| Mississippi Fred Mcdowell - Blues
04. Nov. 2006
This week we are going to dive real deep into the blues and listen to Mississippi Fred Mcdowell. He has a real roughed up voice that is a bit hard to listen to but he is a brilliant guitar player, one of the best, if not the best slide-guitar player this world has ever seen. I just learned this guy existed about a month ago after looking at EtTumason's profile here on myspace. After seeing videos of Fred I went straight out and bought a medicine bottle to be able to play the bottleneck blues.
Fred Mcdowell, nicknamed Mississippi Fred, was born Jan 12, 1904 in Rossville Tennessee and died Jul 3, 1972 in Memphis Tennessee. He was a master of the bottleneck blues, originally not with a glass bottle as the others but with a dried up and smoothend piece of rib-bone. He learned playing the guitar around the age of 14. He started the live of a traveling musician/hobo in the 20's but soon realized that live wasn't for him and started working as a farm laborer, mill worker, and tractor driver near Como Mississippi, where he lived for the rest of his live. He played music at country dances and juke joints, though as he says, "I wasn't making money from music... sometimes they'd pay me, and sometimes they wouldn't." The most remarkable thing about him is that though he was playing in the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's he wasn't discovered until 1959 and didn't become a full-time professional musician until the mid-60's. Why don't we just let him describe his live;
"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."
"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."
John Henry
Goin Down to the River. Only video of him playing acoustic that I found. That's the stuff.
My babe
Shake 'em on Down, and then another song, I think, recorded for the Seattle Folklore Society c.1970
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