Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

So much of what has been written about the blues and many of its specific practitioners over the years is complete and utter bullshit. All the creepy selling of souls at the crossroads and the like is bad enough, and has at least some basis in actual regional and/or racial folklore, but what really gets my goat is much of what’s been written in books and on album covers for decades, masquerading as biographical fact. This stuff gains credence merely by virtue of its prevalence and inertia. I’m not gonna go into full on rant mode here, not in a broad ranging way anyway, but I will try to make some sense of some of the at best uninformed and at worst agenda-driven mythology surrounding seminal bluesman Charley Patton.

Much of what’s been written about Patton, just as in the case of Robert Johnson, is based on hearsay and cursory research. In Johnson’s case, if you look hard enough, the facts (the few that exist at least) are out there. Hasn’t stopped the majority of people from still believing a lot of skewed and agenda-driven writing, but at least people like Elijah Wald, in his fine book Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, tell it like it is. Charley Patton isn’t nearly as well known as Johnson, itself an issue if you ask me, but there’s been just as great a degree of misinformation and agenda-based writing on him, almost impossible to refute unless you dig pretty deep. I’ve done the digging.

First, a little background on Patton. If you’re any kind of blues connoisseur, you at least know the name, and perhaps are aware of his status as one of the most important figures in the history of what is called “delta” blues, itself a rather nebulous term. There’s really no refuting that. Patton was a highly influential and musically important guy and was lucky enough to have been recorded, unlike any number of others that have vanished into history as names recalled and maybe published here and there. Guys like Henry Sloan, one of a few people from whom Patton learned his craft several years before he went into a studio.

Anyway, the short history of Charley Patton is that he was already a star in the Mississippi delta region and beyond well before he began recording for Gennett, then Paramount records in 1929. He recorded a ton of sides from then until his death in 1934 (last recordings for Vocalion), and is regarded as the founder of the delta blues. His records sold pretty well, and most importantly, he was the inspiration for several key music figures, guys from Robert Johnson and Son House to Howlin’ Wolf and Roebuck “Pops” Staples. He was a masterful guitarist, and had an astonishing voice, not one you’d expect from a guy that looked like he did. Patton was of mixed ancestry, with white and Native American blood resulting in a slightly built copper colored guy with features that really don’t look African in any way. His voice sounds more like it should be coming from a guy that looks more like Howlin’ Wolf. It’s big. And scary. Ornery even. Based on the one famous picture of Patton, and his estimated height (5’7″), you’d expect him to sound a lot different.

Here’s what bothers me though: almost everything you read about Patton paints him as an illiterate, woman-beating, hard drinking, not serious about anything, even his music, kinda guy. A clown, for whom entertaining his audience was more important than anything else aside from maybe “eating from the white folks’ kitchen”, another commonly used and patently offensive and inaccurate cliche used in almost all writing on him. First of all, Patton came from a fairly well to do family by delta standards. His father was a sharecropper, sure, but was at a high level, a “bossman” himself, a favorite and favored cog in the Dockery plantation machine who rarely if ever did any of the hard physical labor himself. Charley had several years of education, as did his siblings, the few that survived into adulthood. Not illiterate. He was aware of and took exception to his classification as “colored” despite looking more like a white man than most in his milieu. He decided upon a career as a musician at an early age, perhaps as early as age seven, and worked hard at his craft at the knees of Sloan and others. He saw a way to escape a life of hard labor and direct racial abuse and carved out a highly successful career. Sure, he drank and was a womanizer, probably abusively so, but he was driven to success. Not a carefree clown, and not a live off the white man’s handouts guy in any way shape or form.

Charley Patton was a freakin’ rock star, long before recordings of blues were ever made! He owned his own cars, replacing his Model T yearly, and buying a Chevrolet shortly before his death. He was never without the cash needed to not only survive, but thrive under conditions that were brutal at times for his contemporaries living on the plantations. He was well traveled, often being wired to do weekend or week long engagements in the big cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Memphis, Gary, IN, etc. His recordings were made in NYC, Richmond, IN, and Grafton, WI, near Milwaukee. This was no plantation-bound yokel. He always wore a clean suit, every single day. He played at functions hosted by both whites and blacks and was well regarded by all, even the likes of Deputy Sheriff (of Bolivar county) Tom Rushing, forever immortalized in Patton’s “Tom Rushen Blues”. Rushing likened him to Jesse Owens of all people! A famous hero type, and ol’ sheriff Tom would know, having been photographed with Owens in the 1930’s. Patton was not the sociopath painted by self-described blues historians.

How do I know all this? Well, there’s one guy that’s taken the time and made the effort to analyze and debunk the bulk of what’s been written before. Dr. David Evans, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. Before he came along, you could buy entire books of utter tripe devoted to Patton. Evans read all of that, gathered the original sources and quotes and did some actual research of his own and was brave enough to see something different. The hard drinking, woman beating noble savage in work clothes lazing his way from plantation to plantation, the music coming to him through some kind of racial magic, was too hoary a myth for Evans. This line of mythology around blues is damaging to everyone, and has been perpetuated for far too long. The NYC “folk” cognoscenti fostered this sort of thing by parading Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter around in overalls for years. It’s inherently racist as I see it, this portrayal of African Americans as naturally musical, not having to try very hard, and sucking a life and/or career from the women or white folks around them. Worst of all, it’s not based in fact, at least not often enough to matter. The big names in blues worked hard and lived a good life, making much much more money than any of their peers on the plantations or in the factories. Patton would earn upwards of $100 a week all his life, while a sharecropper would struggle to make that in a good year. The delta at this time was a huge population center, and a decent musician was in demand for the weekly parties and functions. Patton was good enough to be in demand on a nightly basis, and could travel by car or train to take even higher paying jobs. He was as successful as a racial mongrel could be in his time, and by the accounts of family and friends he lived life on his own terms. Imagine doing that!

