Robert Burton "Mack" McCormick (August 3, 1930 – November 18, 2015) was an American
musicologist
Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some m ...
and
folklorist
Folklore studies, less often known as folkloristics, and occasionally tradition studies or folk life studies in the United Kingdom, is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currenc ...
.
Biography
McCormick was born in 1930 in
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...
,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; (Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, Ma ...
Colorado
Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...
,
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States while the ...
and
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...
, as she traveled to find work as a hospital technician.
Career
He dropped out of high school to work at a ballroom in Cedar Point, Ohio, running errands for the musicians performing there. He later worked as an electrician, cook, carnival worker and
taxi driver
''Taxi Driver'' is a 1976 American film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul Schrader, and starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Leonard Harris, and Albert Brooks. Set in a decaying and ...
. In 1946, he met record store owner and
discographer
Discography is the study and cataloging of published sound recordings, often by specified artists or within identified music genres. The exact information included varies depending on the type and scope of the discography, but a discography entry ...
Down Beat
' (styled in all caps) is an American music magazine devoted to "jazz, blues and beyond", the last word indicating its expansion beyond the jazz realm which it covered exclusively in previous years. The publication was established in 1934 in Ch ...
'' in 1949. He developed an interest in blues and began traveling and researching the lives and origins of undocumented
blues music
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the A ...
ians around the country and learning about folk traditions and customs.
In the late 1950s, McCormick "discovered" and recorded
Mance Lipscomb
Mance Lipscomb (April 9, 1895 – January 30, 1976) was an American blues singer, guitarist and songster. He was born Beau De Glen Lipscomb near Navasota, Texas. As a youth he took the name Mance (short for ''emancipation'') from a friend of h ...
Lightnin' Hopkins
Samuel John "Lightnin" Hopkins (March 15, 1912 – January 30, 1982) was an American country blues singer, songwriter, guitarist and occasional pianist from Centerville, Texas. In 2010, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine ranked him No. 71 on its list o ...
.Russell, p. 64 At the
1965 Newport Folk Festival
Newport Folk Festival is an annual American folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the Newport Jazz Festival. It was one of the first modern music festivals in America, and remains a focal ...
, he assembled a group of former convicts who had never performed together, and after trying but failing to get
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career sp ...
to end his rehearsals with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, cut off Dylan's electricity supply, possibly giving rise to the apocryphal story that
Pete Seeger
Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notabl ...
had attempted to cut off the power during Dylan's debut performance with electric guitars and keyboards.
McCormick wrote numerous magazine articles and
album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...
liner notes
Liner notes (also sleeve notes or album notes) are the writings found on the record sleeve, sleeves of LP record albums and in booklets that come inserted into the compact disc jewel case or the equivalent packaging for cassettes.
Origin
Liner n ...
and assembled an extensive private archive of Texas musical history. He researched the lives of dead blues musicians, such as
Robert Johnson
Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911August 16, 1938) was an American blues musician and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generat ...
Russell, p. 207 and
Henry Thomas
Henry Jackson Thomas Jr. (born September 9, 1971) is an American actor. He began his career as a child actor and had a lead role in the film ''E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'' (1982), for which he won a Young Artist Award and received Golden Glob ...
. He began research on Johnson in 1972, while working for the
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
, and interviewed people who had known the musician. McCormick originally intended to publish his research as a book, ''Biography of a Phantom'', but he never completed it, and he later said that he had lost interest in it. The book ''Biography of a Phantom'', edited by John W. Troutman, was eventually set to be published by Smithsonian Books in 2023.
His unfinished research with
Paul Oliver
Paul Hereford Oliver MBE (25 May 1927 – 15 August 2017) was an English architectural historian and writer on the blues and other forms of African-American music. He was equally distinguished in both fields, although it is likely that aficiona ...
on
Texas blues
Texas blues is blues music from Texas. As a regional style, its original form was characterized by jazz and swing influences. Later examples are often closer to blues rock and Southern rock.
History
Texas blues began to appear in the early 190 ...
was published in 2019 by Texas A&M University Press as ''The Blues Come to Texas''.
Death
He died on November 18, 2015, from
esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer is cancer arising from the esophagus—the food pipe that runs between the throat and the stomach. Symptoms often include difficulty in swallowing and weight loss. Other symptoms may include pain when swallowing, a hoarse vo ...