Smithsonian’s Folkways label and American History Museum are releasing Robert “Mack” McCormick’s tapes, research and writings as part of Folkways’ 75th anniversary.
Smithsonian’s Folkways label and American History Museum are releasing Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick’s tapes, research and writings as part of Folkways’ 75th anniversary
One chunk involves McCormick’s work documenting the short life of Robert Johnson, the mystical bluesman who deeply influenced such artists as the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Bonnie Raitt. After years researching Johnson, McCormick guarded the files and abandoned multiple versions of a manuscript he had developed from them.
The third piece of the McCormick reveal also came this summer when the National Museum of American History opened the display “,” which features items never seen in public, including photographs, a booking contract for Hopkins, the questionnaire McCormick sent to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s sister and a Washburn guitar played by Lipscomb.
“I told him I didn’t like Mack McCormick when I finished,” she said during a recent tour of the stacks of boxes in the Smithsonian archives. “And I didn’t know if that was the right feeling that I should have had.”McCormick was unsettled from the start. His parents separated when he was 2, and he and his mother, Effie Mae, would move at least 20 times by the time he had turned 17.
McCormick spent several years trying to track down Johnson’s history, roaming the South as he sketched maps and knocked on doors. But he gave up in the mid-1970s after the dispute with the Johnson family. As Troutman would discover, McCormick wrote and rewrote his Johnson book and then packed it away. The time that had elapsed since he did his research made the material less revelatory.
Still, he demanded so much attention, so much focus, that McCormick’s wife, Mary, and daughter moved out in the 1980s. Not that Mary abandoned him. There would be no divorce, and she would come over once a week to cook and clean for him until her death in 2004. That was unlikely. For years before his death, historians and members of the Blues Mafia had been prodding him to release some of the material. Sales of blues 78s are booming, with auction sites selling even scratched-up records for thousands. With her father gone, Nix began fielding calls.
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