| "Mississippi" Fred McDowell Born: 1904 Died: 1972 |
Fred McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, just east of Memphis in January, 1904. Orphaned while still a youth McDowell picked up the guitar at age 14. Although he played at dances and picnics it was not a real source of income. Most of his income was from the back-breaking work of a farm laborer.
The life of a musician in Memphis was much less taxing physically than the life of a farmer. Like many young people in the early part of the early 20th century, McDowell made his way to the city and began to make his way as a musician in 1926. McDowell played a guitar based mainly on slide. He originally used a pocket knife, but moved on to (believe it or not) a beef rib bone. Ultimately he used a glass slide in the manner of the early slide-blues musicians. These slides were normally made of "medicine bottles" which at that time were tall and slim. Fred McDowell sliced his glass slide down to the point that he could play slide "lead or melody" while still striking chords. The open tunings he used reduced the need for complex chord fingering.
During the World War II era Fred McDowell left the music profession and took the ultimate fallback in those days, farmwork. As fate would have it an expedition to the South by Alan Lomax and Crew recorded a number or Fred's songs which eventually led to him being a part of the so-called "re-discovery" of blues artists. It was actually an unearthing of existing blues artists by a brand new fan-base.
McDowell performed for a number of years, including playing on the electric guitar, but always his mantra was "I do not play no rock and roll". He, in fact, made that the title of an album recorded in 1969. He does not appear to have been offended by rock and roll, he simply did not play it. He was honored by the Rolling Stones recording of his "You Gotta Move". He should have been honored deeply since other bands, notably Led Zepplin, stole liberally from the older blues musician without giving up a penny of the royalties.
Fred McDowell's later life contained a good deal more recognition and respect than his early life. Sadly he died from cancer at the age of 68 in 1972. He appears to have anticipated the music of Elmore James and modeled a much-imitated style of two-fingered picking with raked chords and slide interludes.
Mississippi Fred McDowell is buried at Hammond Hill M.B. Church, between Como and Senatobia, Mississippi.
The following is Fred McDowell in his own words:
"I couldn't tell you exactly the date I was born. I was born in Rossville, Tennessee... I was about 21 when I left Rossville. There I was plowing with a mule. My father was a farmer and I worked with him. We were working twelve acres, growing cotton, peas and corn. I went to Memphis from there. I just got tired of plowing. I went there to look around, and after I got there I started working the Buckeye Oil Mill, sacking corn. Yellow corn, oats, sweet peas, and all like that. They had a great big plant out there. I stayed there about three years, I think. Then I loafed around, stayed with different people, friends. I worked for the Dixon brothers hooking logs on the track.
"Worked in Chickasaw stacking logs for barrels. Worked at the Illinois Central shop in Memphis building freight cars. All this time I was picking up guitar...
"I was just a young man when I started playing guitar. In my teens, I was. I used to go to dances. I used to sing to the music whilst others was playing. When they'd quit, I'd always grab the guitar, go to doing something with it. I was watching them pretty close to see what they were doing. My older sister-- I nearly forgot-- played a little guitar, but she didn't teach me anything. I didn't get a guitar of mine until 1941. When I was learning, when I was young, I was playing other people's guitars...The way I got my first guitar-- Mr. Taylor, a white man from Texas, he gave me a guitar. I was working in a milk dairy in White Station, near Memphis. This was right before I'd moved to Mississippi. I wasn't making money from music. Just playing around for dances and like that...
"I learned a lot from one fellow, Raymond Payne, in Rossville. He was really good. Played regular style, not bottleneck. I got that bottleneck style from my uncle. He was an old man, the first person I ever saw play with that. He didn't play with a bottleneck, though. You know this big bone you get out of a steak? Well, he done let it dry and smoothed it off and it sounded just like that bottleneck. That's the first somebody I saw play like that. This was in Rossville. I was a little bitty boy when I heard him do that, and after I learned how to play I made me one and tried it too. Started off playing with a pocketknife. I just remembered him doing it. He didn't show me. Nothing. I never could hardly learn no music by nobody trying to show me. Like, I hear you play tonight. Well, next week sometime it would come to me... what you was playing. I'd get the sound of it in my head, then I'd do it my way from what I remembered...
"I made up a lot of the songs I sing. It's like you hear a record or something or other. Well, you pick out some words out of that record that you like. You sing that and add something else onto it. It's just like if you're going to pray, and mean it, things will be in your mind. As fast as you get one word out, something else will come in there. Songs should tell the truth... When I play-- if you pay attention, what I sing the guitar sings, too. And what the guitar say, I say." - Fred McDowell
The following is a quote from Alan Lomax, the main researcher in the "blues rediscovery" movement of the 1940s and 50s:
"Fred was surprised when I admired his music sufficiently to visit him for several evenings and record everything he knew. In true country fashion he kept telling me that he couldn't play nearly as well as other men he knew. In my estimation he is simply a modest man, for in him the great tradition of the blues runs pure and deep."