A percussive truthfulness. A synthesis of conflict and beauty. A futuristic maturity. An opening out toward multidimensionality through simplicity.
-- Yusef Komunyakaa
Aw take my picture,
hang it up in Jackson's wall
Aw take my picture,
hang it up in Jackson's wall
Anybody asks you "What about it?"
Tell 'em "That's all, that's all."
-- Charley Patton
It's fitting that there exists only one authenticated photo of Charley Patton, the man widely regarded as the founder of the Delta blues. It's not that this lone snapshot heightens Patton's mystique; we've long had a fairly complete portrait of the artist. Scholars have traced his lineage and limned his childhood, they've plotted the arc of his career and chronicled his exploits. No, it's the archetypal nature of Patton's music, the utter irreducibility of his blues, that imbues this monolithic image with such resonance and power.
Much as Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Bill Monroe did in their way, Patton forged not just a style but a new musical language. His wry vocal shadings, knotty cross-rhythms, and alchemical bottleneck work served as blueprints for everyone from Bukka White and Robert Johnson to Roebuck Staples and Howlin' Wolf. Indeed, Patton's recordings of tunes such as "Pony Blues" and "A Spoonful Blues" proved touchstones for virtually every blues musician who followed in his wake -- and, from Canned Heat to Cream, for many a rock band as well.
The son of a preacher man who whipped him whenever he so much as looked at a guitar, Patton endured his father's beatings to become, by 1920 or so, the pre-eminent live performer in the Mississippi Delta. Still, he was hardly the first blues singer to record. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among others, had been cutting sides for a half-decade by the time Patton, then around 40, ventured off Dockery's Plantation to make his first recordings for Paramount in 1929.
Neither was Patton the most virtuosic country blues musician of his era. Son House sang with greater intensity; Tommy Johnson's blues were more lyrical. Willie Brown was a flashier guitarist, Robert Johnson more of a poet. Yet from their "percussive truthfulness," to the way that, through their very simplicity, they "open...out toward multidimensionality," Mister Charley's blues evince every one of the transcendental qualities that Yusef Komunyakaa, writing about jazz poetry, enumerates in the passage cited above.
Disciple Bukka White once claimed he wanted "to be a great man like Charley Patton." But as evidenced by Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues, Revenant's opulent new 7-CD box, Patton's blues were so singular -- hermetic even -- that no one save maybe kindred spirit Big Joe Williams has approximated their like since.
A percussive truthfulness
The Delta blues grew out of the West African "talking drum" tradition, a radically percussive approach to playing where just about anything you can bang on takes precedence over wind instruments and guitars, and where rhythms, stacked one on top of another, signify far more than melody.
Patton, whose compositions rarely employed chords and frequently eschewed the familiar diatonic scale, embraced this polyrhythmic first principle with a vengeance. So much so, in fact, that as the liner notes to an early compilation of his recordings attest, his "rhythms assume such importance in each work that they ultimately become the work itself."
More than any of his inheritors or peers, Patton grasped that inherently linear vehicles such as words and melodies couldn't begin to do justice to the tortuous, often conflicted, feelings he sought to convey. Only the driving, heavily-accented cadences he growled, scratched, or rapped out on his hollow-body guitar -- and typically pitted against each other -- could invest those tangled webs of emotion with anything close to the force of truth.
Take the sprung, atavistic sequences of beats he stomps out on "Down The Dirt Road Blues". Metrically divorced from the song's lyrics, these flurries of notes, coupled with the syncopated figures Patton chokes off on his guitar, capture the dissonance he feels as he stands at a crossroads with his lover. Charley knows which way he's going, but his special rider has her doubts, and her hesitation's killing him. Patton's "dirty" vocal timbres heighten this tension, blurring the lines between the barbs of hostility and hurt he has yet to -- and may never -- sort out for himself.
"Pony Blues", another case of Patton "sacrificing" diction for pathos, achieves a similar effect. Stressing beats over syllables, his ravaged groaning renders palpable the mire of desire and dis-ease at the record's core.
