He was brought up by his mother, in Alabama, Colorado, West Virginia and Texas, as she traveled to find work as a hospital technician.

He dropped out of high school to work at a ballroom in Cedar Point, Ohio, running errands for the musicians performing there.

[1] McCormick wrote numerous magazine articles and album liner notes and assembled an extensive private archive of Texas musical history.

McCormick originally intended to publish his research as a book, Biography of a Phantom, but he never completed it, and he later said that he had lost interest in it.

[1][9] In 2022, it was announced that McCormick's archive, including 590 reels of sound recordings, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, playbills, booking contracts, and miscellaneous materials and ephemera concerning blues musicians would be housed at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.