Treasures and Trouble: Looking Inside a Legendary Blues Archive

Highlights from a recently acquired, one-of-a-kind archive documenting the blues as compiled by Robert “Mack” McCormick are featured in the museum’s Archives Center cases. The late Robert “Mack” McCormick, who died in 2015, was a Houston-based, self-trained folklorist who built one of the world’s largest and most significant blues archives, with research materials on hundreds of artists beginning in the 1950s and the collection contains items dating well before that. The display asks visitors to consider questions such as how has history been told and who has done the telling?