The Productivity, Madness and Mistreated Legacy of Mack McCormick

Do the custodians of the gifted, troubled researcher's work on the great bluesman Robert Johnson remain intent on keeping a major portion of that work off-limits to the public? Unfortunately, they do.

The late Robert Burton McCormick (1930-2015), universally known as “Mack,” was a savvy, tenacious researcher and talented writer who devoted something more than a half-dozen years, or from 1969 to 1976, to an investigation of the life and death of the Mississippi singer/songwriter/guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938). “To most blues historians,” I wrote in an essay for Tidal magazine that appeared on April 5, 2023, “Johnson represents the apogee” of the genre known as the Mississippi Delta blues.¹

Mack McCormick, in front, with the major Texas blues singer Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (in sunglasses). Hopkins’s career was at a low ebb in 1959, when McCormick began promoting him, helping to rekindle interest in a great musician. To Hopkins’s right is the singer “Long Gone” Miles. Photograph taken in 1959.

According to researchers familiar with McCormick’s life and work, he had essentially completed his book about Johnson, which he entitled Biography of a Phantom, by 1976. For multiple, but largely emotional reasons, McCormick never published the book. “From 1976 on,” I wrote, “he essentially obsessed over his manuscript, unable to release it into the world.” The Johnson manuscript was not the only piece of research McCormick was sitting on. “A hoarder on an immense scale,” I wrote, “McCormick died in possession of a vast, largely uncatalogued archive that encompassed the breadth of Southern vernacular music and folkways. The research and writing on Johnson comprised only a small portion” of the archive, which McCormick had taken to calling “The Monster,” half in jest and half in despair of ever wresting control of it. The ungainly sprawl had long taken over the better part of McCormick’s Houston home.

Mack McCormick was more than eccentric. He was mentally ill, saddled with bipolar disorder throughout his adult life. His illness had an impact on every aspect of his work and his relationship to the world. In one respect, it was beneficial: during his manic episodes, Mack was able to work virtually nonstop, accomplishing vast amounts of fieldwork. Yet not only did the inevitable periods of depression leave McCormick dysfunctional for weeks at a time, but the paranoia that often accompanies bipolar disorder clearly came to distort Mack’s thinking and behavior.

Several years after Mack’s death, his daughter and heir, Susannah Nix, donated The Monster to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, whose staff set about taming it, that is, organizing and cataloguing it. Dr. John Troutman, the museum’s curator of music and musical instruments, took on the job of editing McCormick’s Johnson manuscript into publishable shape. Troutman bent his shoulder to the task, and in 2023, Smithsonian Books (with which this writer published a book in 1999) released Biography of a Phantom.

It appeared in surprisingly truncated form, 181 pages sandwiched between Troutman’s 32-page preface, thirteen-page afterword, and 35 pages of endnotes. As the book’s editor, Troutman “inherited a tangle of difficulties,” I wrote. While I sympathized with his multiple dilemmas, I argued that Troutman, who clearly admired McCormick, had in several respects not acted as a worthy steward of Mack’s book.

To cut to the chase: Troutman made a number of deletions, one in particular, that severely damaged Biography of a Phantom. (Without access to the deleted text, it’s impossible to know the extent of the damage.)

In 1972, in what alone amounted to a impressive piece of fieldwork, McCormick located Robert Johnson’s two half-sisters, Bessie Hines and Carrie Thompson, in Churchton, MD, not far from Annapolis. The sisters signed a contract with McCormick which provided that they would share with him their memories of Johnson, which they did. These interviews, if they ever appear, may take their place among McCormick’s most signal achievements. But that’s a big “if.” For reasons that Troutman provides in his supplementary text, he deleted the sisters’ memories from McCormick’s text.²

Last week I contacted Troutman to ask him if he and his associates have reconsidered their stance regarding McCormick’s book, that is, if there are any plans to make available to the public the material that McCormick gathered from Thompson and Hines. To myself and others, McCormick’s at times unsavory actions do not justify withholding what may be an invaluable trove of information and insight about a genius of American music. Countless people will benefit from the release of this material.

Let me outline the misdeeds for which McCormick is posthumously paying. First, he sorely abused the trust that Thompson and Hines had placed in him. In the years remaining to them (Hines died shortly, in 1974, Thompson in 1983), McCormick treated the two women, as I wrote in Tidal, “shabbily, deceitfully, and to an increasing extent sociopathically.” He refused to return several photographs they loaned him, including one, still unseen by all but a few researchers, of Johnson and his nephew Lewis Harris. According to yet another family member of Johnson’s, to be introduced below, McCormick responded to Thompson’s request that he return the photographs by mailing her an empty envelope. “Thompson’s attorneys sent letters to McCormick, demanding their return,” writes Troutman. “He never complied….” In addition, McCormick told the sisters that he had located a number of Johnson’s surviving family members whose claims to the royalties from Johnson’s recordings trumped theirs. He had found just one, Johnson’s son Claud (in another remarkable piece of fieldwork). McCormick claimed, too, that the contract he had signed with the sisters covered a wide range of material, not just their memories of Johnson, but the photographs, various memorabilia, and other items. The contract was for the interviews alone.

