Mack McCormick obit

Folklorist Mack McCormick dies

 

He was not on the list.

Robert "Mack" McCormick's accomplishments were such that the phrase "renaissance man" feels insufficient. Best known as a music folklorist and historian, McCormick documented hugely important folk and blues musicians throughout Texas. He was also a songwriter, playwright and journalist, who used to cover jazz in Houston for the famed Down Beat magazine.

McCormick died of esophageal cancer on Nov. 18 at age 85.

In addition to his study of folklore, McCormick was at the center of his own mythology, believed to have been the man to pull the plug on Bob Dylan at the at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. His research into the life and music of the blues legend Robert Johnson played a crucial role in creating public interest in Johnson's enormously influential work.

Michael Hall wrote about McCormick's life and work in Texas Monthly's tribute. And John Nova Lomax did one of the last interviews with McCormick here. He was also at the center of a controversial story in which material from his vast archives was used in this story about an old blues song.

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. In 1946, he met record store owner and discographer Orin Blackstone in New Orleans and began assisting him in researching and compiling Blackstone's multivolume Index to Jazz. McCormick became Texas correspondent for Down Beat in 1949. He developed an interest in blues and began traveling and researching the lives and origins of undocumented blues musicians around the country and learning about folk traditions and customs.

In the late 1950s, McCormick "discovered" and recorded Mance Lipscomb, Robert Shaw and Lightnin' Hopkins.[3] At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he assembled a group of former convicts who had never performed together, and after trying but failing to get Bob Dylan 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 had attempted to cut the power with an axe during Dylan's debut performance with electric guitars and keyboards.

McCormick wrote numerous magazine articles and album liner notes and assembled an extensive private archive of Texas musical history. He researched the lives of dead blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson[4] and Henry Thomas. He began research on Johnson in 1968, while working for the Smithsonian Institution, 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.[6] The book Biography of a Phantom, edited by John W. Troutman, was eventually published by Smithsonian Books in 2023.

McCormick's unfinished research with Paul Oliver on Texas blues was published in 2019 by Texas A&M University Press as The Blues Come to Texas.