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[Dave Van Ronk] Who was
Charley Patton, and what the hell was he singing about? There are infinite
arguments about Patton’s lyrics. His growling, slurred diction,
and the fact that his recordings were often made on mediocre equipment
and survive only in scratched and beaten copies make words and phrases
utterly indecipherable. Combined with the gaps in what we know of his
life and character, this creates an almost irresistible opportunity
for historians to shape him into whatever they want him to be. Take
the first line of “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” one of his
earliest and greatest recordings: Is he a haunted, Delta mystic singing,
“I’m going away to a world unknown,” as transcribed
in the liner notes to an ornate new box set and a half-dozen web sites?
Or is he a popular country entertainer singing, “I’m going
away to Illinois,” a common theme of the great exodus of black
Mississippians to Chicago? There is no “right” answer, but
how one hears a line like this can be emblematic of the whole way one
looks at blues.
For
some forty years, “Delta blues” has been used as a synonymn
for the most tortured and soulful strain in American music. Never mind
that the region produced gentle, light singers like Mississippi John
Hurt, country string bands like the Mississippi Sheiks, racy comedians
like Bo Carter, slick, jazzy performers like Joe and Charlie McCoy,
and smooth, urban stars like Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy--or
that (Hurt excepted) these were the Delta’s biggest record-sellers.
In popular legend, the Delta blues scene was dominated by haunted, Devil-harried
guitarists whose records remain the gold standard for “deep”
blues. Robert Johnson is the most famous name in this pantheon, but
among aficionados Charley Patton is almost universally hailed as the
founding, defining genius, the source of a musical lineage that runs
through Johnson to the Chicago masters and on to encompass virtually
everything now called blues.
Born in 1891, Patton was older than the other Delta musicians who recorded
during the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, and he seems to have developed
many of the themes that are now considered basic to the Delta blues
repertoire. His trademark guitar arrangements were adopted by Tommy
Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown, as well as younger players like
Howlin’ Wolf, Roebuck “Pop” Staples, all of whom hung
around him in order to master the pieces he had turned into local hits.
He apparently gave formal lessons to some of them, using teaching as
a secondary source of income in the weekdays between juke joint performances.
And yet, when we define Patton as the brilliant progenitor of blues
as we know it, we are to a great extent limiting him, locking him into
a stylistic straitjacket he never wore when alive. Of course, he was
a great blues player. His basic blues themes--the “Spanish tuning”
arrangement he recorded first as “Screamin’ and Hollerin’
the Blues,” and that reappeared as “Future Blues,”
“Jinx Blues,” and “Maggie Campbell” when recorded
by Willie Brown, Son House, and Tommy Johnson respectively, or the basic
blues in E he called “Pony Blues,” which was reshaped by
Brown into “M&O Blues” and Johnson into “Bye and
Bye”--are masterpieces, and no other solo player has matched his
controlled and inventive rhythmic variations. Still, when historians
base their assessment of Patton’s work on these pieces, they are
seeing him through a prism of blues fandom that barely existed in his
day, and shortchanging both his talents and the broader world in which
he lived.
Great as they are and much as they have been immitated, those classic
arrangements represent only one side of Patton’s recorded repertoire,
and undoubtedly an even smaller proportion of what he played at live
appearances. Remembered by history as a blues musician, Patton had grown
up in the pre-blues era, and he played the full range of music required
of a popular rural entertainer. Even though his recording career was
sparked by the blues craze, only about half of his roughly fifty records
can reasonably be considered part of that then-modern genre. The others
are a mix of gospel and religious music, ragtime comedy like “Shake
It and Break It,” ballads like “Frankie and Albert,”
older slide guitar standards like “Bo Weavil” and “Spoonful,”
and a couple of unclassifiable pieces that seem to be his reimaginings
of Tin Pan Alley pop numbers, “Some of These Days” and “Running
Wild.”
This was not a particularly unusual repertoire for the time and place.
Back in those days before recorded entertainment, rural musicians were
expected to perform whatever their audiences cared to hear, and many
of them mastered an extraordinary range of styles, from minstrel comedy
to square dance accompaniments. Even Robert Johnson, twenty years younger
and a child of the blues era, made a streetcorner specialty of songs
like “Ain’t She Sweet” and cowboy numbers. By the
time Johnson recorded in the mid-1930s, though, producers were pushing
black guitarists to stick to blues. Patton first recorded in 1929, and
was one of the last rural African-Americans to have a chance to preserve
his broader range of material on commercial recordings. Unfortunately,
his non-blues material has generally been relegated to the background
of his story, as if it were far less important than his blues work--some
scholars have even argued, with virtually no evidence, that his non-blues
repertoire was simply learned for white audiences. This has unfairly
limited his appeal to modern listeners. Promoted as the deepest, rawest
Delta bluesman of them all, Patton is rarely heard by people who are
not already hardcore blues fans.
