Topic: 3rd verified Robert Johnson Picture (again)

[jpeters609]

No one really knows what McCormick did with that photo. Presumably, he didn't want to have to deal with Steve LaVere's litigation and so he kept it to himself. Now that McCormick is dead, the whereabouts of the photo are even less clear.

[Blues Vintage]

Thank you for these clarifications! Hope the book will be available abroad...
Have they been keeping that (McCormick) 3rd photograph hidden because identification wasn't 100% sure?

I think it's Robert Johnson 100 %. It may have something to do with the LaVere/McCormick legal battle.
In "Searching for Robert Johnson" (the book not the documentary) Peter Guralnick explains that McCormick showed him a few pictures (1976);

The next photograph shows a young man in a sailor's uniform, obviously pleased, obviously proud, with another man, very slightly older, standing beside him, his arm draped affectionately around the sailor's shoulder. The sailor, Mack McCormick tells me, is Robert's nephew, Louis, at home in memphis, on his first leave from the navy base in Norfolk where he was stationed in 1936-37. Later he would be transferred up to Annapolis and that was how his mother and his aunt Bessie would eventually move up to the Maryland area, where McCormick found them. Louis was very close to his uncle, and in fact, when McCormick visited Carrie in 1972, was so disturbed by the conversation that he retreated into his room and refused to come out. And the other man in the picture? The man in the sharp pin-striped suit? That, of course, is Robert Johnson. I stare and stare at the picture, study it, scrutinize it, seek to memorize it, and for my very efforts am defeated...............


If I remember correctly this picture is in a safe in Mexico, where McCormick lived for a period.
This information is in the gripping New York Times article "The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie" from a few years back which I can't acces right now.
Mack passed away a year after the article. I haven't heard anything lately what happened with his enormous archive ("The Monster").

The Monster Work Of Mack McCormick
https://lonestarmusicmagazine.com/if-i-had-my-way-the-monster-work-of-mack-mccormick/

[Blues Vintage]

Note; I was writing my message the same time as Jeff.

I forgot to mention that LaVere died about 5 weeks after McCormick died. There's some kind of voodoo curse everywhere Robert goes.

[Stuart]

I forgot to mention that LaVere died about 5 weeks after McCormick died. There's some kind of voodoo curse everywhere Robert goes.

Yep, it's called "life."

[CF]

Mack's pic of RJ and his nephew has been seen in the last few years and still exists. Someone who knows someone has mentioned it at the RBF at facebook.

[btasoundsradio]

Interesting to learn that a lot of his family members relocated to near Deale MD, not far from where I grew up. His mother's grave is in Churchton MD, but flooded out and now inaccessible, according to Annye Anderson. Carrie, his half sister married an oysterman named Sanky Thompson. I wonder if any of the other graves are still accessible.
The second half of the book about the legal battles for the Johnson estate is heartbreaking.