See that my grave is kept clean

It was in 1928 that  Blind Lemon Jefferson sang about the need for his grave to be kept clean; it was just a year before he died. Fast forward nearly seventy years and two people did see a grave was kept clean but the spelling on the headstone was corrected and the dates were corrected as well.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was born in North Mississippi near Memphis in 1904 and settled further south  in the Como area around 1940. He farmed and played music for fun and was not one of those blues players who made any records in the pre-war period. He was 'discovered' in the late 1950s and was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959 on a trip through the South accompanied by his girlfriend, the English singer Shirley Collins.

Through the 1960s Fred played festivals including Newport and came to Europe as part of the American Folk Blues Festival. Fred wrote 'You Gotta Move' that was covered by the Rolling Stones and in the sixties he showed Bonnie Raitt how to improve her slide guitar technique. His playing style was an inspiration for others in the Delta including R L Burnside and much later The North Mississippi All Stars who covered Fred's 'Drop Down Mama'.

Dick Waterman who did so much to help many of the blues singers during the early 1960s, including rediscovering Son House, decided to do something about Fred's grave in the early 1990s. The old one had the wrong dates and spelled Fred's name as McDewell. Dick and Bonnie Raitt – they were and girlfriend boyfriend back when she got to know Fred in the late sixties and through her early career – paid for  a new gravestone. Today you can visit the grave site which is just off I-55 the interstate between Memphis and New Orleans.