Mississippi Fred McDowell - Jesus On The Mainline Extended Liner Notes

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Jesus On The Mainline

Imagine intrepid musicologist Alan Lomax’s unfettered delight when he came upon bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell in September of 1959 in rural Como, Mississippi. The slide guitar wizard hailed from the same groundbreaking blues generation as Son House and Skip James, yet he’d never been discovered by a talent scout, much less entered a recording studio to cut a sinfully rare 78 or two in his younger years. McDowell’s elegant bottleneck technique and richly burnished vocals were products of that pre-war era (his repertoire reflected those long-ago years as well), but they had been tucked away in pristine form for decades. Mississippi Fred had performed solely for local consumption on weekends while spending his days toiling on a farm from sunup to sundown. 

Lomax and his assistant Shirley Collins had fortuitously been steered in McDowell’s direction by Fred’s neighbor Ed Young, a cane fife player who had just recorded for Lomax himself with his brother Lonnie on bass drum. Apparently the northern expanses of Mississippi bred an uncommon amount of amateur talent that had patiently awaited discovery for decades; Lomax encountered one standout-in-the-rough after another while traversing the sometimes perilous back roads with his stereo tape recorder his other companion. Given to him by Atlantic Records at the outset of his historic journey, the newfangled machine made brilliantly crisp tapes that formed the label’s acclaimed Southern Folk Heritage Series. 

Lomax, who had been the first to document the slashing blues of Muddy Waters and David “Honeyboy” Edwards during early ‘40s Mississippi field recording jaunts when recording equipment was a great deal more cumbersome and incredibly heavy to transport, would have been hard-pressed to uncover another totally unknown bluesman with the longterm upside that Mississippi Fred possessed at such a late date. 

Over the course of four indelible evenings under the pitch-black Mississippi horizon (McDowell’s sessions were held outside), Lomax’s portable recorder captured a cross-section of Mississippi Fred’s mesmerizing repertoire: “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed And Burning” (a vocal duet with wife Annie Mae), “61 Highway,” “Going Down The River,” and his signature piece “Shake ‘Em On Down” just for starters. Once they were pressed up on vinyl and presented to the world on Atlantic’s acclaimed Lomax-produced anthology series, that jaw-dropping motherlode announced to the world that Mc Dowell was a blues discovery truly to be reckoned with, albeit a very belated one. A new country blues movement quickly gained traction during the ‘60s, driven by folk music fans who eschewed amplification in favor of acoustic blues just as it had sounded during pre-war times, and McDowell took his rightful place in its vanguard. 

Despite his memorable moniker, McDowell wasn’t a Mississippi native. Born January 12, 1904 or 1905 (the year was a best guess on his part—Fred was never sure) in tiny Rossville, Tennessee, McDowell grew up on his family’s 12-acre farm, planting and sowing cotton, peas, and corn and plowing the bountiful fields behind the wrong end of a mule. Although he began playing guitar in his teens, watching his uncle utilize a steakbone as a slide early on, McDowell started out fretting with a knife and eventually came to prefer slipping a bottleneck onto his left ring finger to make his axe talk with such sublime force. He picked up guitar pointers from bluesmen Raymond Payne and Vandy McKenna but didn’t actually have his own axe to play Saturday night dances until the dawn of the ‘40s, when he finally acquired one thanks to the benevolence of a white man named Mr. Taylor. 

McDowell had left home when he was 21, his sights set on Memphis. He’d lived for short spells in Mississippi prior to that migration, the first time when his parents died and he lived with his sister and another stint later on to pick cotton. Making music wasn’t his primary interest in Memphis, despite the city’s wealth of blues activity. Fred landed a series of menial positions to make ends meet: sacking corn in an oil mill, stacking and hooking logs, constructing freight train coaches for Illinois Central, and working at a dairy. Around 1940, Fred bid the Bluff City farewell, relocating to Como. That December, he took himself a bride, Annie Mae Collins. She would sometimes serve as his duet partner on the religious pieces in his repertoire but avoided singing anything on the secular side. 

McDowell settled into a backbreaking existence of cotton farming, moonlighting on the weekends by performing his distinctive blues and gospel material at local dances and parties that paid him little to nothing for his artistry (Fred was still piloting his tractor as late as 1964, long after Lomax put him on the global musical map). Had Lomax not unexpectedly dropped into their lives, that impoverished situation might have remained the case indefinitely, though one of the eager young folk-blues aficionados that doggedly rediscovered so many aging pre-war blues stars during their daring forays across the South would have probably stumbled across him sooner or later.

Surprisingly, the blues world didn’t exactly beat a path to McDowell’s weatherworn door in the wake of his Lomax-helmed debut sides seeing light of day on Atlantic (some of Alan’s precious McDowell tapes turned up on Prestige instead). Washington, D.C. musicologist Richard Spottswood, soon to be a catalyst in unearthing pre-war legend Mississippi John Hurt, came calling to Como in April of 1962, capturing a cache of McDowell performances that he eventually sold to the British Heritage imprint for a solitary album two full decades after they were cut. Then Pete Welding and his recording engineer Norman Dayron taped enough McDowell performances in Como in November of ‘63 and February of ‘64 for an album on Pete’s Testament imprint, My Home Is In The Delta.  

Only 11 days prior to Testament’s second visit, Arhoolie Records boss Chris Strachwitz arrived on McDowell’s Como doorstep, similarly ready to engage the guitarist to do some recording for his label. That album hit the shelves under the stripped-down title Mississippi Delta Blues. It’s rather unusual that up to this point, Fred’s recording sessions were held at his residence rather than in an actual studio. Both Arhoolie and Testament would record Fred again in years to come.

