Charley Patton
Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton (Revenant)
Charley Patton is the greatest and most recorded of the Mississippi Delta bluesmen. He was an elusive yet central figure in pre-World War II blues, spellbinding white and black audiences alike with a wide repertory that set field hollers, traditional folksongs, bawdy ragtime numbers and his own material to a wildly virtuosic and percussive guitar. Though he isn’t as widely celebrated a figure as Robert Johnson, his influence looms large over American popular culture.
Few musicians were more profoundly inspired by Patton’s music than the late John Fahey, who first heard some of the bluesman’s famous Paramount sides as a teenager in 1950s Takoma Park, Md. Fahey would later achieve international renown for his own multidirectional guitar playing, but he was also a lifelong record collector, an author (penning the first comprehensive study of Patton), a record label owner and even a humorist (who satirized the often academic liner notes that accompanied blues reissues). Thus he was able to appreciate, beyond the scratchy surface noise of the 78 rpm records that housed Patton’s music, the astounding, complex composition and, more importantly, the intense undiluted emotion of Patton’s singing and playing.
Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues, the Revenant label’s recently released seven-disc set, may be a tribute to Charley Patton, but it is as much a tribute to label owner Fahey’s fanatical obsession with the bluesman—one that spanned more than four decades. Fahey’s untimely death during the latter stages of the set’s preparation made finishing the project more personal for Revenant co-owners Dean and Laurie Blackwood. Indeed, there may be no greater way to honor his memory.
A definitive record of Patton’s life and work, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues is an indispensable reference work for Delta blues aficionados. Even apprehended purely on a design level, this is an astounding set, modeled on a 78 rpm album folio and housed in a clothbound slipcase, much like a library book. The remarkable care and detail with which all the components have been rendered serve to create a context that allows the listener to step into Patton’s world and obtain a clearer understanding of his cultural importance. The copious notes, information and essays included here have been gathered from the top authorities on the subject: Dick Spottswood, the wizened record collector and a sometime colleague of Fahey’s; biographer David Evans, whose essay “Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta” (partially reprinted in the set) reversed somewhat cynical perceptions of Patton’s life; famed collector Gayle Dean Wardlow; and Fahey himself, who reconsiders Patton some 35 years after his monograph Charley Patton was published. (A standing reprint of the original work is included as well.)
Sketchy information provided by jealous rival singers (mostly Eddie “Son” House) and Stephen Calt’s biography King of the Delta Blues (co-written with Wardlow) paint Patton as a boozy philanderer and illiterate, a hard-living and selfish man with little care past his own sensual impulses. And while all of Patton’s biographies concur that he liked to drink and carouse with women, Evans’ careful notes refute the idea that he was uneducated and an idler. Quite the opposite is true. Charley’s father, Bill Patton, was a landowner and business owner, and Charley himself received at least a ninth-grade education. Thus it is far more likely that he adopted the role of an illiterate when it proved advantageous for him to do so.
While a teenager growing up on Dockery’s Plantation in Drew, Miss., Patton came under the influence of an unrecorded guitarist named Henry Sloan, whose raw blues was closer to African music than to the Tin Pan Alley fare that sold to white audiences. Bill Patton beat Charley with a bullwhip when he found out that his son had been listening to the “devil’s music.” But by the time the younger Patton turned 14, around 1905, his father relented and bought him a guitar. Patton’s other early musical influence was the large Chatmon family, which included bawdy songster Bo Carter and the membership of the Mississippi Sheiks, who penned the 1930 blues hit “Sittin’ on top of the World.” From the Chatmons Charley learned his resolute professionalism, while from Henry Sloan he learned something about making music rich with plaintive emotion.
In Charley Patton, Fahey opines that the singer “was more imitated than innovative; more cooperative than creative.” Which is to say that in the intervening years between his occupation as an itinerant musician and his first recordings in 1929, Patton traveled widely within the confines of the Delta (in this case meaning the area encompassing the Yazoo River Basin), informally exchanging ideas with other musicians. He even acted as a talent scout for Paramount and brought to the label such greats as Willie Brown and Son House, who were also at Dockery’s; the amazing choral group The Delta Big Four; and raucous pianist Louise Johnson, with whom he had a romantic relationship.
The six CDs of music included in Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues—there is an additional disc of interviews as well—present the cleanest sounding recordings yet of Patton’s 52 issued sides, as well as unissued takes and sessions on which he played but did not lead. After taking time to sit down and go through the set, it becomes clear just how ingeniously assembled it is. For example, blues and jazz reissue labels typically sequence unissued takes in the order they were recorded, a habit that has some scholarly merit but makes for an annoying listening experience, with seemingly unnecessary repetitions and interruptions. Revenant solves this problem by indexing the unreleased songs as negative-numbered tracks before the first track. If you don’t want to hear them, just press play. If you do want to hear them, hit the rewind button before you press play.
