King of the Delta Blues Liars

April 11, 2023 12:21 AM

Digging into Robert “Mack” McCormick’s archives to find out what he had learned about Robert Johnson uncovered a writer far more complicated and problematic than his subject. A lifetime of old-fashioned research repeatedly failed to deliver multiple projects, yet the one everyone was after was a completed manuscript on Robert Johnson. Texas Monthly finally gets to write the story about the story.
posted by bookbook (23 comments total)

Fascinating stuff, thank you for posting this.
posted by sudasana at 12:47 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mack seems like a real-life Bolaño character. Great article.
posted by hototogisu at 1:38 AM on April 11, 2023

This was a fascinating read, thanks for posting!
posted by Dysk at 2:38 AM on April 11, 2023

Ted Gioia wrote about this recently "Mack made an amazing revelation to Hall. He claimed that the Mississippi guitarist named Robert Johnson—admired all over the world today—didn’t actually make those famous blues recordings."
posted by Lanark at 5:21 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

McCormick features prominently in an essay I think about regularly, The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. [Archive link]

There’s a certain kind of collector who feels ownership over what they collect, and McCormick strikes me as having been that sort. When that interfaces with the dynamics of a racist society, that tends to go badly.
posted by Kattullus at 5:26 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Having finished Hall’s essay (this is a lesson in reading before commenting if there ever was one) I see that Sullivan’s essay is discussed at length.

If anything, that’s made me even madder at McCormick. If he’d done the right thing and donated his archive to a university, he’d be remembered as a hero. But instead his sense of ownership over the art and stories of blues musicians led him to pollute the historical record with his bullshit.
posted by Kattullus at 5:55 AM on April 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

There is this weird thing that holders of unique informative historical artifacts sometimes do in sequestering these items. You’d think they would want the information about the topic and/or person to which they are devoted to become as widely known as possible. Why wouldn’t a devotee of Johnson not want a previously unknown recording to be heard, right? But often they hold these things back in order to become gatekeepers whose “power” is exercised by always saying no. I can remember being flabbergasted to learn that the holders of Giuseppe Verdi’s correspondence and manuscripts frequently would not give permission for these items to be viewed, used, published. Wouldn’t they want Verdi to be as fully understood as possible? Maybe. But if they allowed unfettered access, they wouldn’t have the “power” of saying no to scholars and musicians.
posted by slkinsey at 6:33 AM on April 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

The manic-depressive dynamic at work. Unmanaged, the obsessive drive that uncovers historical artifacts and and runs down facts is the flipside of the depressive and antisocial tendencies that sabotage projects and collaboration.
posted by zamboni at 6:48 AM on April 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wow, what a roller coaster ride!
posted by TheCoug at 8:37 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mack lived alone, and we sat in the living room, which was cluttered with stacks of papers, books stuffed with Post-it notes, and banker’s boxes full of files. A guitar once played by the bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins leaned against a wall. I looked around and shivered. I’d never felt so close to so much hidden history.

Man, the names mentioned in this article -- Peter Guralnick, Chris Strachwitz, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Mack McCormick, Blind Willie Johnson (!), Ledell Johnson. brother of Tommy Johnson -- the blues singer named Johnson who actually did claim to have gone to a crossroads to sell his soul -- all the blues singer Johnsons you could shake a stick at included! -- a topic on which I have said more than once here, oh don't get me started on the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads. And then names not mentioned like James McKune, his biographer in passing Marybeth Hamilton or Gayle Dean Wardlow, a legendary 78 collector who keeps or kept his records under his bed in his mother's house, if I recall correctly... This is like a buffet style Thanksgiving meal which will be hard to digest amidst all the family arguments that usually accompany it. Oh, the mind reels... I think I want to go lie down for awhile.
posted by y2karl at 9:13 AM on April 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

classic narcissist
posted by anazgnos at 9:55 AM on April 11, 2023

Thanks for posting, this was amazing and horrifying. To distort the love and curiosity into hoarding and paranoia, and deliberate lies. I was especially struck by this:
" To my surprise, he even gave me a couple of the early chapters to read. I took them home and was stunned by how good they were. The writing had a firm sense of place, and it was full of detail and dialogue. I could picture Mack in Mississippi, talking to strangers, asking questions. I told him how impressed I was. “Thank you,” he said, sounding genuinely pleased. “That’s very encouraging. No one’s said that to me before. Of course, no one’s had a chance to read it.” He was slurring his words, his body drunk on morphine. It was one of our last conversations. "
Wonder if he'd shared more, earlier, and gotten this kind of praise, would he have not gone so far into paranoia? Or was it inevitable, given his penchant for blowing up every relationship he had? In the end, he was also destroying himself, as a music scholar and historian.
posted by winesong at 10:10 AM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

According to the essay, he routinely poisoned his manuscripts with bad information, sometimes inserting whole passages from Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He could then use these poison paragraphs to discredit anyone who tried to publish without his permission. He even made forgeries.

