Mack McCormick

Robert "Mack" McCormick (August 3, 1930 – November 18, 2015) was an American musicologist and folklorist.

McCormick was born in 1930 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was brought up by his mother, and as a child lived in Alabama, Colorado, West Virginia and Texas, as she traveled to find work as a hospital technician. He did not complete his school education, but worked at various times running errands for musicians in Cedar Point, Ohio, and later as an electrician, cook, carnival worker and taxi driver. In 1946, he met record store owner and discographer Orin Blackstone in New Orleans, and began assisting Blackstone in researching and compiling his multi-volume Index to Jazz. He became Down Beat's Texas correspondent in 1949, and, as his interest turned primarily towards blues, began traveling and researching the lives and origins of previously undocumented blues musicians around the country, as well as folk traditions and customs.

In the late 1950s, McCormick "discovered" and recorded musicians such as Mance Lipscomb, Robert Shaw and Lightnin' Hopkins. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he assembled a group of former convicts who had never performed together, and after trying but failing to get Bob Dylan to end his rehearsals with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, cut off Dylan's electricity supply, possibly giving rise to the apocryphal story that Pete Seeger had attempted to cut Dylan's power supply during a performance there.

McCormick wrote numerous magazine articles and album liner notes, and assembled an extensive private archive of Texas musical history. He researched the lives of dead blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson and Henry Thomas. His researches into Robert Johnson's life started in 1972 while he was working for the Smithsonian Institution, and included interviews with people who had known the musician. Though McCormick originally intended publishing his researches as a book, Biography of a Phantom, his work was never completed and he later said that he had lost interest in it.

He died on November 18, 2015 from esophageal cancer, at the age of 85.

External links

• Mac McCormick Still Has the Blues by Michael Hall
• The Ballad of Geeshie and Eevie by John Jeremiah Sullivan