In the day and age of artists that apear overnight somehow pushed by commercial aspirations I find it refreshing to read about people who were or are driven by passion. 

Here is an article all about a passion. A read into some very extraodnary people that have left traces of their commitment through recordings. Thanks for this! Thanks to Wiley and Thomas and obviously McCormick and all those that have led their lives this way.

It starts like this…..

“IN THE WORLD of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical arrangement.”

Read the full article here NYT April 2014

I hope you enjoy as much I do.

All fun….

McCormick in Houston, in December 2013.