#fred mcdowell

Shake 'Em On Down - Mississippi Fred McDowell

60's

A relentless groove straight from the Mississippi hills

Tom Pomposello, Mississippi Fred McDowell, David Baron

From my Substack:

The Last Dance: 55 Years in the Making

A pre-release essay by Fred Seibert

I wasn’t always in the cartoon business. (For the regular Oblivion readers: My primary occupation for the past 35 years has been producing cartoons for television.)

Fifty-some years ago, two friends and I started Oblivion Records. We recorded blues and jazz albums in New York City, and they were pretty good. A couple were maybe a better than good. But we didn’t really know what we were doing when it came to running a record company, and in three years we were out of business.

I’ve been putting the masters on the internet for several years now, more as an experiment in digital media than any real commercial ambition. A few years ago I released, for the first time, an amazing avant-garde jazz artist I’d recorded in the Oblivion era. It did better than expected, which gave me the courage to think about what we’d do for our final release.

Actually, there was never really a question about what it should be.

…

The first artist Oblivion ever recorded was called Mississippi Fred McDowell. It was the last album of his lifetime. To this day, it remains the record of ours that gets played the most. Fred remains the artist Oblivion’s most associated with, which is both a great honor and, given everything that followed, a somewhat bittersweet one.

Simultaneously with that album, we recorded Fred at my college radio station, WKCR-FM, Columbia University’s radio station. He sang while my partner Tom Pomposello accompanied him on guitar. Fred passed away several months later, in 1972. Those tapes went on the shelf.

What you never knew, what a lot of people who love his records have forgotten, is that when Mississippi Fred McDowell was ‘discovered’ in 1959, he’d spent more than thirty years of weekends playing dances and house parties across Mississippi. The blues, in its original setting, was music you moved to. It carried stories and history in its lyrics, but it lived in the body. Fred loved being an entertainer. He loved getting people up on their feet. He knew that his people loved to shake it, Fred knew it in his bones.

Tom Pomposello knew it too.

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Tom was a blues scholar, a blues musician, a blues purist in the best sense. He believed fiercely in the integrity and artistic truth of the men and women who made the music. But he didn’t think the blues was meant to be preserved in amber. He believed in it as a living, breathing form that had always absorbed whatever was great from its contemporary surroundings. Tom was Fred’s student, his accompanist, and ultimately, his friend, and his famous defense of Fred McDowell playing country blues on an electric guitar said everything about how he felt: the music had never stayed frozen.

So it was my surprise, though, in retrospect, maybe not really, when Tom emailed me a new version of Fred’s “Bull Dog Blues”* in the late 1990s to see what I thought. He had taken Fred’s vocal track from those 1971 radio station recordings, wiped his own original guitar parts. He got together with musician/producer David Baron, rebuilt the track from the ground up. Electric Dobro. Harmonica. Keyboards. The beats and the sound of a dance floor.

I thought it was great.

Tom called it “Bulldog Blues [Dance Mix 1998].” The quarter century between Fred’s vocal performance and Tom’s remix… That 25+ years, he always said, was the secret sauce.

Tragically, Tom passed away in a car accident not long after finishing the track. The track was never released. It sat again, waiting.

… 

I’ve spent years thinking about how to do right by this recording. By Fred, by Tom, by what they made together across those decades. The 1998 mix is extraordinary, it really works, but music moves fast, and by now it’s 25 years old. My friend, DJ/director Jon Kane, didn’t want me releasing a period piece. I wanted to release something that could find new ears, new feet, new rooms.

So we used AI to separate the original stems into Fred’s voice, Tom’s Dobro and harmonica, David’s keyboards. I brought in a contemporary mixer to rebuild it for today. The new version keeps the soul of what Tom and David created while giving it a sound that belongs to right now.

We’re going to be dropping both tracks in a limited edition 12” vinyl single, and eventually it goes to streaming everywhere. 

This will be Oblivion Records’ final release. After fifty-some years, it feels right that we close with the beginning, with Fred, with Tom, with a record that honors what the blues always was before anyone decided it needed protecting from itself.

…

*Bulldog Blues* is coming soon. More details shortly.

Mississippi Fred McDowell: vocals (recorded 1971)

Honest Tom Pomposello: electric Dobro, harmonica

David Baron: keyboards

Original production: Tom Pomposello & David Baron, 1999

Contemporary remix: Jacob Rosati, 2026

Original vocals recorded by Fred Seibert, WKCR-FM, Columbia University

Oblivion Records: Independent American Beats 

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You gotta move