Last week I recommended Fred McDowell's You Gotta Move. If you haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, go and listen now before you read any further…
The farmer who walked out of the woods
It's the first day of autumn, 1959. Alan Lomax and English folk singer Shirley Collins are in Como, Mississippi, on what became known as the Southern Journey, a field recording expedition through the American South. They're set up at Lonnie Young's porch, recording the Young brothers' fife and drum ensemble.
Nobody expected what happened next.
A slight man in overalls emerged from the local woods, guitar in hand, and ambled over to the porch. His name was Fred McDowell. He was 54 years old. He'd never been recorded. He'd spent decades playing at local dances, picnics, juke joints and on the farm where he worked without anyone from the wider music world ever hearing him.
Without much fanfare he sat down and started to play.
Lomax later wrote that the blues, speaking through Fred, sounded like a deep-voiced herald, with the treble strings answering like a silver-voiced heavenly choir. Lomax kept returning to the farm for several evenings, recording everything McDowell knew. McDowell kept telling him he couldn't play nearly as well as other men he knew.
When Lomax played back the recordings to McDowell that evening on the porch, Fred stomped up and down, whooping and laughing and hugging his wife. He knew he had been heard. He knew his fortune had been made.
What happened next
At 55 years old, Mississippi Fred McDowell was suddenly lauded as a great new discovery in the blues world. He went on to play the Newport Folk Festival, tour Europe, and record more than a dozen albums. A star of the 1960s and 70s folk revival — decades after most musicians would have given up hope of being heard.
And then the Rolling Stones covered You Gotta Move on their Sticky Fingers album in 1971. The Stones wined and dined him and bought him a silver lamé suit. McDowell wore it home to Como.
He died in Memphis in 1972. He was buried in the silver lamé suit.
What makes him extraordinary
Here's what I want you to listen for in You Gotta Move. The slide and the voice are almost indistinguishable.
McDowell sings a phrase. The slide plays the same phrase back. Or the slide leads and the voice follows. Or they move together, so closely intertwined that you stop being able to tell which is which. The slide isn't accompaniment — it's another voice in the conversation.
This is exactly what we've been building toward in these newsletters. The singing before you play principle I mentioned last week. The economy of the harmonica players. Blind Willie Johnson telling a complete story without words. All of it points here.
The slide guitar, when it's working properly, doesn't play notes. It sings. And McDowell's You Gotta Move is one of the purest examples of that anywhere in the recorded blues tradition.
What it means for your playing
I teach this piece. And what makes it so useful as a teaching piece is that the vocal melody is right there on the top string in Open D — the same strings and positions we've been working in throughout this series. The slide just plays what the voice sings. Simple as that.
But here's the thing that took me a while to understand. It works both ways.
Most players think the slide follows the voice. And it does. But the slide can also help your voice. When you play those blue note squeeze zones on the slide, the notes between the frets that we've been talking about for weeks, your ear starts to hear those microtonal positions. Your voice starts to find them too. The slide teaches your ear. And what your ear learns, your voice can eventually reach.
The slide and the bottom strings work beautifully here too — strings 4 and 5 carry the same melody in a lower register, darker and more grounded. McDowell uses that lower register as a kind of bass voice under the singing. It's the same cigar box thinking we talked about a few weeks ago — those bottom strings as the engine room, this time carrying the melody itself.
Playing and singing aren't separate activities. The slide is a path toward the internal voice you're trying to get out into the world. Every time you find a blue note on the top string, you're training yourself to hear it — and eventually to sing it.
The slide doesn't just follow the voice. It helps you find it.
Have another listen to Fred McDowell, You Gotta Move. Listen with this in mind: when is it the voice leading and when is it the slide? See if you can tell them apart. Then pick up your slide in Open D and try to play the vocal melody on the top string. Don't worry about getting it perfect. Just try to follow the voice with the slide. That's the whole exercise.
You Gotta Move is one of the pieces I teach in the 30-Day Slide Launchpad — a structured programme for getting your slide playing off the ground with my personal guidance. I'll be opening a limited number of places again in late September. If that's something you'd like to be first to hear about, drop me a WhatsApp, or pick up your Get Going with Slide Guide here.
See you on the back porch!