Fred McDowell

I heard Fred McDowell in the late 1960's at the Ash Grove on Melrose in Hollywood.

He played guitar, wore a red shirt and shiny black pants and Beatle boots. He kept a beat going by tapping his right foot on the stage as if it was a little drum.

I don't know how I got into the club, I think I was underage. I'm pretty sure I was with my friend Dave Brown, I'll have to ask him, he'll remember, but maybe it was my other friend, John Phillips.

Fred McDowell played "You Got to Move," and "I Wish I was In Heaven Sitting Down," I'm sure of this, as well as many other songs that night.

There was something really different about Fred McDowell, different from the rock & roll bands I'd been seeing at The Shrine. Fred McDowell played music while the rock & roll bands played at playing music. Toward the end of his life he toured with The Rolling Stones; Keith Richards is said to have bought Fred a gold lame suit for the tour.

Another friend, Jon Groth, told me a story about Fred McDowell many years after I'd seen Fred play at the Ash Grove.

Two friends of Jon were hitchhiking through the South in the late 1960's. They got stuck somewhere in Tennessee, stranded, two long-haired hippies who couldn't thumb a ride. One of them knew the music of Fred McDowell and in desperation looked in the phone book to see if he was listed. There he was, Fred McDowell, there could only be one Fred McDowell. So they called and he drove out the highway late at night, picked them up, gave them a meal and a place to sleep, and a ride out to the highway in the morning.

The Ash Grove burned down in the early 1970's but not before I saw many more shows there--Muddy Waters, Taj Mahal, John Fahey, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Fred McDowell died in 1972. By then he was known as Mississippi Fred McDowell, a name a publicist gave him.