Mississippi Fred McDowell (1904-1972). Despite using Mississippi in his name, Fred McDowell was born near Memphis. He was orphaned at an early age and took up guitar at 14 and played dances. He took up farming, same as his parents, and moved to Como, Mississippi around 1940 or 41 which was not officially in the Delta region but north of it. Fred was discovered in the early 50s by Alan Lomax. He first played slide with a pocketknife, then with a steak rib bone and, finally, a glass bottleneck. He settled on the glass slide for its clarity. He made his own but Buddy Guy borrowed it and it was lost somewhere in Germany. Fred recalled, laughing, that he next asked a fellow to cut the neck off the bottle for him. The fellow didn’t understand what Fred was asking and cut the neck off the bottle and brought the rest of the bottle to him.
“Whatchu handin’ me this for?” Fred asked. “I can’t do nothin’ with this!” So Fred went and cut his own bottleneck slide and used it for the rest of his days—always wearing it on his ring finger (as did Son House).
Fred became a regular at various blues festivals during the revival era and recorded several albums. His style is considered by bluesologists to be its own genre called North Mississippi which has fewer chord changes than regular Delta blues for a droning effect that is considered closer to its African roots played on instruments with droning sympathetic strings. His guitar-playing is top-notch.
Fred was famous for his statement, “I don’t play no rock and roll.” He did, however, praise the Rolling Stones for their straight-up blues version of “You Gotta Move” (which Fred wrote with another blues legend, Reverend Gary Davis). He also taught Bonnie Raitt how to play slide guitar. Fred also frequently played the electric guitar on his recordings and occasionally has a full band arrangement although it was usually just him on guitar and a bassist or harpist. His sound is hauntingly rural and viscerally arresting. His gospel recordings, sung with him and his wife, Annie Mae (shown with him in the above photo), are especially time-reversing—like one is sitting on a porch of a farmhouse in 1920s Mississippi in the cool of the evening listening to some folks playing blues after a hard day’s work in the fields.
While many consider Son House to be the premier slide player, many others insist Fred McDowell is. But Fred and House both admired each other greatly and both admired Patton whose slide abilities were nothing to sneeze at. Critic Art Tipaldi wrote of McDowell: “Few sounds on the planet are as emotionally urgent as McDowell’s bottleneck. The piercing effect of bottle on strings makes hairs tingle. Then his voice explodes in the seer [sic] passion that characterizes the first generation country blues.”
Fred’s last album was recorded at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, Live in New York, in 1971. The following year, Fred McDowell died of cancer at the age of 68. He was buried at Hammond Hill Baptist Church near Como, Mississippi. Bonnie Raitt paid for a headstone. Fred kicked off a flurry of interest in North Mississippi bluesmen that were ignored during the early blues era, which resulted in the establishment of Fat Possum Records in 1992 based in Oxford, Mississippi. The label was dedicated to recording the North Mississippi sound and made blues stars of great artists as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough (of whom Iggy Pop became a devotee), Asie Payton, King Ernest and Charles Caldwell—first generation blues artists who have all have since died.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2aUSSfO38