He spent a lifetime collecting the blues. The Smithsonian listened.
Smithsonian’s Folkways label and American History Museum are releasing Robert ‘Mack’ McCormick’s tapes, research and writings as part of Folkways’ 75th anniversary

The article in the Washington Post starts:

Robert “Mack” McCormick’s life was all about the blues. His Houston home was stuffed with reel-to-reel tapes, research files and vinyl records. But by the time he had died at age 85 in 2015, few really knew what his collection contained. That included his daughter, Susannah Nix. She was 3 when he finished his last significant project, the liner notes for a 1974 album featuring 1920s recordings by Texas musician Henry Thomas.

Which is why Nix thinks she knows exactly how her father would feel about the Smithsonian’s public reveal of the unruly collection McCormick coined “The Monster.”

“Oh, he would hate it,” says Nix, a 52-year-old writer in Texas and McCormick’s only child. “Which is why he never did anything. He was his own worst enemy. Nothing would ever be perfect enough. Even if he didn’t know he wanted it, it still had to be the ideal version of how it should be.”