Mack Mccormick

Lightnin' Hopkins had a hard and fast approach to dealing with the abundance of record labels he recorded for during his career. The irascible bluesman would show up at the session in question but would refuse to play a note until he was paid his fee upfront. Once paid and satisfied, he'd unpack his stock set of boogie blues riffs and pretty much improvise songs on the spot until he'd fulfilled his agreed upon quota. Then he would leave. This system led to an awful lot of similarly constructed and executed throwaway tracks, but Hopkins had a special gift for personalizing the blues that came through in the best of these improvised songs, and a few gems always showed up in the process. This disc combines 1961's Walkin' This Road by Myself, which features Hopkins with drummer Spider Kilpatrick, harmonica player Billy Bizor, and pianist Buster Pickens, with 1963's solo acoustic Blues in My Bottle…

Stunning solo Texas blues and barrelhouse piano by the late pianist. The most amazing material, produced by Mack McCormick in Austin, dates from 1963 - the rhythmically and technically complex "The Cows" is a tour de force, and "The Ma Grinder" and "The Clinton" aren't far behind. Later numbers from 1973 and 1977 prove that Shaw's skills didn't degenerate with time.