PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
"ROBERT ""MACK"" MCCORMICK (1930-2015) was an American musicologist and folklorist who researched the lives of blues musicians while supporting himself by writing, census taking, and in 1968 and 1971, working with musicians in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. JOHN W. TROUTMAN is curator of American music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History."
KIRKUS REVIEWS, STARRED REVIEW This edited version of the manuscript could stand on its own as a revelation, but the contextual material adds to the intrigue. [...] A worthwhile investigation into a true legend of the blues. LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW This page-turner, crime-thrillerlike odyssey leads readers through the American South for details about the blues guitarist. [...] VERDICT McCormick conveys a wild enthusiasm for his research and the music of Robert Johnson that readers will find contagious. BOOKLIST This volume is a significant contribution to scholarship on Black culture and the blues, told by a flawed man whose perseverance, patience, diligence, and methodical methods provide valuable insights into Robert Johnson and the milieu from which his music sprang. When in 1973 Mack McCormick first told me about Biography of a Phantom, he called his search for the facts of Robert Johnson's life 'a detective story,' and it is. But what McCormick really found and brought home is a gorgeous intimacy with Johnson's works and days, all culminating in a 1970 Mississippi listening party where people who knew Johnson more than thirty years before, who heard him play, who played their now long-gone Johnson 78s until they wore out, gather to hear King of the Delta Blues Singers. McCormick's research may have been superseded by other books; the spirit in his book, a thing in itself, has not been. Not even close. -GREIL MARCUS, author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack's idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can't help but be drawn into Mack's search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer. -DOM FLEMONS, The American Songster At long last, a legendary manuscript sees the light of day. In the half century since Mack McCormick began his Biography of a Phantom, Robert Johnson has become much less phantom-like, with numerous books, articles, and films devoted to illuminating his life and legacy. It is instead McCormick who has become a mystery-and who is this book's most compelling revelation. Through Smithsonian historian John Troutman's editorial framing and McCormick's own narrative, we understand for the fi rst time the real life of a phantom, just not the one McCormick intended. -PRESTON LAUTERBACH, author of The Chitlin' Circuit: And the Road to Rock 'n' Roll