That's absolutely wild to me.
posted by Doleful Creature at 10:14 AM on April 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Really interesting, thanks for posting. This sort of cautionary tale is why I'm glad I'm more of a dilettante by nature (relatively speaking).
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:21 PM on April 11, 2023

I'd like to put in a plug for Texas Monthly: yes, it does focus on Texas and I share many of Mefi's views on the political system in Texas, but boy howdy is that magazine consistently good!

It frequently features long form journalism of the quality of this post, with some of the past features earning backlash within Texas. Plus the food section is extensive: this is the only magazine with a both a 'food' editor and a separate BBQ editor, and recently they added a new tacos editor. It's a fun read.
posted by tumbling at 4:59 PM on April 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

As was alluded to maybe in passing in the article, paranoia can be a symptom of more severe bipolar disorder( and since bipolar disorder symptoms overall can become increasingly severe with no or inadequate treatment, paranoia can also be a symptom that develops later after initial onset. So no, likely unrelated to presence or absence of praise for his writing quality. He also doesn’t sound like a narcissist, nor a cautionary tale against not being a dilettante, as far as I can tell. I am certainly not an expert, but from the bits I’ve picked up from friends with bipolar and from mental health first aid training, the bipolar disorder does seem to adequately explain all of McCormick’s behavior that might otherwise appear puzzling or questionable, or that appears to have been somewhat self-sabotaging.

The keeping people’s photos part just sounds like him being a little bit of a jerk to me, however. He does sound like a fascinating character, though. And I’m glad his archives ended up somewhere useful and accessible! It was definitely an interesting story to read.
posted by eviemath at 5:06 PM on April 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Thanks for posting the article! I wouldn't have seen it.

I'm glad the article mentions "Brother Robert" by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. I highly recommend it. She demythologizes Robert Johnson, and I mean that in a good way. She writes that he sang children's songs for her when she was a child, she remembered a local man in town drove a Terraplane and so on. And a fascinating portrait of what life was like for her family in the Jim Crow US south in the 1920s and 1930s.
posted by philfromhavelock at 5:30 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

McCormick’s Daughter on the NYT cover story.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:14 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Wow, what a read. thanks for sharing this.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:55 AM on April 12, 2023

Recently I've been listening to William Ferris' Voices of Mississippi (track 1, track 2 of Scott Dunbar's), and because of it Lake Mary from Scott Dunbar. It's enough to take your breath away and sonder all that is out there that you'll never know.
posted by rubatan at 11:37 AM on April 12, 2023

Yeah, this is a pretty incredible read. On the one hand, I can empathize to a degree with someone struggling with personal mental and emotional problems, and those interfering with life and relationship goals. But McCormick really went beyond the pale; he stole stuff from Johnson's family. (I actually have the box set that he delayed the publication of.) I was left wondering if he came up with the theory that the "real" Robert Johnson wasn't the one that everyone else knew simply so that he could literally own that version of Johnson.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:30 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

A couple of other things:

- This is mentioned in the long TM article, but I thought that I'd pull it out because Ted Gioia's name has come up on the blue before: he wrote a piece on his dealings with McCormick that is both admiring and quite frustrated. It's much shorter but lines up quite well with TFA.

Also, WRT McCormick's daughter's objections to the NYT piece linked above, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote a reply, which is worth excerpting:

What McCormick withheld from us were L.V.’s actual words. Why did he withhold them? That’ll be for his biographer to unravel. But it left me with the question of whether to join him in keeping her voice, the voice of a great American artist, suppressed after fifty-three years of silence. I decided to quote her and would do so again. It was a question to which I gave the most serious thought (and I alone–the name of my research assistant doesn’t belong in this discussion). Susannah McCormick has written that I made the choice because I found her father’s publishing schedule to be “not convenient.” That description will hardly do. Our sources were literally dying as we reported. Of old age.

McCormick did in fact do a gigantic amount of work, and deserves credit for it, but I'm seeing a very slippery slope between someone owning the work that they did and seeming to believe that they own the subjects of that work, or the creative endeavors thereof.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:56 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

...This is a human and humane book, an insightful exploration of the biographer’s craft. McCormick gets tired and lonely. He sighs on his couch and gloomily watches daytime television. He’s perspicacious but also a bit hapless. He reminded me of the wised-up but melancholy narrators of Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

Late in “Biography of a Phantom” he begins to get some breaks. He finds a cluster of people who knew Johnson well. There’s a moving scene in which McCormick holds a listening party for friends and neighbors who hadn’t heard Johnson’s songs since his death (probably at the hands of a jealous husband) 30 years earlier. About the party, he writes: “I had to stumble over half of Mississippi, wind up here, get all these people together, and then — maybe for the first time — really listen to Johnson’s music.”

McCormick’s book is no longer unseen, nor is it a masterpiece. But, reading it, you feel as though you’ve met a real writer, one who had a lot going for himself and let it all slip away.

Ray Charles said that singers don’t reach their full potential until 50, because a whole life shows up in the voice. McCormick’s book makes you feel what we lost when Johnson died young.

A Biography of a Blues Legend, Five Decades in the Making
Mack McCormick’s long-awaited book about the musician Robert Johnson has arrived, in modest and expurgated form.
posted by y2karl at 3:15 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]