick, "has such imaginative breadth and scholarly research. Mack went beyond the facts and reimagined the world and music of Thomas—it's one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing on blues I've ever read." McCormick not only came close to finding the source of the music but also had an epiphany of sorts that transported him back to the beginning of his career. While researching Thomas, he saw a picture and a drawing from newspaper ads, one of which looked remarkably like the tall hobo he had stopped near the train station in Houston in 1949. When the Thomas anthology finally came out, in 1975, it was clear that McCormick's first field research had led to one of his greatest achievements.
The publication of Biography of a Phantom was announced for the following year, but no book materialized. McCormick took his research and various other manuscripts and moved to another house in Mexico to get some work done. For a decade there were rumors about the book, exacerbated by growing anticipation of the Johnson box set. In 1988 McCormick wrote in the Smithsonian's American Visions magazine that he had promised Johnson's killer that he wouldn't publish until the man died. The next year, Guralnick, to whom McCormick had shown much of his research in 1976, published Searching for Robert Johnson, a book heavily indebted to his fellow historian. "My entire purpose in writing it was to announce the imminent arrival of Mack's book and perhaps spur him on," Guralnick says now. The gambit didn't work, and when the box set came out, in 1990 (Columbia finally decided to go ahead with the project), McCormick was, as he had once called Johnson, something of a phantom.
Indeed, McCormick was the forgotten folklorist. He was spending his time working on various projects—articles, albums, a family history, a little fieldwork here and there—but he had alienated many in the music world (and perhaps possible benefactors of his archive) when those books never came. Some thought he was playing games or hoarding information. McCormick says he wasn't, that he had always been addicted to field research and it just kept piling up. Also, he had a family and needed to make a living. "It was always something," he told me. "Most of the time it was some museum or the park service calling, asking, 'Do you want to go do this?'" Strachwitz, who had had a falling-out with McCormick in the mid-seventies, knew him to be a champion procrastinator. McCormick rationalized his limitations and began withdrawing. He became reclusive and hard to get hold of. His home was robbed a couple of times, which fueled his mistrust. He declared himself retired. LA Weekly writer Robert Gordon says that after he spent two weeks trying to get him to agree to an interview, McCormick finally answered the phone but claimed to be a nonexistent brother. (McCormick denies this: "I told him, as myself, I did not want to contribute.") After a lifetime spent making connections, he was letting them go.
What no one knew was that McCormick was ill. "A great part of the reason I haven't published anything in years," he told me, "is I developed a manic-depressive illness. I'll have states of grandiosity and then a short time later no energy at all. I'd get started on something and then wake up a few days later and say, 'I don't see the point anymore.' It's a crippling and destructive disease." McCormick said that after trying twenty different antidepressants over fourteen years, he finally found the right medicine only four years ago. As for those stories of his self-imposed seclusion, he said, "People call and ask me things all the time. I've helped something like a thousand people. I'm not a recluse—I don't know how I got that reputation." When pressed, though, he admitted, "I think it's because people know I've started and not finished these books."
Indeed, the manuscripts sit where they've sat for years, silently goading him, especially because a few need only a good, passionate editor or co-writer to finish them. The Texas Blues, all 500,000 words of it, is 80 percent done (McCormick said it grew far beyond being merely a blues book long ago, expanding through the years to include all Texas music), and The Aggressive Birth of the Blues is researched, with maps, fieldwork, and interviews—it just needs to be written. (All McCormick will say about the Robert Johnson manuscript is that it has been abandoned: "It ain't happening anymore. I lost interest.") If these works were completed, they would be the most anticipated music books in years and McCormick's reputation as a hermit would be moot.
AT AN AGE WHEN MOST PEOPLE ARE RETIRED, McCormick is still addicted to research, still adding to the Monster, still in love with the chase. Lately he has been mildly obsessed with Emily Dickinson, another semi-recluse, whose life he's probing for a play he's writing. "She's so inspiring," he said. "All I have to do is go to one of her poems for hope. 'This is my letter to the World' is the most heartbreaking poem and the closest to my own lonely feeling sometimes." That feeling got him to join a support group for manic-depressives: "I tell people who are suicidal, who call at three a.m., 'Of course it's hopeless. Who told you it was any different? It's only hopeful in those few moments when you're delusional.'"
But McCormick's life belies such playful cynicism. Only a believer, a person with hope, would spend so much of his life knocking on doors, talking to strangers, seeking connections, even if they sometimes seemed to last for just a few moments, like when Joe Patterson played a jumble of sound on some reeds bound together by white hospital tape.
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