Mack McCormick

Robert Burton "Mack" McCormick (August 3, 1930 – November 18, 2015) was an American musicologist and folklorist. McCormick conducted extensive research into the history of the blues and assembled the material for a major biography of Robert Johnson. The biography was finally published eight years after McCormick’s death.

Biography McCormick was born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. and Lightnin' Hopkins. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he assembled a group of former convicts who had never performed together, and after trying but failing to get Bob Dylan to end his rehearsals with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, cut off Dylan's electricity supply, possibly giving rise to the apocryphal story that Pete Seeger had attempted to cut the power with an axe during Dylan's debut performance with electric guitars and keyboards. and Henry Thomas. He began research on Johnson in 1968, while working for the Smithsonian Institution. McCormick intended to publish his research as a book, Biography of a Phantom, and uncovered a huge amount of fresh material, including discovering Johnson's living relatives and previously unknown photos of the musician. but he was also frustrated by recurring bouts of bipolar disorder.

McCormick died on November 18, 2015, in Houston, Texas,

Archives In 2022, it was announced that McCormick's archive, including 590 reels of sound recordings, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, playbills, booking contracts, and miscellaneous materials and ephemera concerning blues musicians would be housed at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.

Beginning in 2023, Smithsonian Folkways began releasing some of McCormick's previously unreleased recordings as Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971.