Fred McDowell was a seminal figure in Mississippi hill country blues and one of the most vibrant performers of the 1960s blues revival. A sharecropper and local entertainer in 1959, he made his first recordings at his home on a farm north of Como for folklorist Alan Lomax, and the depth and originality of his music brought him worldwide acclaim, allowing him to record and tour prolifically during his final years. Usually billed as “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, he was actually born and raised in Rossville, Tennessee, with his birth date uncertain, though often cited as January 12, 1904 and also indicated by census and Social Security documents as 1906 or 1907. His music blended sounds from local Tennessee guitarists, the pulsating juke joint grooves of the North Mississippi hills, and the hard-edged blues he absorbed during several years in the Delta. Spirituals were an important part of his repertoire, and his 1965 recording of “You Got to Move” gained widespread fame when the Rolling Stones recorded it on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. He learned to fret his guitar strings with a bottleneck or metal slide after seeing his father’s cousin play with a steak bone, and he honed his skills under the tutelage of his longtime friend and neighbor Eli Green, whose song “Write Me a Few Lines” became a McDowell signature piece and was later recorded by Bonnie Raitt. So well known for the rhythmic tour-de-force “Shake ’Em On Down” that he earned the nickname “Shake ’Em,” McDowell laid the groundwork for generations of hill country musicians, most notably R. L. Burnside, who began by playing McDowell’s guitar at a house party. Alan Lomax called him “a bluesman quite the equal of Son House and Muddy Waters, but, musically speaking, their granddaddy.” The highly acclaimed albums he recorded during his belated recording career from 1959 to 1971 showed that some of the greatest country blues music had gone undiscovered by record companies that scoured the South for talent in the 1920s and 30s. Although he was in demand at folk and blues clubs and festivals, he kept a job pumping gas at the Stuckey’s candy store and service station on I-55 during his final years, even when he was finally able to support himself as a musician, and Stuckey’s also served as his social hangout and office for calls from booking agents and record producers. Earlier, he had worked at jobs that included picking cotton, driving a tractor, and laboring for an oil mill, a dairy, a logging company, and, in 1940, the Hotel Peabody in Memphis when he applied for a Social Security card. Fifty-one years later, the Peabody was the site of his posthumous induction into the Blues Hall of Fame. He died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on July 3, 1972, and is buried in the Hammond Hill M. B. Church cemetery north of Como.
