Mississippi Fred McDowell: Mama Says I’m Crazy

About midway through the first listen of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s Mama Says I’m Crazy, I’d more or less decided to write off the album and Fat Possum Records. The recording is tinny sounding and noisy. The vocals are garbled and often half-sung. Johnny Woods’s harmonica is at times too loud, in the next measure inaudible. And Fat Possum … well, honestly, they seem a bit opportunistic at times, as if they believe just because a blues recording is raw and unrehearsed and the artist is black and really old that the material is saleable. The album seemed little more than an attempt — made in the mid-’60s — to imitate one of those barely-listenable, legendary, and revelatory field recordings of Son House, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a score of other blind guys who played sinful slide guitar and howled like wolves on Saturday night, then preached the gospel till they dropped on Sunday morning. However, after numerous listenings, I realized that these were deep blues indeed. They were just recorded poorly.

Mississippi Fred McDowell, born in 1904, was first recorded in 1959 in Como, Mississippi by Alan Lomax for an American folk series released on Atlantic Records. Originally from Rossville, Tennessee, McDowell spent the greater portion of his life as a farmer in Mississippi, playing fish fries and parties for extra cash or outside of candy stores for spare change. Several years after the Lomax recordings Chris Strachwitz went looking for McDowell and ultimately had him record for his own new label, Arhoolie. The results created quite a stir in the vibrant folk-blues community of the 1960s. McDowell became a favorite on the festival and coffeehouse circuits. The Rolling Stones recorded one of his songs, “You Got to Move”, for their Sticky Fingers album. Bonnie Raitt had success with “Kokomo” and “Write Me a Few Lines”. And many other artists have since mined the wealth of material created and left by McDowell. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with cancer in 1971 while on tour in Europe and died in 1972 at the age of 68, his belated career as a full-time professional musician cut short.

Mama Says I’m Crazy was recorded in 1965 by George Mitchell, who approached McDowell about a record deal at a service station in Como, Mississippi where he was working at the time. The idea appealed to McDowell, and he suggested they get Johnny Woods, a local legend of the harmonica, for the session. Three hours later they found Woods passed out drunk on someone’s front porch.

Eventually, the session took place with Woods and his harp in the home of a friend in the midst of card playing, drinking, and casual conversation, which pleasantly persists throughout the recording. The recording itself is difficult to listen to, the fidelity tinny and thin, as previously stated, the lyrics and harmonica riffs sometimes lost. But the more one listens, the more one can imagine Fred McDowell turning away from the mike to greet a recently arrived friend, or Johnny Woods stopping to sip his drink.

Like the fidelity, the first two tracks, “Shake ‘Em on Down” and “Goin’ Away”, are a bit of a disappointment. The guitar riffs that open both are stiffly performed and almost identical in tempo and key. However, with the third cut, also the title track, the listener realizes Fred and Johnny were just warming up and that the alcohol, the act of playing, or whatever, has begun to work on their limbs and relax their troubled minds. The mood and tone of the album shift dramatically. McDowell eases into this number with a driving, hypnotic and groovy riff, and Woods is right in step with him, playing as percussively as his instrument will allow. McDowell moans, “You know I walked all night long, till my feet got soaking wet”, and the real stuff finally begins.

Next is “I Got a Woman”, a blues classic made popular by artists like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Ray Charles. McDowell’s vocalizations give way to the twang and wail of his acoustic slide playing. And what at first seems like an old black man forgetting lyrics or singing a song he never learned properly, turns out to be a musician in the act of a sort of ventriloquism. The voice becomes the guitar line and the guitar becomes the voice. Proper pronunciation of words and rhymes becomes meaningless with such a seamless connection between McDowell’s voice and his guitar playing.

The dark “Red Cross Station” is beyond a doubt the cream of this crop of tunes. One can almost hear the genesis of rock ‘n’ roll in such pure blues. This is precisely the sort of thing those Brit rockers must have honed in on when listening to those early race and blues records, the likes of which led them to form bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones.

The slow burn of “Going Down to the River” and the weaving of Woods’s harp playing through McDowell’s vocal on this track is a pleasant respite from the darkly intense “Red Cross Station”. McDowell and Woods do, however, return to that former intensity on tunes like “Standing at the Back Door” and “What’s Going to Become of Me”, but, unfortunately, nothing quite achieves the dark tone of “Red Cross Station” again.

McDowell and Woods deliver a lot more of the same on the remaining tracks, at times inspired and at times mildly monotonous. But a little monotony never hurt anybody. In fact, it might be just what the doctor ordered in these over-stimulated times. If you dig the deep blues, and can tolerate the poor production, Mama Says I’m Crazy will make a nice addition to your blues collection.