Biography of a Phantom

dizzying pursuit of Johnson than the fragmented portrait he found at its end. Beautifully rendered and unabashadely probing...Phantom is folklore as both fable and action-adventure novel."

UNCUT MAGAZINE
McCormick had grand ambitions for Biography Of A Phantom. Inspired by Truman Capote s In Cold Blood, he writes it like a crime thriller. He has a novelist s eye for scene-setting [and his] criticism comes in poetic blasts.

SALVATION SOUTH
"Revelations abound within Biography of a Phantom. The foremost revelation is how good the book is: Almost nobody would have expected to see something so well-crafted, with such command of voice and tone, seemingly finished and fully realized. The posthumous publication of the book, which the author himself insisted would never be published, provides us an opportunity to reflect on two strange legacies: not only Robert Johnson s but also Mack McCormick s."

TEXAS MONTHLY
"Mack McCormick was a peculiar American hero: a searcher driven to go places no one else went, where he found, interviewed, and recorded guitarists, pianists, and singers who still stir us today. To Mack, scholarship wasn t everything, not compared with curiosity, moxie, and old-fashioned hustle. Often more interested in telling a good story than in getting his facts straight, he perhaps had more in common with the artists he loved than with the journalists, historians, and academics with whom he now finally shares bookshelf space. If you love music, you have to feel some sort of unsettled affection for Mack and his beautiful, damaged mind."

NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE
"Ultimately, the resulting biography manages to offer new insights for Johnson obsessives as well as the merely curious."

WASHINGTON EXAMINER
"Biography of a Phantom creates a fascinating portrait of Johnson that is mostly unresolved and contains several dark and deeply personal undertones."

WASHINGTON POST
"Biography of a Phantom is far more compelling for what it shows about McCormick, from the way he approached strangers as a White man traveling through the rural South to the way he tried to throw others off his trail."

TIDAL MAGAZINE
"What comes through loudest in Biography of a Phantom for me, the book s real takeaway is McCormick s tenacity, resourcefulness and creativity. His inspired fieldwork makes for inspiring reading. He persevered despite failure after failure, returning six and seven times to the same spot, often with a new angle of approach, new conversational gambits to try out on his suspicious informants."

"When in 1973 Mack McCormick first told me about Biography of a Phantom, he called his search for the facts of Robert Johnson s life 'a detective story,' and it is. But what McCormick really found and brought home is a gorgeous intimacy with Johnson s works and days, all culminating in a 1970 Mississippi listening party where people who knew Johnson more than thirty years before, who heard him play, who played their now long-gone Johnson 78s until they wore out, gather to hear King of the Delta Blues Singers. McCormick s research may have been superseded by other books; the spirit in his book, a thing in itself, has not been. Not even close." GREIL MARCUS, author of Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock n Roll Music

"One of the most coveted books in blues scholarship, Biography of a Phantom is truly a brilliant firsthand account by Mack McCormick. While it is a book about Robert Johnson, it is also a window into Mack s idiosyncratic method of folkloric research. In a world without reference books dedicated to the blues, one can t help but be drawn into Mack s search through a sea of small southern towns for a specter of a blues singer." DOM FLEMONS, The American Songster

"At long last, a legendary manuscript sees the light of day. In the half century since Mack McCormick began his Biography of a Phantom, Robert Johnson has become much less phantom-like, with numerous books, articles, and films devoted to illuminating his life and legacy. It is instead McCormick who has become a mystery and who is this book s most compelling revelation. Through Smithsonian historian John Troutman s editorial framing and McCormick s own narrative, we understand for the fi rst time the real life of a phantom, just not the one McCormick intended. PRESTON LAUTERBACH, author of The Chitlin Circuit: And the Road to Rock n Roll