Mack McCormick tapes

POAAAM/3/1/5

Mack McCormick tapes

c1962-1972

Tapes produced by Robert 'Mack' McCormick (3 Aug 1930 - 18 Nov 2015), an American folklorist and musicologist based for most of his adult life in Houston, Texas. Between 1959 and c1978 he was engaged in a long-distance book project with Oliver on the history of the blues in Texas, after which time they fell out and lost contact (for more on the story of which, see Alan Govenar's introduction to The Blues Come to Texas, 2019).

During the first phase of their work on the project, McCormick appears to have sent Oliver tapes by air mail on a fairly frequent basis; Oliver initially filed these with his 'Texas blues research' 'T' series of tapes (see POAAAM/3/1/4/1-5), but subsequently distinguished them with a separate 'MM' prefix. The extant tapes in the MM series run from numbers 6 to 29. MM6-MM21 appear to have been compiled and sent in a concentrated period, c1962-1963; a second batch of mostly post-war material (MM22-MM29) was sent later in the decade, as can be deduced from references in the letter accompanying MM25 to 'this batch of 8 tapes' and to the psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane (who debuted in 1966). In addition to the MM compilations, there are two tapes of spoken monologues from McCormick (1968-1969) and a further two tapes of telephone research interviews conducted by him in Jan 1972.

Typed tracklists (often with McCormick's detailed notes and commentary) for most of the MM tapes can be found in Oliver's tape index folder: see POAAAM/1/2/12/1. Those for MM15, 27 & 28 were stored in their original tape boxes (and have been left in them to preserve original order). For contact sheets of photographs taken by McCormick in Texas, see POAAAM/4/7. For printed research material apparently compiled by him, see POAAAM/1/2/2/16.

30 items

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