Search - Fred Mcdowell :: Good Morning Little Schoolgirl

The Devil Walks BEHIND Fred McDowell !

Anita Fix | Alcazar in the Land of Enchantment | 12/06/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Before I ramble as I am ampheta-mindededly do---let me state THIS IS THE COMPANION PIECE TO THE FAMOUS ARHOOLIE RELEASE ENTITLED Y-O-U - G-O-T-T-A - M-O-V-E as recorded in 1964 by Chris Strachwitz on a simplistic minimal recording device after hearing Fred first from the Alan Lomax Library of Congress Collection, which these close to 40 recordings from a single all-night-long session and the morning after settin down the facts of Mississippi Fred McDowell...These easily compete with and surpass constantly the first Lomax songs! Though both are essential for Fred's fans, Also the 1962 recordings by Dick Spottswood just released (?) on Rounder in 95...those FOUR CD's are the best and the completest early works...I have never heard anything I didn't like by Fred, this Music is so much the man, no amount of Post-Modernistic deconstruction can separate the Artist from his works! As Robert Crumb said, that people being unable to express themselves this way anymore (though they can play it its "empty" as an old blue bottle in the desert sun on recordings that have to have some rare place and time and atmosphere like Home to work things out...the Bluesmen is quite simply a solitary creature, even amidst Jazz-sized swooning crowds he's as alone in a band as any one man advanced guardian is....) that people have lost this tradition is simply "a calamitous loss"
But Fred was the Hero of the delta in its later days, long gone a full Generation plus 50 years of age away from the first round of Legends which shall never again be repeated unless a whole race of "gutarists" are never separated from their instruments longer than it takes to take a leak or make another man-child...Fred McDowell, by all accounts one of the most sincere good-hearted personages that ever Embodied a Bluesman...who maintained even during the slow cancerous death all that was his owned inner peace unconditionally in tune with the world around him as much as his guitar never was out of tune neither was He...Fred literally schooled half the Delta North of him as well as the hill country to the East, including the now infamous Mississippi Hill cow-Punk- R.L. BURNSIDE, Blues Heroe to a generation not so X-communicated by setting down roots in the music that began it all, rock-n-roll, urban blues, punk rock...al descend from the perfected abandon and pure fury of these men's (and Women's) music...who have all suffered accordingly as all do, which doesn't make a bluesmen but the ability and drive to express themselves this way akin to religious as much as sexual ecstasy does...Fred could play with equal inseparable nonchalance and rare ease Gospels and Traditional songs, or down-n-out classics still circulating by ear through the towns of that outlaw's State with by far and away the largest African-American population of all the surrounding states put together...of so many Bluesman who got stuck in an urban hell under the fire of steel factories instead of the good old Sun of the farmland, Fred McDowell and Annie May, his dear beloved stayed put and the result is a Blues all his own, and unlike anything from the 20's and 30's, except perhaps for a few Memphis and St Louis Bluesmen like Robert Wilkins and Henry Townsend, which were so like the hardcore Mississippi style of shouted vocals and extreme percussive Guitar hands, like a piano played like a drum that's a converted Harp fallen off one of the Fallen angels, shaped like a woman's torso, and who rests in a case that's shaped like a coffin? King Solomon Hill played with some kind of animal bone, Henry Thomas used a pocket knife, Charlie Patton used a smoothed down bottle-neck, but Fred used a tiny piece of steel that let him use his pinky for notes as well as slidin with an accuracy never looked down upon, simply done by the tone of it...he could make a snake roll over or a woman beg him to stop when he got lowdown and dirty or temporarily evil on that thing..then again he could call down a cupid angel which Annie May sounds like on the version of Amazing Grace on this album, out of 100 versions, this is the greatest duet I have ever heard! Even surpassing the self-titled album by testament which I use to put in first thing every Sunday while mixing my Poison to begin he day with a bit of churchin and gratitude before the Poetry began after breakfast was fixxt...
ah hells just loosed its hounds and I must play something to calm them Quick! And I'll tell you all plain and simple, aint Nobody as good as Fred McDowell is to get schooled by in that unstoppable BACK-BEAT that defines by an endless supply of variations making a rhythm section out of a single person's thumb what make the Delta Bluesman sound like two men...you know the old maxim of Robert Johnson (who invented the essential Rock-n-Roll riff in the 1930's!) when heard the first time when the new comer asks: "Who's the other guy?" It aint no ghost, and I have considered the Devil for awhile accompanying them all, but the devil couldn't touch Fred, even if he walked "just like a man" he walked BEHIND Fred McDowell!
If you feel the need for some beautiful blues though not soft like love songs, a blues unafraid of being harsh with its words and instruction, of a mercy that is comprised of simple commiseration like a bird willing to sing for free, find anything Fred McDowell has set down for Humanity's benefit, he'll not let you down about being sad he has a remedy only the deep country blues' can afford to give away a music older than you or me but is definitively AMERICAN, and there's noting "primitive" about it, unless one means it's purity and heartfelt sincerity; in fact the exact opposite is true...it's so intricately woven together it takes two hands and a heart to hold together and then just barely contain it, like a dove in cupped hands, or a crow caged in the ribs...there aren't even notes or frets but strings slid along and stroked like true love and snapped like heartstrings and spanked like a naughty child that grew up and got to like it...with a healthy appetite to exceed itself continuously changing every time the same song is played its never the same as it was before and never will be like this is again...A-MEN!
A BAnd and a mAn truly inspired in modern-day Music by Fred McDowell who comes closest in keeping things honest even in progressive DecadeDances is the DOO-RAG's First Album CHUNCKED AND MUDDLED: Truly the delta blues come full circle and not a tribute but a testament to the Delta Blues of Fred McDowell's day as the King come home again...A-Man"