onurblues: Mississippi Fred McDowell - Live At The Gaslight (1971)

July 25, 2022

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Live At The Gaslight (1971)

► Get the album at the usual place...

"I do not play no rock'n'roll"

When you get a bit tired of contemporary blues, nothing is better than going back to the basics. With this exceptional live performance of the great Fred McDowell that's exactly where you go : back to the basics of Mississippi slide country blues. But in music basics doesn't necessarily means poorness. McDowell is proving it here.

A rare mastery of the bottleneck, a very recognizable vocal texture perfectly accorded to the sound of his guitar, a long list of Mississippi blues that became classics… all the ingredients were gathered for a memorable concert in one of New York's Greenwich Village temples of the 1960s folk revival that has seen performing some of the greatest folk & blues artists of this period, from Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan, David Bromberg or Joni Mitchell, from Rev. Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt to Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Big Mama Thornton and a young Bonnie Raitt...

Seven years after his triumphant musical coming out at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, McDowell was giving his last public performance on November 5, 1971 at the Gaslight. He died a few months later, in July 1972. He was 68. This makes this recording his musical testament.
He left his acoustic guitar at home and plays electric all along the two sets of the show only accompanied by Tom Pomposello on bass, and his electric guitar's strings just sound wonderfully under his bottleneck !

The show kicks off with the emblematic "Shake 'Em On Down". McDowell do not play no rock'n'roll, as he mischievously announces, but he sure knows how to rock a hot Hill Country blues ! You understand easily why he fascinated so many rock musicians. As a matter of fact, even if he wasn't aware of the fact (he was just playing blues the way he felt it), McDowell was much more a Hill Country blues player than a traditional Delta style bluesman. Check " White Lightnin'", "Baby Please Don't Go", "61 highway", "My Baby", "Red Cross Store", or even slower pieces like "Levee Camp Blues", or his version of "Good Mornin' Little Schoolgirl", and tell me what it is if not Hill Country style !

With his wife Annie Mae

Very soon his renowned devotion to gospel blues surges up to the surface with "Jesus Is On The Mainline" and later with a hazardous cover of "When The Saints Go Marchin' In" and other songs. In fact, gospel is never far with McDowell and his repertoire is deeply influenced by spirituals. This is of course the case of his famous "You Got To Move", and what I would qualify as "secular gospel" is a McDowell trademark.

McDowell slide guitar playing is so incredibly muddled with his vocals that most of the times his guitar notes stand like an extension of his voice, both in narrow symbiosis. An expert bottleneck craftsman and a fine songwriter, McDowell's blues remain simple ― in the sense that simplicity expresses true talent without any need for artificial adornment ― and exhales a definite country farm fragrance : haystack, horse and cow dung, red mud, freshly cut wood and BBQ smoke hanging in the air...

"Blues is a feeling" he says in the introduction of the outstanding "John Henry". McDowell had a gift to make people feel the blues like few bluesmen were able to do. And to conclude, he might have been a farmer most of his life but he certainly looked like a gentleman. ■

● See also this blog's page for biographical elements and videos.

Documentary

● "Shake ‘Em On Down : The Blues According to Fred McDowell", a very interesting one-hour documentary : https://southdocs.org/project/shakem/

→ This documentary, made by filmmakers Joe York & Scott Barretta, shows that McDowell’s work, often classified as Delta blues , was in fact the foundation of what’s now known as North Mississippi Hill country blues. McDowell’s role (including mentoring R.L. Burnside who would become the face of the movement in the 1990s) remains crucial, even on the current generation of acts from the region.

With Johnny Woods, on harmonica

Joe York explains : "This notion of North Mississippi Hill country blues didn’t really exist in the 1960s. Fred stood out as an anomaly. He didn’t sound like anybody else, you couldn’t put him in any grouping. There was a misconception by people who lived outside the area as to exactly what the Delta is. What this film helps to establish is that Fred was the godfather figure of this North Mississippi Hill country sound."

Bonnie Raitt

The film features prominently McDowell’s best known disciple, apart from Burnside : Bonnie Raitt. "People are going to be surprised to what extent her career was connected to Fred McDowell", says Barretta. "Her big breakthrough came playing at The Gaslight in New York opening up for Fred, and that’s when she got signed [to Warner Bros]. Her whole style and guitar approach is based on Fred’s bottleneck style and tone. The film illuminates that and how significant that relationship was."

"With Fred, we had a similar humor and developed a great friendship, confessed Raitt in 2015. We were just young middle-class college kids sitting at the feet of all these bluesmen who were finally being revered after having been being ignored for so long. Fred really delighted in his late career bloom. He was the first one I got close to." In 1993, Raitt actually paid her dues by funding a memorial marker for McDowell in Como.

A few more videos