Country blues singer and electric slide guitarist Mississippi Fred McDowell passed away on 3 July 1972 aged 68. Eight months before, he recorded his last album, a live concert recording made for the radio station WKCR at the famous Greenwich Village Gaslight Cafe also known as The Village Gaslight on New York’s MacDougal Street.
Besides being an incredible album, it also ties together the story of a couple of blues enthusiasts and a short-lived record label resurfacing after 50 years.
The session was recorded by Fred Seibert, a college student at the time, for his Saturday afternoon blues show on WKCR-FM at Columbia University. Joining McDowell was Tom Pomposello (Honest Tom) on bass who was also friends with Seibert.
Pomposello, a multi-instrumentalist and blues enthusiast, co-owned a hippie record store called ‘Kropotkin Records’ (for anarchist Peter Kropotkin) in Huntington, New York. After introducing himself to Fred McDowell in the early 70s, he became his bass player. His passion for the blues saw him teaching students the history of American blues in the early 80s alongside teaching music as a professor at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York. He died in a car accident in January 1999.
In the liner notes, McDowell writes:
You know he first came to me and said, “Fred, can I come up and see you, you know where you’re staying?” Well, I wasn’t doing anything up there alone and I told him to come up. When he got there, he brought three instruments with him – a guitar, a harmonica, and a bass, and he asked me to say which one he was better at. Well, I carried him over on the harmonica. Alright, I said, let’s got to the guitar. Next the bass – I said, “hold it right there baby, that’s the one.” Tom, it’s been a real pleasure to have you play with me. Roll baby.
Pomposello was keen to release his own album and after discussing the best way to achieve this, Seibert suggested he start his own label. They joined forces (along with Dick Pennington) and launched Oblivion Records with the release of this live Fred McDowell recording.
In Seibert’s words “Over the next four years, we produced and released six blues and jazz records. We had a local hit on NY radio, had a hoot, and lost a lot of money and sleep. The company sputtered out of business in 1976.” Although it didn’t sell well, something they put down to the near-invisible blues scene of New York, Pomposello did release “Blues from the Apple” on the label, featuring a medley of working New York City musicians in the early 70s on which he also contributed bass.
Fifty years later during the lockdown, Seibert, who went on to become an American television producer, co-founder of MTV and the CEO of FredFilms decided to revive Oblivion Records’ back catalogue. Live in New York is their second digital release.
Live in New York
While Live in New York has historic interest, being McDowell’s final recording, it’s also one hell of a session that just buzzes with authenticity. All of that magic that Alan Lomax spoke of in his book “The Land Where The Blues Began” is present.
Lomax described McDowell as a “quiet, silky-voiced, stoop shouldered fellow, eager to record”, something the liner notes mirror when recalling that first meeting:
In 1959 folklorist Alan Lomax ventured into northwestern Mississippi during a recording field trip of the Southern USA. He passed through the town of Como, situated between Highways 51 and 55. Lomax explained that he was from a record company and asked whether there were any local musicians that he should hear. Among the first names given was Fred McDowell. Lomax found Fred at home that evening and proceeded to record him. Fred played well into the night for Lomax (the session lasted from 8 p.m. until about 7 a.m. as Fred recalls it). When Lomax finally departed, he left Fred with promises that these recordings would bring him world repute and a great sum of money. Lomax was at least half right. Despite the fact that the payment was nominal, the recordings were greeted with abundant enthusiasm. Even though only eleven songs were released (on two Prestige LPs: Deep South-Sacred and Sinful; and Yazoo Delta-Blues and Spirituals; and two Atlantic LPs: Sounds of the South; and Roots of the Blues), the reaction was immediate. The blues world had discovered Fred McDowell.
From ‘The Land Where The Blues Began’, Lomax adds: “The blues, speaking through Fred, sounded like a deep-voiced black herald of the loi, with a silver-voiced heavenly choir answering him from the treble strings.” The album opens to one of his most well-known tracks, Shake ‘Em on Down, what Lomax called a “sexy dance tune…that now the whole world jumps to”. Joined by Pomposello on bass it’s as rock n roll as he gets.
For me, it’s after his popular showpiece that this album gets interesting. McDowell later reminds the audience “that’s the blues y’all, I don’t play no rock n roll…I’m playing from the heart”. When he says that, Lomax’s words come flooding back…”no one on records, perhaps, performed the sweet old country blues so well as he. His mellow, multitonal vocal style lends subtle pathos to every phrase of his songs and evokes eloquent responses from his gnarled and work-wise plowman’s fingers. His journeys up the treble strings take us into the region of heart cries or, at times, of tender ectasy.”
A personal highlight is the slow blues ‘Mercy’. The liner notes draw attention to the opening stanza, “which consists of some unusual lyrics (unusual for Fred that is) and lines which are of uncertain origin. ‘Everyone’s cryin’ mercy, Lord what do mercy mean? Well, if it means anything, Lord have mercy on me!'”
The quality of this recording is superb, according to Seibert, they borrowed the recording equipment from the university’s news department. It included a high-quality, monaural, one-track Nagra recorder intended for film and field recording and three microphones (Shure and Electro-Voice), the mixer was a Shure M68.
For all his musicology knowledge, Alan Lomax was clearly moved by McDowell’s playing, he becomes quite spirited in his description of McDowell’s virtuosity and poetry, using it to benchmark the dull and mechanical modern-day offerings “fooling around in the upper registers” of the guitar, more interested in “showing off how many notes they can get off and how many chords they know than what the song has to say…”
Live in New York brilliantly captures that Mississippi mystique of McDowell’s music and also tells the story of the passionate individuals who wanted to share it with the rest of the world.
Buy the album via Bandcamp here: https://oblivionrecords2.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-new-york