⬇️ ALBERT MACON ⬇️
(4LP/CD)
BIOGRAPHY
Friends report that Macon's death followed complications from a
shooting injury received while he was cleaning his gun. After being
treated by a doctor for the gunshot wound in his leg, he returned home
and appeared to be mending well. His condition took a rapid turn for the
worse, however, and he was admitted to the East Alabama Medical Center
in Opelika where he died May 12 of kidney failure.
Macon, born in 1920 in Society Hill, played a type of music he called
"boogie and blues," which he learned from his father, Buster Macon, at
house parties and frolics in the rural Macon County community. They
played old-time, country blues tunes, such as "John Henry," and
"Staggerlee," in a rousing style intended for dancing.
In a 1991 interview with music researcher Joyce Cauthen, Macon
described set dances held in neighbors' homes where his father played
guitar and Robert Thomas' father called the figures that guided the
couples on the dance floor. He also described another type of dance
involving rhythmic foot shuffling and tapping, known as buckdancing.
Macon, who was an excellent buckdancer himself, recalled the competitive
nature of the scene.
They'd be singing what I'd be playing. Like 'Sixteen-Twenty' and 'Mean
Old Frisco.' And then all the ladies would stand back and the men would
come around and do the dance and see which one do the best dancing. He'd
get out there and do the buck dance and other'n get out there and do
another kind of dance and then another'n come in and see which one beat.
And they had a little pot they give him, which one do the best dancing.
They had the hat around, they'd give him a tip."
Albert Macon began teaching Robert Thomas to play blues guitar when
Thomas, who was nine years younger than Macon, was about 15 years old.
For the past 40 years the two men had been playing music together at
fish fries, parties and festivals in the greater Auburn, Tuskegee, and
Columbus, Georgia area. The two men also received national and
international attention, playing such venues as the Knoxville World's
Fair and the American Blues Festival in the Netherlands and the WDR
Blues Festival in Bonn, Germany. Macon and Thomas recorded Blues and
Boogie from Alabama, an album on the Dutch Swingmaster label, and are
also featured on the recording In Celebration of a Legacy: Traditional
Music of the Chattahoochee River Valley, produced by the Columbus Museum
of Art.
Albert Macon defies the stereotype of the itinerant blues musician. He
lived his entire life and raised his large family Society Hill, Alabama.
He drove a school bus for 40 years in Tuskegee, where the town's leading
citizens, including school principals, teachers, police officers and
even the mayor, he said, were once students who rode his bus. He was one
of the very few country blues musicians left in Alabama today who
actually lived and learned his music in the era, setting and social
conditions that produced this powerful, African-American musical
tradition. Fortunately before his death, he was beginning to receive
recognition for the cultural treasure that he was.