In fact, in many ways Patton’s recordings are more like Leadbelly’s
than like Robert Johnson’s, and it would be easy to assemble a
collection of his work aimed at folk and old-time country fans. In rural
Mississippi, blacks as well as whites danced hoedowns and square dances,
and when Patton used a sideman--even on blues records--it tended to
be a fiddler, Son Sims. (Sims was still going strong in the 1940s, leading
a country dance quartet that included Muddy Waters on guitar.) On the
four of their duets where Sims took the lead, it is an education to
hear how Patton plays. The songs are all blues in some sense, but the
boom-chang pattern of his guitar accompaniments sounds a lot like hillbilly
playing, albeit with a leavening of hot, syncopated bass runs. It does
not sound white, exactly, but if a modern bluegrass group reworked these
songs, Patton’s guitar would fit right in.
Patton’s way with pre-blues, “songster” material is
even more interesting, and it is not a stretch to say that, had things
worked out differently, he could have appealed to the same audience
that made Leadbelly a folk icon. Admittedly, his recordings do not include
a “Goodnight Irene” or “Midnight Special,” but
it is worth remembering that Leadbelly only learned the latter song
after being taken up by John Lomax as a folksong demonstrator. We have
no idea how much more “folk” material Patton might have
known, or how he might have adapted his formidable skills to suit a
Greenwich Village audience. He was a notably versatile performer and
musician and, unlike virtually any major blues singer besides Leadbelly,
he was given to composing lengthy ballads about current events in his
world, just the sort of thing the New York crowd would have prized and
encouraged. His most famous topical song, “High Water Everywhere,”
is a six-minute description of a Mississippi River flood, telling of
the suffering caused throughout the Delta, and leading his listeners
on a journey through the devastation:
The water at Greenville and Leland, it done rose everywhere,
I would go down to Rosedale, but they tell me it’s water there.
He had a gift for personal narrative, and seems to have enjoyed documenting
events that touched his own experience, and which would have been particularly
interesting to his local audience. For example, he wrung wry humor from
two of his own run-ins with local lawmen, in “Tom Rushen Blues”
and “High Sheriff Blues.” Recorded five years apart, these
were essentially two variations on a single musical theme. Far from
being bitter, passionate heart-cries, they used a lilting melody that
would have fitted the smooth style of a Leroy Carr, or even a Gene Autry,
and Patton sang with relaxed ease over a slide guitar line that shadowed
his voice:
Lay down last night, hoped that I would have my peace, ee-yee (2x)
When I woke up, Tom Rushing were shaking me.
The song is full of local color, mentioning Tom Day, the town marshal
of Merigold, Mississippi, and a bootlegger named Holloway who was apparently
one of Patton’s running buddies. As for the title character, Tom
Rushing (his name was mispelled by whoever took down the title for Paramount
Records) was a deputy in Bolivar County, and when some blues experts
tracked him down in the 1980s he recalled Patton coming to see him after
the record was released and presenting him with a copy. He considered
this an honor, and described Patton as a important local figure--indeed,
he compared him to the track star Jesse Owens.
Much has been made of the isolation of the rural Delta, and the poverty
and racism that overshadowed the lives of black farmers and musicians.
It is important to remember, however, that this was not the whole story,
that a singer like Patton could have a relatively friendly (though obviously
unequal) relationship with a white deputy, and that his arrest could
lead to songs that show humor as much as despair. It is also worth noting
that Patton’s song, despite its personal details, was a reworking
of “Booze and Blues,” recorded by the “Mother of the
Blues,” Ma Rainey, with a jazz group directed by bandleader Fletcher
Henderson. That is to say, far from being an opressed rural primitive,
Patton was a professional musician using a modern pop style to tell
a story that would interest and amuse local fans, both black and white.
“Tom Rushing Blues” combines Rainey’s verses about
the misery of being stuck in jail without a drink with wry digs at the
local power figures. Marshall Day, for example, would not have been
somebody for a black sharecropper to trifle with in 1930s Mississippi,
but Patton jokes that his badge is not a permanent possession and, “If
he lose his office, now, he’s running from town to town.”
Likewise, in his Depression lament, “34 Blues” Patton mocked
Herman Jett, the white foreman who had ordered him to leave his home
plantation, Dockery’s Farm, apparently because he had become involved
in a marital dispute (Once again, he sent a copy of the record to Jett,
who was amused):
Herman got a little six Buick, big six Chevrolet car (2x)
(Spoken: My God, what sort of power!)
And it don’t do nothing but follow behind Harvey Parker’s
plow.
