Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson

Another interesting article on the topic here:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/a-scandal-is-taking-place-in...

I dug into old blues a few years ago. Robert Johnson came up again and again. I decided to give him a listen and have liked him ever since.

It won't keep you on your seat. It all starts to sound the same after a while. The recording quality is abysmal. They all sound like he was standing too far away from the microphone.

Despite all that, he is a cultural treasure. I can close my eyes and feel the era when I hear his music. The ambience of those scratchy, distant, tinfoil recordings was just what the doctor had ordered.

In high school when I should have been listening to grunge, I was listening to Led Zeppelin (and similar) and wondering about the influencers to all those 1960s British rock bands... which lead me to Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, and loads of others. By college I had a blues show on the campus station, and every night I signed off with Johnson's Traveling Riverside Blues. In fact when I then switched over to do the classic rock show.. I signed off with Zeppelin's rendition of Traveling Riverside Blues.

I had this classical guitar teacher who had achieved some prominence in the music world, having written and performed the guitar music as part of a nationally syndicated radio program. I asked him one day if we could work on the blues and he said something like it was "stupidly simple and not worth the time" yet here we are a century after Robert Johnson still celebrating him, while that guy is an unknown. There's something really magical about this music, which is why it transformed into rock and roll and crossed the Atlantic twice and can be heard in samples and as fundamental sounds in music today.

What a great read. Loved this:

The birthplace of jazz wasn’t far away, so Mack hitchhiked to New Orleans, where he met an inscrutable record collector named Orin Blackstone, who was working on a set of books called Index to Jazz. Blackstone asked the teen to be the Texas editor of the final two books and find jazz and blues 78-rpm records made in the state. The meeting changed Mack’s life. He had never liked being an introvert, and now, working as a field researcher, he was pushed to connect with people, hitching out into the rural areas around Houston and knocking on doors, looking for old records.

Sometimes, those little serendipity encounters lead to opportunities that can truly change the course of your life.

But the guy was also quite devious. Inserting “hoaxes” into research notes as an insurance policy against people who might cross him?