PLAYING FOR THE MAN AT THE DOOR: FIELD RECORDINGS

In the 1950s and 60s, the blues was the dominant form of Black vernacular music throughout Texas andthe 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. Robert Mack McCormick, an academically untrained but fanatical devotee ofthe blues, stepped into this world and became one of it's most devout advocates and documentarians.By photographing Black and Latino Texans and their neighborhoods, as well as recording andinterviewing musicians-many of whom never stepped foot into a proper recording studio-McCormickendeared 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, playbills, and posters.Because McCormick never published or released most of these materials, his collection became a thingof legend and intense speculation among scholars, blues aficionados, and musicians alike.Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958-1971 isthe first compilation of music drawn from this fabled collection, which indelibly documents a pivotalmoment in African American history. It features never-before-heard performances not only frommusicians who became icons in their own right-including Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb-butalso, crucially, performers whose names may be unfamiliar to even the most devoted blues fans andscholars. Newly mastered recordings and accompanying photographs bring to life many of theseforgotten figures: offering insight into their lives and illuminating in new, enlightening ways their joysand anguish, deep social connections, distinctive voices, and cultural networks. The collection spansgospels, ragtime, country blues dirges, the unclassifiable music of George Bongo Joe Coleman, andmore, showing that no community, no matter how tight knit, is monolithic.Accompanying the music is a 128-page book, which contains breathtaking photographs by McCormickand his associates, as well as contextual essays by producers Jeff Place and John Troutman onMcCormick's life, and by musicians Mark Puryear and Dom Flemons on some of the marginalizedcommunities throughout Greater Texas to which McCormick devoted his life's work. This release is apartnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.