Mississippi Fred McDowell

When Mississippi Fred McDowell declared on one of his final albums that he did not play no rock & roll, the remark functioned simply as an accurate description rather than any protest from a performer left behind by shifting tastes. A master of the core Delta blues tradition, he blended the raw power of Charley Patton with the intensity of Son House, channeling both through his gritty vocals and his aggressive bottleneck guitar technique. Confident in the authenticity of his approach, McDowell refused to modify his music for modern listeners the way many contemporaries did, instead letting his unchanged style set him apart.

Although he rejected amplified rock music more fiercely than most country blues players, he willingly shared his methods with younger white musicians, among them Bonnie Raitt, who developed her own slide technique under his influence. Unlike other blues figures rediscovered during the 1960s, McDowell had never appeared on records from the 1920s or early 1930s; his first sessions occurred only after folklorist Alan Lomax found him in 1959, and he did not turn professional full-time until the mid-1960s.

Born in 1904 in Rossville, Tennessee, he began playing guitar at fourteen using a slide fashioned from a steer bone. After losing his parents early, he embraced the itinerant life of a musician, performing for tips on Memphis streets during the 1920s before settling in Como, Mississippi, where he remained for the rest of his years. There he balanced farm work with weekend appearances at local fish fries, picnics, and house parties, a routine that continued for three decades until Lomax captured his playing for an Atlantic anthology of American folk music. McDowell welcomed the recordings yet kept farming and busking outside a Stuckey’s candy store in Como until Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, sought him out for dedicated sessions.

The resulting mid-1960s releases, Fred McDowell, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, astonished the folk-blues world with their emotional depth and rare repertoire untouched by earlier commercial documentation. Soon afterward he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, coffeehouses, and as a participant in the American Folk Blues Festival tours of Europe. Documented on screen in The Blues Maker (1968), the 1969 film Fred McDowell, and Roots of American Music: Country and Urban Music (1970), he also signed with Capitol for the album I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll. Several of his compositions reached wider audiences through Bonnie Raitt’s versions of “Write Me a Few Lines” and “Kokomo,” while the Rolling Stones recorded an unadorned rendition of “You Got to Move” on Sticky Fingers.

Extensive touring ended when cancer was diagnosed in 1971; McDowell died in July 1972 at age sixty-eight, having never deviated from the straight, natural blues he had always performed.