In both of these songs, Patton’s singing is notable for how laid-back
and relaxed he sounds. Though he was famous for the volume and strength
of his voice, which made it possible for him to be heard over a crowded
room full of dancers despite the lack of amplification, and to keep
this up for hours on end, many of his records find him in a quieter
mood. His voice remains gruff, but he has no need to shout in the intimate
surroundings of a recording studio, and his playing is equally gentle.
This is particularly true of his slide work. In most cases, Patton used
the slide in the old-fashioned, voice-like manner of the pre-blues era.
It is the same sound one hears in Lemon Jefferson’s “Jack
O’ Diamonds,” or Mance Lipscomb’s work, rather than
the hard, slashing style associated with Delta masters like House, Robert
Johnson, and Waters.
A perfect example of this is Patton’s very first recording, “Mississippi
Bo Weavil Blues.” This is a cousin of the song that Leadbelly
and others made into a folk standard, a ballad of the bol weevil, a
tough little bug that was destroying cotton crops and impoverishing
farmers throughout the South. Patton sings a particularly minimalist
version of the song, essentially a single musical line punctuated with
slide riffs, but full of the grudging, comic admiration for the pest
that has led commentators to consider the song a veiled protest in which
the bug represents the rebel urges of black sharecroppers:
Bol weevil left Texas, Lord, he bid me fare thee well, Lordy.
(Spoken: Where you going now?)
“I’m going down to Mississippi, going to give Louisiana
hell,” Lordy.
It is interesting that Patton (or the recording agents) should have
chosen this as his first song to record, since by 1929 such older, “folk”
material was already falling out of favor on what was then called the
“race” market. The accepted commercial wisdom of the time
was that, while white rural Southerners were eager to buy “old
fashioned songs,” their African American neighbors wanted hipper,
contemporary material like the smooth blues ballads of Leroy Carr or
the double-entendre hokum of Tampa Red. Both of these artists had breakthrough
hits in 1928 and, combined with the economic conservatism that came
with the Depression, essentially wiped out the market for idiosyncratic
rural geniuses, which Blind Lemon Jefferson had pioneered only a couple
of years earlier. Patton was the last Jeffersonian to make a significant
impact on the blues market, and it is worth noting that only a half-dozen
of his earliest records sold at all well, and even these almost exclusively
in rural areas. (Jefferson, by contrast, was a big seller in country
and city alike.)
Back home in Mississippi, the story was somewhat different. Here, recordings
might slightly enhance a musician’s reputation, but they were
in no way vital to local success. Son House, for example, was a very
popular juke joint player, though he was a complete failure as a recording
artist, his records selling so poorly that hardly any survived to be
found by later collectors. Patton did much better, releasing 26 records
to House’s four, but there is no reason to think that the recordings
made up a significant part of his income, or that the failure of his
later records to sell implies any lack of work on the local dance and
picnic scene. On the contrary, all reports suggest that he remained
a favorite performer right up to his death in 1934, and could easily
have kept working and recording had his health not given out.
Indeed, one of the most misleading myths about the rural blues players
is that they were all down-and-out ramblers, or sharecroppers trying
to pick up a few extra bucks. It was a picture conjured up by John Lomax
when he presented Leadbelly in overalls as an ex-convict, and was reinforced
by the poverty in which many old blues singers were living at the time
of their rediscovery in the 1960s, but in no way matches the life they
led in the music’s heyday. Patton, for instance, always appeared
in a nice suit, and according to some reports was given to buying a
new car every year. He was not rich, exactly, but certainly was doing
far, far better than the black farmworkers who came to the jukes on
Saturday night, and probably earned more than a good many of the white
country folk who hired him to play at their dances and outings.
Likewise, although Patton’s success was undoubtedly due in part
to his astonishing abilities as a guitarist, and the depth and soul
of his blues singing, it also owed a lot to his professionalism and
skill as an entertainer. Friends interviewed in later years would comment
on his dependability, the fact that he always showed up on time and
took care of business. His performances were masterpieces of showmanship:
he was famed for tricks like playing behind his head or between his
legs, to the point that some rival musicians disparaged him as a mere
trickster. Unfair as this seems to modern listeners, it highlights an
important point: To his live audiences, Patton was not the subtle player
and singer we hear on the records, nor particularly noted for his soulful
depth. He was a man who banged out loud rhythms, shouted so he could
be heard to the back of the room, and was a dazzling showman--despite
his older, acoustic repertoire, he can in some ways be considered a
predecessor to Little Richard and James Brown.
