Fred Mcdowell - The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell
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CD Details
Artist: Fred McdowellEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2001-10-23
Music Label: Arhoolie Records
Soundtracks:
- Write Me a Few Of Your Lines
- Do My Baby Ever Think Of Me
- Levee Camp Blues
- When The Saints Go Marching In
- My Bottleneck (story)
- Fred's Worried Life Blues
- Kokomo Blues
- Meet Me Down In Froggy Bottom
- Good Morning Little Schoolgirl
- Keep Your Lamp Trimmed And Burning
- Shake 'Em On Down
- Going Away-Won't Be Gone Long
- I WIsh I Was In Heaven Sittin' Down
- Fred's Rambling Blues
- I Looked At The Sun
- You Gotta Move
- My Baby
- Shake' Em On Down/Louise (live)
Music reviews of The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell
Music Review: A great artist and a great man know him from his recordings
Rating: 5 Stars
I've been a fan of Fred McDowell, who always pronounced his name MACK DowWELL, for more than 40 years. His music has inspired not only my guitar playing, but also my blues playing on the banjo which has gotten some reknown among old time music buffs and my fiddling. His personality shines through in his music and speech on his recordings. He was sharp, gritty, and real, very real.
Fred was never a professional bluesman in the African American context of Mississippi where he came up. He was a tractor driver and sometime preacher who was "discovered" actually early in the folk revival in the late 1950s. He became better known later in the early 1960s when he graced the Newport Folk Festivals and began making records of his own like this one(he had earlier appeared on anthologies of Mississippi music put out by Alan Lomax, I believe).
Fred 's music shows how the great blues recordings and performances of the great stars of 1930s blues like Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, Lonnie Johnson, Tampa Red and Big Maceo, and the local Mississippi masters like Son House and Bob Johnson filtered down and were mixed with the on going tradition of continued acoustic players like Mr. McDowell.
This reality even more present in Robert Johnson, conflicts with the popular ignorance that Mississippi slide blues represents some kind of more original, more authentic, more traditional, or more African version of the blues isolated from the major currents of urban recorded blues of the 1920s, 1930s,and 1940s. In fact in the generation of bluesmen represented by Fred, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters the blues is in constant dialog with the big city bluesmen and blueswoman of the 1920s and 1930s who were the dominant blues artists of the acoustic period. Perhaps because McDowell did not have the pressures to manufacture "new" blues because he was never a commercial recording artist, and, thus, in Fred's recordings get a richer picture of the way that tunes by Leroy Carr or Big Maceo informed the Mississipi bluesmen and blueswomen.
There is a more personal style in some of the lack of polish, and some of the simplicity of McDowell's playing that is missing in a more masterful player like either the early or the revived Son House or Bukka White, let alone a total syncretist like Bob Johnson. For the most part, McDowell retained the acoustic sound, although he also played electric, and probably would have gone electric if he wasn't playing for a "folk" audience.
My favorite on this CD is what is called "Fred's Worried Life Blues" which Fred sometimes called "You ain't gonna worry my life any more."
Anyone familiar with the Blues realizes this is a version of the great "Worried Life Blues," a masterpiece made famous in the late 1930s by Big Maceo and Tampa Red recording for Ezra Melrose on Bluebird in Chicago. If you have not have that track, buy one of their CDS with it. In fact, Tampa and Maceo's version is so good, that you should buy the CD even if you do not have a CD player, so it can be the first music you hear on the CD.
Like so many tunes of similar great lineage, Fred transforms it into a personal statement. While I have spent hours playing big Maceo and Tampa's version on repeat, I will never forget Fred's great lines like "If I had money like Henry Ford, I'd have a new woman on every row." I perform and have recorded this tune in Fred's style.
Fred's a good person to know from his music. His music is a unique picture of a stage of the blues not often found on record, closer to traditional folk culture, and not under the pressures that the bluesmen and blueswomen who became commercial recording artists were under.
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