I studied or learned with five of those guys above [...] Like Fred McDowell...
Are you kidding? McDowell is one of my all time favorite! I started playing electric because of him and Johnny Shines, because of thier sound!! Ahh my my....
Did you meet mister Shines too? I wish I had the chance to see him back in the days, but I was not born, not soon enough I guess, hehe.
Yes, I did. I had seen him perform several times in the Chicago area in the 80s (He performed fairly regularly until not long before his death.) I got a chance to sit with him for an hour or so and talk after being introduced to him by Virginia bluesman Bowling Green John Cephas whom I'd known for many years. He played pieces of several tunes I asked about for me but I didn't have a guitar with me so I didn't get to really learn a lot from him. I had the chance to spend several days with Fred McDowell and (within my limited skill-level back then) learned quite a bit from him. Someone had asked about meeting him before. I'll copy this from part of a previous post...
QUOTE
...I found him driving a tractor in a cotton field near Como, Mississippi. I walked out to talk to him and he said he'd give me some pointers when he had a little time later after he finished his chores. I spent a week sleeping in an abandoned pick-up truck down the road from his place. I practiced all day sitting in the bed of the truck or in the shade of a tree in the field-break, and spent the evenings at his place learning what I could from him (and I couldn't slide for sh!t back then so I needed a lot of help). The day I left, he laughed at my slide-version of the tune "The Pusher" I'd come up with and said "Not bad, keep at it." and told me to keep the old unchromed deep-well socket he'd loaned me from under the seat of his tractor when he saw my slide was a thin chromed slide from a music-store up north ("Hahaha... that'll never do. You need something with a little meat to it.... Here, try this.") I returned a couple of years later and he'd died. He's buried in a little cemetery next to his wife at Hammond Hill Baptist Chuch just outside of Como. His headstone was inexpensive, just a poured block of cement with his name cast in it. And his name was even spelled wrong...Fred McDewell. I told myself I was going to by him a real headstone someday. I mentioned it to the old woman back at the general-store in Como who had told me how to find the cemetery. (Very out-of-the-way). She said "Why you wanna go an' do that? His people bought what they could afford. It'd be disrespectful of them for some white-boy from up North to buy him another one." Her statement had a big impact on me. I'd never considered that. I've bought two gravestones for old bluesmen since, but only for un-marked graves with no known family. A few years ago on my way to New Orleans, I stopped in Como again to pay my respects to Mister Fred's and Miss Mae's (who had also been very kind to me) graves. I played one of his tunes and shared a whiskey with him and then went on my way. On my way back to the inter-state highway, I just happened to drive down that same dirt-road I'd walked down years before when I had hitch-hiked down to find him. The same old rusty abandoned pick-up truck was still there, looking almost the same as it had thirty years earlier. The hot sun beat down on the dirt-road and the cotton-fields, just as it had then. As if nothing at all had changed, except the calendar. And me riding in a Buick instead of walking on foot. A very......blue, un-easy feeling sort of. Very hard to explain.
So anyway, yes. It was him. Bonnie (who he mentioned..."a young white gal, Little Bonnie" he called her. I'd never heard her name before back then) had been there a year or two before me to learn from him. I give her a great deal of credit, a young white teenaged-girl hitching deep into the South (where segregation and racism were just a matter of fact back then). Things then weren't like they are now down there. (Well, maybe not that different in some ways.)
Below are a couple of pictures I took myself, probably on that visit. (I've paid my respects there many times.) I always bring that same guitar, one I'd just gotten and brought it down to show him when I found out he'd died.
Mr. Fred's grave, about 1989 (mis-spelled "McDewell")
The panorama view beyond his grave towards the river.
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