From Thomas Stern:

On August 4, Smithsonian Folkways will release Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958 – 1971, a compilation of previously unheard field recordings from Robert “Mack” McCormick's legendary blues archive. Today, hear the first track, "Train Roll Up," by Leroy "Country" Johnson and Edwin "Buster" Pickens.

The collection will be released on CD and LP box sets, which include a 128-page book of photographs from the archive and essays by leading blues scholars from the Smithsonian and beyond. The vinyl set marks the largest vinyl box set in Smithsonian Folkways history, with six LPs of music.

In the 1950s and '60s, the blues was the dominant form of Black vernacular music throughout Texas and the surrounding areas. In segregated neighborhoods, community members gathered in saloons, dancehalls, and each other’s homes to hear their neighbors sing their stories of sorrow, heartbreak, jubilation, and triumph. 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 neighborhoods, as well as recording and interviewing musicians — many of whom never set 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, research notes, photographs, playbills, and posters. Because McCormick never published or released most of these materials, his collection became a thing of legend and intense speculation among scholars, blues aficionados, and musicians alike.

Playing for the Man at the Door is the first compilation of music drawn from this fabled collection, which indelibly documents a pivotal moment in African American history. It features never-before-heard performances not only from musicians who became icons in their own right (including Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb) but also, crucially, performers whose names may be unfamiliar to even the most devoted blues fans and scholars.

Newly mastered recordings and accompanying photographs bring to life many of these forgotten figures: offering insight into their lives and illuminating in new, enlightening ways their joys and anguish, deep social connections, distinctive voices, and cultural networks. The collection spans gospels, ragtime, country blues dirges, the unclassifiable music of George “Bongo Joe” Coleman, and more, showing that no community, no matter how tight knit, is monolithic.

This release is a partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which will exhibit items from the collection beginning June 23. On April 4, Smithsonian Books will release Biography of a Phantom, a book on the life and legacy of blues musician Robert Johnson that was left unfinished and unpublished at the time of McCormick’s death.

“McCormick’s field recordings allow us to ponder the possibilities, power dynamics, problems, and promise associated with interactions between ‘folklorists’ and ‘the folk,’ between a white collector and mostly Black artists, at a time and in places where Jim Crow traumas continued to prevail,” says John Troutman, curator of music at the National Museum of American History, co-producer of Playing for the Man at the Door and editor of Biography of a Phantom.
Main Folkways Page for the Album (click)