Blue Monday: Mississippi Fred McDowell

Blue Monday will be a (hopefully) weekly post, focused solely on blues, but may spread and leak into including other related genres - calypso, soul, jazz- anything I feel owes a great debt to the work of early bluesmen and women or is directly between genres. anybody who can "sing the shit out of the blues" (Fred Neil on Karen Dalton)

As mentioned in the opening post, Mississippi Fred McDowell marked a turning point in the way I listened to music. Amazing Grace - an album with the Hunters Chapel Singers - made me listen to the gaps in music, the unfilled spaces left to linger, and the canyons of emptiness left between instruments, vocals and electronics.

Aside from all that, this album is utterly impossible to dislike, it is heartbreakingly beautiful, just a group of gospel voices, singing together and apart, each one with their own inflections; the undulating male voice lingers on final phrases and the heavy female voice flies to the top notes like it's ascending into heaven, leaving the twang of Fred's guitar far behind.

The quality is good, having only been recorded in the mid-60s in the Blues Revival of that time. The songs are all religious; plain folk songs from the Mississippi brought to life in exquisite relief. When I hear the slow opening refrain of Amazing Grace I smell the golden dust of the Mississippi, the dirty river and the whitewashed wooden houses strewn along its banks, yet I've never set foot inside the US.

The only accompaniment is McDowell's bottleneck guitar, the gospel slant to Amazing Grace stands in contrast to much of McDowell's other work, where he sang as a delta blues man, alone on a guitar with a sharp lilt to his voice. Lots of people have tried and failed to cover McDowell, most notably the Stones, who covered Fred's signature song 'You Got To Move' on Sticky Fingers, they had no souls, they weren't worthy of playing the blues proper, and so couldn't.

Watch his crinkled old face here

Listen:

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You Got To Move


Mississippi Fred McDowell - Amazing Grace