Mississippi Fred McDowell - The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell
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CD Details
Artist: Mississippi 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: No, This Is Not Rock and Roll
Rating: 4 Stars
Over the past year I have been doing a review of all the major country blues artists that I can get material on. High on that list would be the performer on this CD, the legendary Mississippi Fred McDowell. Before discussing this CD, however, let me put this blues man in context. I first heard Brother McDowell and his magnificent slide guitar riffs as a backup to some of "Big Mama" Thornton's early blues numbers like "Little School Girl" and "The Red Rooster". I have also noted elsewhere that McDowell performed a very important service to the continuation of the country blues tradition when he provided mentorship to the great modern folk/country/blues singer songwriter Bonnie Raitt.
Ms. Raitt has profusely acknowledged his influence and just a peep at her own work demonstates the truth of that influence. Furthermore there is another place where McDowell has demonstrated his vast influence. That is on The Rolling Stones. Their main blues influence might have been another Delta product, Muddy Waters, but the Stones did a cover of McDowell's "You've Got To Move" (and gave him the royalties for his cancer treatment) on their Sticky Fingers album that has withstood the test of time. All these anecdotes are presented for one purpose- to show, if anyone needed showing, that Mc Dowell rightly takes his place with the likes of Bukka White, Skip James, Son House and Mississippi John Hurt as the legends of country blues.
For those not in the know the theme of the country blues is about rural life, about picking cotton in the Delta (or hard scrabble farming elsewhere) and, most importantly, about those Saturday night bouts with booze, women and worked up passions that could go any which way, including jail and the graveyard. McDowell follows that tradition although on a number of cuts here, those in which he is accompanied by his wife's singing along, he will also pay homage to the deeply religious expression of the travails of black existence at the turn of the 20th century Jim Crow South.
The most famous exemplars of that tradition are of course Blind Willie Johnson and the Reverend Gary Davis but others, including McDowell have taken a turn at that end of the blues spectrum in order to sanctify "the devil's music". Needless to say you must listen to "You've Got To Move", "Levee Camp Blues", "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and "Kokomo Blues" here.
Description of The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell
Choosing the tracks for The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell must have been a difficult task, because in his brief recording career, practically every song he played was a nearly perfect slice of pure, unadulterated Delta blues. McDowell was a contemporary of prewar blues legends Robert Johnson and Skip James, but unlike them, he didn't make any commercial recordings until 1964, when he started working with Arhoolie. The tracks on The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell are drawn from his five-year tenure at the label and include such classics as "You Gotta Move," which was covered by the Rolling Stones, "Kokomo Blues," and "Write Me a Few of Your Lines," which Bonnie Raitt later recorded. McDowell has a distinctive slide guitar style that he honed in his decades of playing local fish fries and rent parties. Even when he picks an electric guitar on "Meet Down in Froggy Bottom" and "My Baby," he sounds as if he's channeling the music from a 1930 Delta juke joint. McDowell was not a guitar innovator like Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, but he sang the blues with a passion and authority that have rarely been equaled. --Michael SimmonsGeneral CDs
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