Alumni secure America’s most legendary blues archive.
Written by Joe Nick Patoski
Photo by Chris Strachwitz/Courtesy of The Smithsonian Institution
For more than 60 years Mack McCormick chased music, supporting his obsessive curiosity with a series of odd jobs while amassing over 4,000 photographs; cabinets stuffed with notes, transcripts, and manuscripts; and nearly 600 recordings of singers, guitarists, and pianists. The massive and mysterious archive filled his Spring Branch home. He called it The Monster.
Pictured above: Mack McCormick (right) and drummer Spider Kilpatrick in the 1960s.
The self-taught ethnographer’s treasure trove might have been lost with McCormick’s death at age 85 in 2015 if not for Bill Kroger ’89 and Roger Fulghum ’94. The two Baker Botts partners, working pro bono, guided the Smithsonian’s acquisition of The Monster, which in 2023 celebrated the archive with the release of Biography of a Phantom, McCormick’s never-published manuscript about the search for the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and a Grammy-nominated boxed set of McCormick’s field recordings, Playing for the Man at the Door.
In 2014, Texas Monthly writer Michael Hall suggested Kroger, an estate attorney, help McCormick, whose bipolarity factored into his notoriety as a paranoid possessive. McCormick placed Kroger’s information in a file titled “Ambulance Chasing Lawyers.” When her father passed, McCormick’s daughter and sole heir Susanna McCormick Nix reached out for Kroger’s advice securing The Monster.
Kroger was born for the task. His parents owned Parker Music Company, a Houston music instrument, sheet music, and record store dating back to 1911. “I was exposed to all kinds of music,” he said. “We sold accordions, bajo sexto. [Guitarists] Albert Collins and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top were customers.” During his undergraduate and law school years at UT, Kroger’s weekly visits to Antone’s Nightclub were revelations. “You could hear the people who played on those blues records playing in a pickup band.”
The Smithsonian was an easy choice. “They had dealt with complex collections before, and they would take the whole thing,” Kroger said. “They also knew how to pay out royalties and do it legally correct. Susanna wanted to make sure the families of the artists got paid and got the credit.”
With so many items, The Monster’s intellectual property questions were tricky. “Mack took many of the [4,000] photographs in the collection, but it was also possible that [he] possessed photographs that were taken by others, which raised both ownership and copyright issues.” The Smithsonian invested over $3 million organizing and preserving The Monster.
McCormick understood the importance of the music and the people who made it, Kroger said. “He knew how to talk to people and get them to open up. He knew who these people were. There’s Bongo Joe doing proto-rap. There’s African Americans playing fiddles. Hop Wilson playing Bob Wills on his steel guitar in a Houston club. Many had never recorded before or since. That’s an incredible gift. To me, [McCormick’s] a hero for that.”