This is McDowell’s last recording, made on 5 November 1971 at the long defunct Gaslight in Greenwich Village. McDowell’s bottleneck style is now legendary, but at the time he was barely-known as a musician. He had only recently gained enough financial security as a musician to give up his day job as a share-crop farmer. McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, near Memphis. His parents, who were farmers, died when McDowell was a youth. He started playing guitar at the age of 14 and played at dances around Rossville. Wanting a change from plowing fields, he moved to Memphis in 1926 where he started to work in the Buck-Eye feed mill where they processed cotton into oil and other products[4]. He also had a number of other jobs and played music for tips. Later in 1928 he moved south into Mississippi to pick cotton[5]. He settled in Como, Mississippi, about 40 miles south of Memphis, in 1940 or 1941, and worked steadily as a farmer, continuing to perform music at dances and picnics. Initially he played slide guitar using a pocket knife and then a slide made from a beef rib bone, later switching to a glass slide for its clearer sound. He played with the slide on his ring finger.[6] While commonly lumped together with Delta Blues singers, McDowell actually may be considered the first of the bluesmen from the ‘North Mississippi’ region – parallel to, but somewhat east of the Delta region – to achieve widespread recognition for his work. A version of the state’s signature …

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