Search - Fred Mcdowell :: The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell

Choosing the tracks for The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell must have been a difficult task, because in his brief recording career, practically every song he played was a nearly perfect slice of pure, unadulterated Delta blues. McDowell was a contemporary of prewar blues legends Robert Johnson and Skip James, but unlike them, he didn't make any commercial recordings until 1964, when he started working with Arhoolie. The tracks on The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell are drawn from his five-year tenure at the label and include such classics as "You Gotta Move," which was covered by the Rolling Stones, "Kokomo Blues," and "Write Me a Few of Your Lines," which Bonnie Raitt later recorded. McDowell has a distinctive slide guitar style that he honed in his decades of playing local fish fries and rent parties. Even when he picks an electric guitar on "Meet Down in Froggy Bottom" and "My Baby," he sounds as if he's channeling the music from a 1930 Delta juke joint. McDowell was not a guitar innovator like Charley Patton or Robert Johnson, but he sang the blues with a passion and authority that have rarely been equaled. --Michael Simmons