He Spent His Life Chasing a Music Legend

Two decades ago, Michael Hall wrote a flattering profile of music folklorist Robert "Mack" McCormick for Texas Monthly. Hall's new profile in Texas Monthly of McCormick, who died in 2015, is less flattering and far more complicated. The focus is on McCormick's decades-long quest to write the definitive life story of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. McCormick found and interviewed two of Johnson's sisters back in the 1970s, as well as countless others who knew the Mississippi legend, or of him. He kept voluminous notes and tapes in a stockpile that became known as the Monster. McCormick, however, never finished the work in his lifetime, and Hall explains that a big reason is that McCormick battled his own demons, including manic depression that led to "self-sabotage" and the destruction of relationships he had forged.

It is a fascinating, twisting tale, and Hall (who was able to read the Monster months after McCormick's death) floats the troubling possibility that McCormick began concocting a tale meant to torpedo the Johnson legend—that the man who hailed from Mississippi wasn't the same Robert Johnson who made the later legendary recordings. "Could it really be that Mack—angry and bitter at a world that had lionized Robert Johnson and never given his most enterprising biographer his proper due—had spent his final twenty years trying to destroy the Robert Johnson he had helped discover, telling anyone who would listen ... that we had the wrong guy?" It seems so. Read the full story, which notes that McCormick's biography of Johnson has finally been published posthumously, while the Smithsonian now has the Monster. (Read other longform stories.)