Much of McCormick’s deceitful and abusive behavior came on the heels of the 1973 arrival on the scene of a second Johnson researcher, Steve LaVere, as much an entrepreneur as a musicologist. By this time, Columbia Records had released two albums of Johnson’s recordings, King of the Delta Blues Singers, Volumes 1 and 2. They were selling steadily. The Johnson renaissance had begun in earnest, and Steve LaVere aimed to cash in on it. Thompson showed him two photographs she had found since McCormick’s visit, which have since become iconic: the singer in a fedora and pinstripe suit and a photobooth self-portrait by Johnson, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

In addition to conducting his own, 1974, interviews with Carrie Thompson, the unscrupulous LaVere convinced Thompson to sign over to him ownership of the rights to all of Robert Johnson’s 41 recordings (including a dozen unreleased outtakes) and the two photographs, promising to split all future royalties with her. LaVere further arranged with the legendary talent scout and record producer John Hammond, a vice president at Columbia, to release a three-volume set of Johnson’s complete recordings, including the pinstripe suit and dangling cigarette photographs and liner notes by LaVere.

Notified by Hammond of these developments, McCormick was distraught. In 1975, “he sent Hammond a five-page letter,” writes Troutman, “arguing that his extensive research on Johnson preceded that of LaVere [which it did], as did his agreement with Thompson and Hines [which also did], and that he was feeling ‘a bit ripped-off here.’” Intent on shutting down Columbia’s project, McCormick did just that, “creating enough confusion [with a series of duplicituous letters to Hammond and others at Columbia],’ writes Troutman, for the label’s lawyers “to see risk in moving forward with the release until questions could be answered.”

To understand McCormick’s behavior, one must be aware of the bind he felt himself in. He was mentally ill, incapable of letting go of his book, whether out of a pathological perfectionism or other, more delusional, reasons. Instead, he obsessively reworked it, each version increasingly detached from reality. He also, understandably, wanted credit for getting to the sisters first, ie. getting the scoop, and likely in greater detail than LaVere, who had interviewed only Carrie Thompson. Yes, he acted abysmally towards Thompson and Hines and was to act deceitfully towards Columbia, but he wanted credit where it was due. And, as was never in doubt, he did not, as did LaVere, have financial gain in mind. He was a man in psychological pain, at loggerheads with himself. “Moral turpitude” was never a factor.

In 1990, Columbia, having overcome its fear of a lawsuit by McCormick, released the handsomely art-directed box set Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings. It ended up selling more than a million units, with Steve LaVere receiving half of the royalties. The other half was put in escrow, pending recognition of Johnson’s legal heir(s). In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court declared Claud Johnson the sole heir. Claud immediately received $1 million in royalties. Steve LaVere continued to pocket the rest until his death in 2015, one month after McCormick died.

After the Smithsonian had acquired McCormick’s papers, a third stepsister emerged: Annye Anderson, now 98, the author of the 2020 memoir Brother Robert. Although Anderson, who is some 15 years Johnson’s junior, is not Johnson’s blood relative (this family’s lineage is tangled indeed), she has always thought of him as “Brother Robert.”

“For Anderson,” Troutman writes in his afterword, “what McCormick and LaVere took from her sisters—not simply through the financial losses accrued through legal costs, but also the years of stress, anxiety, sadness, nightmares and trauma—delegitimizes any signed agreement between them and McCormick.” Anderson asked that the memories of Johnson that her sisters had shared with McCormick be removed from Biography of a Phantom. “In respect for her wishes,” Troutman writes, “we expunged the stories her sisters provided to McCormick from this publication [McCormick’s book].” A major, perhaps riveting, portion of Biography of a Phantom is unavailable to readers. In my opinion, this is an injustice to McCormick, his misdeeds notwithstanding.

“A specific rationale drove our decision to edit, frame and publish McCormick’s book in this manner,” writes Troutman, referring to his excisions and highly critical preface, afterword and notes. “[W]e imagined that [McCormick’s] true life’s work might ultimately come down not as much to his interpretive revelations on Robert Johnson or the blues, but rather to his role in amplifying the critical, ongoing conversations and dilemmas that churn around these questions.” What this amounts to is a minimization of Mack’s years of hard labor, despite meager resources and frequently debilitating mental illness, and of his tremendous accomplishment.