High-profile concert bookings were beginning to come through for the slide master as well. McDowell journeyed up to the Windy City in 1963 to perform at the prestigious University of Chicago Folk Festival, and he was one of the stars of the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island the following year. Mississippi Fred also headlined the Ash Grove in Los Angeles in 1964 and returned to the West Coast the following year to play additional shows. Promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau’s American Folk Blues Festival brought Fred overseas in 1965 to barnstorm Europe in the earthy company of Big Mama Thornton, Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Boyd, Buddy Guy, J.B. Lenoir, Big Walter Horton, Jimmie Lee Robinson, and Dr. Ross, ensuring that his bout with fame wouldn’t be limited to America.  

The slide guitar wizard was indeed a Long Way From Home when he cut an album of the same title for Milestone in November of ‘66 with Welding producing: it was done at the University of California in Los Angeles. By then, touring had become second nature for the once-isolated McDowell. He was back in the Windy City in 1966 to star at the University of Chicago Folklore Society Festival and then joined a Memphis Blues Society package show that toured the U.S. Fred hit Milwaukee for a ‘67 gig at the Avant Garde Coffeehouse, a folk-blues stronghold; returned to star once more at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival, and made another extended European jaunt in 1969, recording for the Transatlantic label while he was over in London. When the Ann Arbor Blues Festival invited the country’s greatest blues talent to convene in Michigan in 1969 and ‘70 for concerts that are still revered to this day, Mississippi Fred naturally graced the all-star bills both times. A young Bonnie Raitt learned some of her pungent guitar licks from listening to McDowell’s recorded library early in her development, and she reportedly played with him at the 1970 Philadelphia Folk Festival.
  Although he’d remained a staunch acoustic advocate for the great majority of his days, Mississippi Fred had finally transitioned to playing an electric guitar by the time he made his major label debut on Capitol. The brashly titled “I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll” was one of Tommy Couch’s early productions at his fledgling Malaco Sound Recording Studios in Jackson, Mississippi. Cut in September of 1969, it presented an amplified Mississippi Fred doing his thing in front of a crashing rhythm section as he blasted through some of his best-known titles. It may not have pleased the purists, but the album no doubt sold better than just about anything McDowell had released due to its widespread availability.  

Continuing to make up for lost time in his late-blooming professional musical career, Mississippi Fred was headlining the Gaslight Café in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on November 5, 1971 when he taped the stunning performances that constitute disc one of this collection, which sadly turned out to be his final live recordings. McDowell brought his electric guitar along for the gig (acoustic blues purists were in short supply by then) and was subtly backed throughout by bassist “Honest” Tom Pomposello, who reportedly received his unusual stage handle as a result of his youthful campaign for the office of receiver of taxes in his hometown of Huntington, New York. 

Fred introduced “Shake ‘Em On Down,” so indelibly associated with him around his Como homebase that some of his neighbors called him “Shake ‘Em,” with the droll aside “I told you I didn’t play no rock and roll, but it kind of sounds like it!” And indeed it did, as McDowell rampaged through the relentless anthem. It wasn’t his composition; quite a few of Fred’s set list staples came from records he’d encountered during the pre-war era. Bukka White had waxed “Shake ‘Em On Down” for Vocalion in September of 1937, Tommy McClennan chiming in with “New ‘Shake ‘Em On Down’” on Bluebird in November of ‘39. 

Whether peeling off spine-chilling renditions of his classic “You Gotta Move” (memorably covered by the Rolling Stones on their ‘71 album Sticky Fingers) and Big Joe Williams’ 1935 Bluebird classic “Baby Please Don’t Go,” conjuring up a haunting back country blues trance on “Louise,” “I’m Crazy ‘Bout You Baby,” and “Letter From Hot Springs,” or testifying up a storm on “Jesus Is On The Mainline,” McDowell had the Gaslight crowd nestled in the palm of his hand from the outset, climaxing the evening with a rollicking revival of John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson’s immortal 1937 Bluebird 78 “Good Morning, School Girl.” A set-closing “Get Right Church” inspired the enthusiastic audience to respond with hand claps and rowdy vocal exhortations.

 The same had been true when McDowell visited Portland, Oregon that April. His performances from that booking are the source for disc two, Mississippi Fred storming his way through “Kokomo Me Baby,” “Write Me A Few Lines,” “Worried Blues,” a highly personalized adaptation of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Mojo Hand,” and a sanctified “When I Lay My Burden Down.”

You’d never guess from the unbridled power of the rare recordings contained on this collection that Mississippi Fred McDowell had only a scant few months left to live. Cancer claimed him on July 3, 1972 in Memphis, stilling one of the greatest discoveries of the 1960s country blues revival. Luckily, Mississippi Fred remained in top musical form right up to shortly before the end of his life, leaving us gems like these to savor his brilliance by. McDowell may have gotten a tardy start on his career as a professional bluesman, but he sure made up for it.

--Bill Dahl

SOURCES

All Music Guide website: https://www.allmusic.com/album/live-at-the-gaslight-mw0000102959#:~:text=Recorded%20on%20November%205%2C%201971,have%20strengthened%20with%20the%20years.

Blues Records 1943-1970 “The Bible of the Blues” Volume Two L to Z, by Mike Leadbitter, Paul Pelletier and Leslie Fancourt (London: Record Information Services, 1994)

Blues Unlimited, No. 24, July-August 1965, Interview with Fred McDowell by Pete Welding

Blues Who’s Who, by Sheldon Harris (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979)

The Land Where the Blues Began, by Alan Lomax (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993)

Wikipedia website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Fred_McDowell