So why do all these myths persist even now? Well, the NY “folk” cognoscenti crowd sure didn’t help, but that was minor compared to some of what occurred during the revival of “country blues” in the 1960’s. Dozens of aging blues stars of the 1920s were rediscovered and trotted out to college stages and worldwide audiences. The “folk” ethos was still in effect, so most of the time these guys were dressed in farm or work clothes. Still no big thing though. What really skewed writing and perceptions for decades to come was the interviews done with some of these guys. The interviewers often had agendas, usually bringing up Robert Johnson as the standard against which all acoustic blues artists should be measured. These old guys gave ‘em what they wanted to hear mostly, making things up or tailoring what they said to their audience. You can’t blame most of ’em really. They just wanted to make a little cash in their golden years, and a little adulation from young white kids was kinda cool for ’em. “Sure, I’ll wear whatever you want me to wear, I get paid, right?”

But one guy skewed the history when it came to guys like Patton and Johnson more than anyone else, with ripples that are still billowing to this day. That would be Son House. House was not a blues star as a recording artist, until the 1960’s anyway. He made like six sides for Paramount, thanks to Charley’s beneficence, and they did not sell. He was forever going back and forth between preaching and playing blues, with a heavy emphasis on the hard drinking aspects of the latter. Apparently House had some kind of bone to pick with Patton. In every interview on the subject, he belittled Patton’s abilities, painting him as a clown, a buffoon, a degenerate that could barely speak his own name, let alone read or write. Son House was an alcoholic asshole. There’s illustrative footage of House proving this, as he’s in the small barroom audience for a 1960’s Howlin’ Wolf performance. House is sooooo drunk and disorderly, so loud and obnoxious, that Wolf starts yelling at him from the stage, apologizing to the rest of the audience for his “old fool” behavior. The truly sad part though is that House’s recollections have been used as primary, sometimes sole, sources for “scholarly” writing on Patton, Johnson and others. Subsequent research and interviews with Patton’s relatives and others without an agenda have proven House to be just what he was. A jealous asshole, and a dangerous one at that, at least in terms of making sense of the early history of the blues. We still see his bullshit being repeated as fact in liner notes and in books. It pains me to say it, because he looms large in my own life (more on that another day), but Son House was an old and jealous fool, and one with an agenda that involved talking shit about Patton at the drop of a hat or the gift of a bottle. Asshole.

In conclusion, I’ll leave you with my favorite Charley Patton track, “Down the Dirt Road Blues”. I’ll note that Patton also recorded religious material and did several songs that could be considered “pre-blues”, or what the “folk” types would consider “folk” music. Songs with roots dating back to minstrelsy or with Tin Pan Alley pedigrees if not for being altered by time and oral tradition. He wasn’t just a bluesman. He was a startlingly great musician. His guitars were always in tune, no small feat in those early days. His rhythmic sense was impeccable, he played slide like a monster, and could make up lyrics on the spot about anything around him. He did autobiographical songs about the great flood of 1927, his run-ins with the law (“Tom Rushen Blues”), women in far flung locales, just about anything. He was a complete and well rounded performer that was always in demand and popular with young and old, with all races, and with both sexes, unless a woman started paying a little too much attention to him. That resulted in him getting his throat slit in the late 1920’s by a jealous husband, probably a prime source of danger all his life. Patton was not what the liner notes for any album you may buy, even today, portray him as. He was a consummate professional musician, at the top of the heap in the Mississippi delta world he used as his base of operations.

For more on his life and times, there was once a snippet of his real biography by Dr. Evans out there, at one time a part of a larger site devoted to Paramount records. It’s no longer in the same place but probably still somewhere, ideally in a now available book. Let me know in the comments if you figure that out! I’m lazy, you see. And old. And very busy preparing to reenter society after a few decades in what might as well have been prison. More to come on all that! It’s been kinda harrowing at times, including a night in the clink for not paying the right weasels quickly enough. Had to call mom on a jail phone to ask for the cash to become free again. Fun stuff folks! That mess is finally coming to an end and was completely my own fault. I may become one of those weird self-flagellation guys like in those Dan Brown tales. Liked the books, the movies not so much…

That’s it! I like this piece a lot. This is the third time it’s been published, the first time for an audience not comprised of Orioles baseball fans. They had to ignore a lot of this kind of thing when the season was over.

Some day I’ll do a whole new post on Son House, who I may have encountered as a toddler tagging along with dad to the liquor store first, then Buzzo’s, the music store on Main street. In that order. He needed the bottle before the guitar.

Here’s something weird and random that sorta ties this all up into a nice sheep shank, whatever that is. The owner of that liquor store was my gym coach. I was in maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, and he was great, an older big guy that was very kind and understanding with unathletic, scrawny long haired me. I learned the basics of basketball and more from this man, who I never realized until decades later was former Yankee all star pitcher Vic Raschi! He was a pretty big baseball star in the early 50s, won 20 games a few times and probably hoisted some World Series trophies. I just knew him as the guy that would stop other kids from bullying me too hard, and make sure I was doing what I was supposed to on the basketball court. I was awful, never got any better either, despite having a hoop to practice with in our driveway, though it was usually full with the VW bus and other vehicles I no longer recall. There was a Renault at one point…

Over and out! As always thanks for reading, possibly commenting! See y’all next time!