The Alan Lomax Collection: Portraits - The First Recordings

The field recordings that Alan Lomax assembled during his extensive travels in the American South during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s represent one of the most important bodies of recordings in American popular music. Though Lomax recorded a phenomenal variety of gifted artists during his travels, few of them were as generous with their talents as the great Mississippi Fred McDowell, a previously unrecorded Como, Mississippi bluesman who had developed a slide technique as muscular and distinctive as any ever set to tape. Indeed, McDowell’s rough but dexterous finger-picking and his bold, often dissonant slide work compares favorably to that of Sun House at the peak of his powers. The stylistic breadth of these informal recordings is truly astonishing. Over the course of fourteen tracks McDowell dabbles in everything from exuberant country reels and old gospel to rowdy juke-joint classics and weary dread-plagued blues. Few of McDowell’s subsequent works possess the brooding power and casual joy of these seminal 1959 recordings.