A synthesis of conflict and beauty
Writers have made much of the raw, visceral, at times forbidding properties of Patton's music, and there's no denying them. His feral yowl was the model for Howlin Wolf's hair-raising lower-register moan. And the way the flood of cascading rhythms in "High Water Everywhere" unleashes violently, only to let up and then rage out of control again, is quintessential Patton.
Yet what's even more striking listening to his recordings today, especially this sprawling set, which includes sides by Patton acolytes Son House, Willie Brown and others as points of reference, is just how nuanced and sophisticated -- how artful -- his blues were for his or any other age.
Hitching complex African musical devices such as voice masking and call-and-response techniques to the more streamlined dramatic and pop sensibilities he gleaned from vaudeville and hillbilly tunes, Patton fashioned an intricate blues prototype that transposed the traditions of his predecessors into a brand new key. One has only to compare the criss-crossing vocal and instrumental conversations he carries on with himself in "Spoonful" to the ragtimey variant popularized by his contemporary Charlie Jackson to hear that something different -- some new synthesis -- was being born.
A futuristic maturity
Much the same forward-reaching quality, or "futuristic maturity," to use Komunyakaa's more evocative phrase, is also evident in the scope and sweep of Patton's narratives. Unlike his minstrel and songster counterparts, Patton didn't just rehash the ballad-sagas of folk heroes such as Casey Jones and John Henry. He took lines and verses that had been circulating for generations and applied them to the floods, dry spells, and weevil-'deviled cotton of his day.
Others might have personalized and localized the blues before Patton, but few gave them as indelible a subjective and sociological stamp. Or, for that matter, animated as vivid, coherent -- and, from time to time, downright hilarious -- a demimonde, one populated, among others, with trifling women, wanton preachers, whiskey-spawned tormentors, and sinners in the hands of an angry God.
Again, Patton was hardly the bard Robert Johnson was; nevertheless, from lines such as "My baby's got a heart like a piece of railroad steel" and "Oh yeah, evil walkin' at midnight when I hear the local blow," there's plenty of plainspoken poetry here. Mystical-existential musings too. The passage "If I was a bird, mama, I would find a nest in the heart of town...So when the town get lonesome I'd be bird nest bound" doesn't just convey a longing for a sense of home in a world that won't afford one. Delivered with Patton's soul-on-ice intensity, it betrays a depth of spiritual and emotional alienation worthy of Hank Williams -- even Robert Johnson himself.
An opening out toward multidimensionality through simplicity
From his sung sermons to his duets with Willie Brown and down-home fiddler Henry Sims, Patton's 60 or so recordings were rarely less than riveting (only a handful of his 1934 sides suffer, a result of his prematurely failing health; he died later that year). The Revenant set lets us hear absolutely all of them, and not just with brighter sonics and less surface noise, but, more importantly, in context -- alongside recordings by most of the singers who ran with Patton or inhabited his orbit.
Commentary on Patton's life and legacy abounds here as well. There's everything from a CD's worth of interviews with his peers, to extensive essays and song notes, to a reprint of a monograph on the bluesman by the late Revenant co-founder and Patton-inspired guitar pioneer John Fahey. Per Revenant's usual lavish standards, the CDs come in a hardcover "78-album" style book, including full-size repros of Paramount's 1929 Patton ads and of labels from all of his Paramount and Vocalion recordings.
Ultimately, though, no amount of packaging, however extravagant, can testify to Patton's perpetually self-surpassing artistry more eloquently than his imperious body of work. Indeed, it's a monument to the sides he left behind that, nearly 70 years after his death, listeners will recognize many of them, even if they've only heard versions done by others under titles such as "Little Red Rooster" and "Big Road Blues". Even if you're hearing Patton for the very first time, much as the one extant photo of him does, his "originals" will reveal themselves to be not just definitive, but at once singular and singularly inexhaustible.
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