Mack McCormick in 2003, a dozen years before his death.

A recent New Yorker magazine article by Rachel Aviv, a staff writer for the magazine, reveals that the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, died in 2024 (after a 12-year case of Alzheimer’s disease) without ever confronting her second husband about his sexual abuse of Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea, in 1976, when the girl was nine, and for several years thereafter. According to Aviv, Munro had known about the abuse at least since, and likely before, Andrea informed her of it in a letter which Andrea wrote at age 25. Munro’s husband finally confessed to the abuse in 2005, aged 80, and was convicted of indecent assault. He did not serve prison time, but received two years’ probation and donated $10,000 to a treatment center for victims of sexual trauma. He died in 2013.

Shortly after Munro’s death, the Toronto Star published a detailed article about Andrea’s abuse and what Andrea has referred to as Munro’s “protect[ion]” of “the most destructive person of my life.” Canada’s largest chain of bookstores announced that while it would continue to carry Munro’s many titles, it would remove posters of the author from its stores. Munro Books, a prominent Victoria, British Columbia bookstore which Munro and her first husband co-founded, and which the Munro family no longer owns, plans to donate all proceeds from the sale of Alice Munro's books to organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse.

When I wrote Troutman last week, I mentioned the Munro case, saluting Munro Books’ decision. “I do not believe in anything like posthumously removing the honors that Munro earned,” I wrote, “or restricting sales of her books. In Munro's, and in Mack McCormick’s, cases—and I believe that the damage that Mack did was of a lesser order than Munro's—cancelling their achievements is not the way to go.

“What I suggest is this,” I wrote, “is this: publish the expunged material and, by way of acknowledging the harm that Mack McCormick did, make a meaningful act of reparations. I am not sure what, exactly, this would involve. But it's a way, in a manner of speaking, of converting misdeeds into good deeds. I'm aware that Susannah Nix donated not merely the archive, but her advances for Biography of a Phantom and for Smithsonian Folkways Records’ release of Mack's field recordings to the Music Maker Foundation.³ Whoever the beneficiary might be, I think that Smithsonian Books, or some arm of the Smithsonian, might consider taking actions along these lines.”

I received an email from Troutman on the following day. He wrote:

“Dear Tony,

“Due to McCormick never abiding by his end of the original signed agreements made between himself and the interviewees, and due to the wishes of the heir and donor of the McCormick collection, and due to the wishes of the heirs of the interviewees, the Smithsonian duly transferred the control of the interviews to the heirs of the interviewees. The heirs will determine when and under what conditions the interviews will be made available to the public. I am happy to connect you with our Office of General Counsel, if that would be helpful.

“The Robert “Mack” McCormick Collection, comprised of over 90 linear feet of documents, is open to the public for access and research in our museum’s Archives Center reading room. 290 tapes of his field recordings have been digitized by Smithsonian Folkways. Meanwhile, our museum’s staff has digitized and placed online over 4,000 photographs from the collection, and has digitized over 5,000 pages of McCormick’s research notes (we began by prioritizing the notes for his Texas Blues project with Paul Oliver, because the pages are incredibly fragile). These materials are all linked for public perusal within the collection’s 230 page finding aid, written by our archivist team.

“Best of luck with your endeavors, and feel free to reach out if you’d like to schedule a visit sometime to our reading room.

Sincerely,

John”

Troutman’s note did not indicate whether a visit to the reading room would include the opportunity to peruse McCormick’s interview(s) with Carrie Thompson and Bessie Hines. My understanding is that it would not.

I don’t have any plans to correspond further with Dr. Troutman. Unless I am misreading it, his email indicates that nobody is rethinking the decision to put Mack McCormick’s interviews with Thompson and Hines off-limits to the public, ie. to anyone without the specific permission of “the heirs of the interviewees.” I assume that these include Ms. Anderson.

I regret that this is where matters stand.

1. The current piece contains several passages from my Tidal article, some of which have been slightly reworded. The link to the Tidal piece is: https://tidal.com/magazine/article/robert-johnson-phantom/1-90500

2. Over the years, McCormick shared with researchers parts of what he had learned about Robert Johnson from Carrie Thompson and Bessie Hines, so some of the information that has been deleted from Biography of a Phantom has in fact reached the public.

3. In 2023, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released the three-CD, 66-track compilation Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958-1971. John Troutman co-produced the collection and co-wrote the liner notes, receiving Grammy nominations for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes. The Music Maker Foundation provides financial and other types of aid to makers of American roots music.