Each CD is organized to reflect performances culled from specific recording sessions, with 10-second pauses to create palpable breaks between artists—a helpful feature when you consider the many different inflections with which Patton sings. True, the songs aren’t tracked in the order they were recorded, but detailed appendices supply this information so that the listener can program a CD player to re-create the session. (This would be particularly illuminating in the case of Patton’s tense June 1930 session for Paramount with Brown, House and Johnson: Johnson took up with House after arguing with Patton on the trip to the studio in Grafton, Wisc. House is louder on the recordings—that is, closer to Johnson and to the mic—than Patton is. Brown, who clearly wanted no part of it, peppered the tracks with good-natured banter.)
Every detail of the CD packaging is an attempt to transport the modern listener into a different era. Each disc is pressed onto a rubber spindle in the center of a cardboard replica of one of Charley’s most prized 78s. With trademark Revenant thoroughness, each CD/78 combo is then housed in a replica of the dust sleeve that would have accompanied the 78 upon its original release. The packaging is lavish, to be sure, but it is also laced with Fahey’s impish sense of humor. Early in his recording career, the guitarist cut a series of country blues 78s for the Fonotone label, which he then salted into thrift store bins to fool collectors who would inevitably value his music more if it could be attributed to a legendary figure from a bygone era, instead of a white guy from the Maryland suburbs. Included here are a complete set of 78 rpm record labels from Patton’s releases, so that one could stick them on any old stack of 78s and theoretically transform the records into collector’s items.
But folks don’t buy CDs for packaging alone, and the real pearls here are in the music. Patton, a man tortured by a real fear of death and the inescapable feeling that he was controlled by outside forces or “jinxes,” was not your standard performer. Rather than write songs per se, he amassed a staggering vocabulary of guitar phrases and lyrics, which he seemingly freely associated while he performed. The result, something Fahey calls “instant composition,” has yielded horrible results in lesser hands. But for Patton, who played as if in an ecstatic trance, it was all about lines—melodic guitar lines, or noises extracted from the strings, or percussive sounds created by beating on the guitar in rhythm. He might have been free-associating, but his songs were compact and bursting with energy and feeling.
Patton also offered comments on the often disjunctive narratives of his songs by adopting different characters. When you consider the incredible dexterity with which he changes voices, all while weaving complex, syncopated counterpoint on the guitar, it becomes quite clear just how phenomenally good he was. If you want proof of his slide mastery, check out “Mississippi Boweavil Blues,” while his lyrical inventiveness can be brought into relief by comparing “Magnolia Blues” and “When Your Way Gets Dark,” both of which are set to essentially the same guitar accompaniment yet come off as strikingly distinct.
As a testimony to Patton’s widespread influence, and to help convey just how innovative he really was, Revenant has included a CD dubbed “Charley’s Orbit.” From the hard Memphis blues of “Ma” Rainey and the more urbane Mississippi Sheiks to the desperate falsetto wail of Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson (who surfaced as a composite character in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), the CD offers a fine cross-section of historic recordings by people who influenced, admired and were taught by Patton. The inclusion of Howlin’ Wolf and The Staple Singers might come as a shock, but both Pops Staples and Wolf spent time on Dockery’s Plantation and offer brief testimonials on the interview disc about their relationships with Charley. (He taught Wolf to play the guitar, and Staples recalls as a child seeing him perform at Dockery’s.)
Given Patton’s rich and unique talent, it’s a pity that he didn’t have a Faustian crutch to prop up his legend the way Robert Johnson did. The legacy of Johnson, who learned a great deal from watching Patton, has been perhaps elevated by movies and literature—not to mention a tacit endorsement by Bob Dylan, who conspicuously placed a reissue LP of Johnson recordings on the cover of 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home. Dylan set things straight this year by dedicating “High Water” from his “Love and Theft” CD to Charley Patton. He also claimed recently that if he made records strictly for his own pleasure, he would record only Patton songs.
Such heartfelt and unqualified praise from the likes of Dylan should come as no surprise, and indeed should underscore the need for such a document as Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues. For rock ’n’ roll, R&B, gospel and even rap owe a debt to Patton’s influence and legacy—and to that of his descendants Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, The Staple Singers, Bob Dylan and countless others. They also owe a debt to John Fahey, whose Revenant set eloquently pays that debt back to Patton, asserting his primacy among Delta bluesmen.