All of Patton’s varied skills come out on the records, though
not necessarily in the ways one might expect. For example, the power
of his voice is often most evident in his gospel work. (Much has been
made of the absolute divide between secular and religious music in African
American culture, so it is worth pointing out that, though Patton released
his first gospel record under the alias “Elder J.J. Hadley,”
his five other religious records came out under his own name to no apparent
protest from the church folk.) Clearly inspired by the ferocious, shouting
style of the Texas “street corner evangelist” Blind Willie
Johnson, Patton delivered his best gospel sides with a fervor and vocal
volume that is unmatched on any of his blues recordings. Some of his
showmanship also comes through in the brief sermon he delivers on “You’re
Gonna Need Somebody When You Die” (a reworking of Johnson’s
“You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond”). The Johnson
connection further highlights a fact often forgotten by Mississippi
blues patriots: Texas was a deep blues country as well, and few if any
Delta guitarists were unmarked by Johnson’s and Jefferson’s
hugely popular recordings. This was a quickly-moving musical world,
in which styles shifted dramatically in a few years time, influenced
by all the new sounds streaming in with traveling shows, records, and
radio. When we listen to Patton sing his quirky reimagining of “Running
Wild,” it is the sound of a man raised on 19th century country
dances, hearing a song once or twice on the radio, then coming up with
his own variation to record and ship to stores throughout the country.
Which brings us to the hippest sound in Patton’s repertoire, those
blues songs that have made him a musical legend. Because, unlike Leadbelly,
Patton did not find a white folk audience, and his recordings were directed
at contemporary African American rural pop music buyers. And, great
as his musical range was and whatever he may have done at live shows,
it is those records that earned him a reputation outside the Delta,
that were adopted by other players, and that are the bedrock of his
enduring fame.
If one had to pick out one characteristic of Patton’s work that
is unique and--despite many attempts both then and now--inimitable,
it is the rhythmic control he displays on his greatest blues recordings.
Take “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” the
first recorded version of his trademark “Spanish” guitar
arrangement. His playing is never hurried, and the rhythmic power comes
not from direct forward momentum (as in Willie Brown’s magnificent
reworking, “Future Blues,” now a staple of Rory Block’s
repertoire), but from the constant variations and surprising accents.
He keeps pausing in his playing, creating moments of tension, then coming
back with completely different emphasis. Meanwhile, his relaxed vocal
sets up still another level of complexity, sometimes joining the guitar,
sometimes working in polyrhythmic counterpoint.
In these terms, Patton’s masterpiece is “Down the Dirt Road,”
which for sheer rhythmic complexity is the most striking performance
in the whole of blues. At times, Patton seems to be singing one rhythm,
tapping another on the top his guitar, and playing a third on the strings,
all without the slightest sense of effort. This is the work that distinguishes
him from his peers, and that sets his circle of Mississippians aside
from all the other players in the early blues pantheon. While no other
player equalled his abilities, Mississippi consistently produced the
most rhythmically sophisticated players in early blues. Perhaps this
was due to the regional survival of African tradition exemplified by
the “fife and drum” bands of the hill country to the Delta’s
east, perhaps to the proximity of New Orleans and the Caribbean, perhaps
in a large degree to the influence of Patton himself.
It is a mistake to view this music through the prism of modern blues,
to see Patton and his peers as the progenitors of the first electric
Chicago bands, and thus of the barroom boogie bands that fill suburban
bars outside every Ameican city. His rhythms are a world--or at least
a continent--away from the straight-ahead, 4/4 sound that defines virtually
all modern blues. That is why so few contemporary players can capture
anything of his greatness. There is the tendency to play his tunes for
driving power, missing the ease, the relaxed subtlety that underly all
of his work. It is a control born of playing this music in eight or
ten-hour sessions, week after week and year after year, for an audience
of extremely demanding dancers, and of remembering centuries of previous
dance rhythms--not only the complex polyrhythms of West Africa, but
also slow drags, cakewalks, hoedowns, and waltzes.
There is a lot more to be said about Patton’s blues work, but
most of it has been said many times, in articles, essays, liner notes,
and books. The debates come hot and heavy, scholars fiercely arguing
over whether his lyrics are consciously obscure and poetic or simply
careless, whether he carefully composed his songs or often assembled
them on the spot. Some base involved theories on what they perceive
to be a constant “angry” tone in his singing, which I do
not even hear, or find clues to his deepest fears and desires in lyrics
which I assume he picked up from other singers. They may perfectly well
be right. The important thing is not to be scared off by the myths or
debates, and to give the music a chance. In his lifetime, people listened
to Patton because his music was fun and exciting, and he pleased audiences
of varied colors, tastes, and economic backgrounds, finding something
in his repertoire for each of them. Luckily, much of that range has
been preserved on record, and it is too varied, interesting, and important
to be left to the small circle of prewar blues fans.
©2002 Elijah Wald (originally published in
Sing Out!)
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