Various Artists : Playing for the Man at the Door – Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958-1971

In the 1950s and ’60s, the blues was the dominant form of Black vernacular music throughout Texas and the surrounding areas. In segregated neighbourhoods, community members gathered in saloons, dancehalls, and each other’s homes to hear their neighbours sing their stories of sorrow, heartbreak, jubilation, and triumph. Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick, an academically untrained but fanatical devotee of the blues, stepped into this world and became one of its most devout advocates and documentarians. By photographing Black and Latino Texans and their neighbourhoods, as well as recording and interviewing musicians, many of whom never stepped foot into a proper recording studio, McCormick endeared and eventually embedded himself into these communities. By the time he died in 2015, McCormick had amassed a collection of 590 reels of sound recordings and 165 boxes of manuscripts, original interviews and research notes, thousands of photographs and negatives, playbil