Charley Patton earned the title “King of the Delta Blues” not only through his music, but also because of the many bluesmen he influenced, and because he led the archetypal blues life. An African-American who grew up in the Deep South, when he was young he learned to play the blues while living on a plantation, and when older he seldom spent much time in one place.
Patton was born sometime between 1881 and 1891 on a farm near Edwards, Mississippi, one of 12 children. His father beat him to try to discourage his interest in “un-Christian” music. But already Patton was performing this music so regularly with the neighbouring Chatmon Family that many people thought he was related. The group’s repertory ranged from Tin Pan Alley songs to jump-ups (highly danceable music), indeed almost everything but the blues.
In due course Patton’s father moved his family to the Mississippi Delta, where he went to work at Dockery Farm, near Cleveland, Mississippi. In doing so he put his son on the very plantation where the blues may well have been born. Charley Patton soon fell under the spell of bluesman Henry Sloan, following Sloan everywhere and no doubt adopting some of Sloan’s style as his own. Little is known about Sloan—his music was never recorded—but he was apparently playing the blues by 1897.
By the mid-1910s, Patton was one of the most celebrated bluesmen in the Cleveland, Mississippi area, which was known throughout the state as the place to learn to play the blues. His repertory included many of his own compositions. Tommy Johnson moved to the area around 1913, and soon was socialising with Patton and his sidekick, Willie Brown. Other blues players such as Son HOUSE, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert JOHNSON followed, listening to (and later performing) Patton classics such as “Pea Vine Blues,” “Tom Rushen Blues,” “Going to Move to Alabama,” and “Down the Dirt Road.” Patton’s influence on each of these blues musicians was profound.
It was not until 1929, however, that Patton got to the recording studio, where he cut “Pony Blues” (a hit on his first try) for Paramount. By this time he was well known throughout Mississippi, and popular with both African-Americans and whites. He went on to record 50 titles for Paramount and Vocalion.
Patton had a powerful, gritty baritone that could be heard over a plantation dance crowd. Rocking in rhythm to a single guitar pattern—which would sometimes last half an hour—his hollering voice was often incomprehensible but always moving. In a live setting he was a showman, tossing his guitar in the air, flipping it backward and playing it like a drum, or playing it behind his back and between his knees. His recordings better reflect the sophistication and inventiveness of his work. Although he played in conventional quadruple meter, he used a variety of tricks to accent the first beat in the measure with his guitar and the fourth beat with his voice, creating a layered, polyrhythmic tension.
Although Patton travelled to Indiana, Wisconsin, and New York to record, for the 20 years that were the heart of his career he mostly kept to the states around Mississippi. He was married as many as eight times, though perhaps never legally, and periodically tried to reform his ways, even serving as a preacher and recording religious titles. Patton and Bertha Lee, his last “wife,” recorded spirituals together shortly before he died on April 28, 1934, in Indianola, Mississippi. The official cause of death was heart failure, probably first weakened by rheumatic fever as a youth or from the syphilis he contracted as a young man, and further damaged by smoking and drinking.
Stan Hieronymus
FURTHER READING
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995);
Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Founder of the Delta Blues; King of the Delta Blues.