BOOKS
THE phantom in Robert “Mack” McCormick’s extraordinary Biography Of A Phantom is Robert Johnson, a musician whose posthumous reputation was constructed from fragments, but the description might also apply to McCormick himself. It seems extraordinary – unbelievable – that the musicologist (who died in 2015) knew so much about Johnson, yet failed to disclose it. Having done the fieldwork, he reworked his book several times, adding false trails and questionable assertions, before losing interest. McCormick’s struggles with depression derailed the project and damaged his reputation.
In recent years, the foundations of the Robert Johnson myth have been questioned in a way which throws the behaviour of the ‘blues mafia’ of white folklorists into sharp relief. However noble the intention, their efforts to ‘collect’ lost blues players had a whiff of paternalism. In 1965, the most famous of them, Alan Lomax, encouraged the organisers of the Newport Folk Festival to find a group of black prisoners to sing worksongs while chopping wood. The authorities were not keen, but did sanction a singing group of recently released prisoners. McCormick, the group’s wrangler, earned a glimmer of notoriety when he mounted the stage to interrupt Bob Dylan’s soundcheck so that the ex-cons could warm up.