Troubled musicologist and folklorist Robert "Mack" McCormick called his massive collection of blues artifacts "the monster."
Following McCormick's death of esophageal cancer in 2015 at age 85, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington acquired his archive.
The files include 590 reels of sound recordings, which now reside with the Smithsonian's Folkways label.
McCormick amassed 165 boxes of material that total more than 70 cubic feet of unpublished manuscripts, original interviews and research notes, thousands of photographs and negatives and playbills, posters, maps and business records.
The material is housed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which recently exhibited McCormick's recorded interviews with Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb and other blues artists.
McCormick was a nationally known member of the "blues mafia," an eccentric group of white males obsessed with the black blues artists who made pioneering records in the 1920s and 1930s.
While McCormick's stockpile of artifacts overwhelmed his home in Houston, the self-taught musicologist sought to write the first definitive biography of Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson as McCormick battled mental illness, financial difficulties and health problems.
From 1969 through 1975, McCormick visited small towns in rural Mississippi, knocking on doors and visiting pool halls and small cafes to talk to elderly black people who knew or were related to "the king of the Delta blues."
MCormick also traveled to Memphis, small towns in Louisiana and Arkansas, and Washington, D.C. seeking details about Johnson's brief, dynamic life.
While McCormick never completed his major Johnson book, he turned to writing a first-person narrative about his journeys into the Delta. He kept revising the book-length manuscript through the years.
McCormick's dream of book publication has been realized with the release earlier this year of "Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey" by Smithsonian Books.
The Smithsonian has also released "Playing for the Man at the Door, Field Recordings From the Collection of "Mack" McCormick, 1958-1971," a three-CD, six LP set that includes a 128-page book of photographs and essays from blues scholars.
John W. Troutman, curator of music and musical instruments at the National Museum of American History, edited "Biography of a Phantom," compiled from McCormick's manuscripts.
The book portrays the virtuoso musicianship, community dances and agricultural rituals of southern blacks, which endured despite poverty, racial violence and white supremacy.
McCormick also analyzes the Delta's cotton economy, which he documents developed after the Civil War and the end of slavery. Instead, blacks were forced into oppressive sharecropper arrangements with white owners of huge plantations, which were really small towns with stores and entertainment centers.
Johnson, who mainly performed in plantation homes and rural "juke joints," gained international fame with the 1961 release of his handful of recordings, "The King of the Delta Blues." His work inspired a generation of white musicians, ranging from Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen.
The book raises troubling issues of cultural appropriation, including by the Smithsonian itself. Record companies and white scholars have profited at the expense of black musicians and their families, which Troutman details.
An intriguing section of "Biography of a Phantom" describes McCormick's unsuccessful effort to solve the crime of Johnson's death. Johnson died at age 27 in rural Mississippi, poisoned by either a jealous girlfriend or a lover's jealous husband or boyfriend.
The increasingly mentally ill McCormick in later life falsely claimed to have identified Johnson's killer. In "Phantom," he gives a chilling fictional account of how Johnson might have been poisoned by someone bringing him whiskey during a performance.
While the book portrays McCormick as a perceptive, resourceful investigator with a deep appreciation of black creativity, Troutman in an afterword reveals the paranoia, depression and manic periods that plagued McCormick in later life.
Troutman also gives disturbing details of McCormick's threatening, duplicitous and fraudulent interactions with Johnson's two half-sisters,whom he found living in suburban Washington, D.C.
As Troutman notes, the phantom of the book's title applies to McCormick as much as the blues singer.