(a.k.a. William Robertson)
(6CD)
BIOGRAPHY
By George Mitchell's own estimation, Cecil Barfield was his most
extraordinary discovery outside of Mississippi. Born in 1922, Barfield was
a farmer all his life until a back injury forced him to retire. He began
playing blues at five years old, using a cooking oil can he had rigged up
with a neck and one string. He took up guitar at 12, and started out
playing rag tunes and dance pieces, though he soon developed the
distinctive bottleneck style heard on the Mitchell recordings.
When Mitchell recorded him, Barfield performed interpretations of songs
by J.B. Lenoir, Frankie Lee Sims, Little Walter, and Tommy McClennan, as
well as several of his own strikingly original compositions.
Barfield lived south of Plains, Georgia, the hometown of Jimmy Carter.
The nation's attention was fixed on Plains in the election year of 1976,
as Carter's campaign portrayed the area as a bastion of racial harmony in
the South. Mitchell remembers it differently: "We were recording Cecil in
this tiny sharecropper's shack in some guy's plantation. And in the middle
of the session, the plantation owner's son came down and told us 'You
can't be in this house.'
So I went up to the plantation house to explain the situation to the
owner, and this guy was just beside himself. 'This is not the way we do
things in Plains, Georgia. White people are not in niggers' houses.' I
tried to tell him we were with the Bureau doing fi eld work and he just
said, 'Listen buddy, I have called the sheriff, and you're gonna be in
jail if you're not out of there fast.' So, that was Plains in 1976."
In fear of endangering the welfare checks he relied on for income, Barfi
eld refused to let his real name be used on any of the Mitchell recordings
issued in his lifetime; instead, the Barfield recordings issued on labels
like Flyright and Southland were done so under the pseudonym William
Robertson. This was not the only area in which Barfield was cautious. He
refused to let Mitchell use a photo of him on the album cover, for fear
that someone could curse him by using his image. He sprinkled powders
around his door, and carried his own water with him, even when he traveled
a few miles to Columbus.
Despite Mitchell's protestations, Barfield would always spend his checks
on root doctors for his health problems. After Mitchell retired from fi
eld recording, the folklorist Art Rosenbaum recorded and interviewed
Cecil. When Rosenbaum asked him how he thought up a song, Cecil replied:
"Your heart feels a certain way, then your mind follows, then your hands
follow that."
Mitchell kept in touch with Barfield up to his death from a heart attack
in 1994.