Como: Where Alan Lomax Found Fred McDowell on a Farm

Como, Mississippi, is a small Panola County town that holds an outsized place in American music history. In nineteen fifty-nine, folklorist Alan Lomax drove out to a farm near Como and recorded a sharecropper named Fred McDowell playing guitar on his porch. McDowell had been playing dances and picnics in these North Mississippi hills since the nineteen forties, but no one outside the region had heard him.

Lomax's recordings opened a door. McDowell used an open G tuning and a slide technique he had developed himself, and his music was unlike the Delta blues coming out of the south. It was rougher, more hypnotic, rooted in the hill country sound of Panola and Tate counties, where cane fife and drum bands had been performing at community gatherings since the Civil War era.

McDowell eventually toured the world as Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Shake 'Em on Down became his signature song. He died in nineteen seventy-two. The hills around Como are still producing musicians.