Big Road Blues Show 12/11/22: Screamin’ And Hollerin’ the Blues – Charlie Patton Pt. 2

ARTIST	SONG	ALBUM
Charlie Patton	It Won't Be Long	The Best Of
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	More on Patton's Popularity	Interview 10.20.22
Charlie Patton	Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues	The Best Of
Elder J. J. Hadley AKA Charlie Patton	Prayer of Death Part I	Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	People Who Played with Patton and Getting on Record	Interview 10.20.22
Nathan “Dick Bankston”	Talks About Meeting Patton & Tommy Johnson	Gayle Dean Wardlow Interview 1967
Tommy Johnson	Bye Bye Blues	Memphis Blues Singers Vol. 1
Willie Brown	M & O Blues	The Roots Of It All Acoustic Blues Vol. 1
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Willie Brown	Interview 10.20.22
Willie Brown	Future Blues	American Epic: The Best Of Blues
Willie Moore	Talks About Willie Brown and the Draft	Gayle Dean Wardlow Interview
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Kid Bailey	Interview 10.20.22
Kid Bailey	Rowdy Blues	Masters of the Delta Blues: Friends of Charlie Patton
Elizabeth Moore	Talks About Kid Bailey	Gayle Dean Wardlow Interview
Son House	My Black Mama Part 1 & 2	American Epic: The Best Of Blues
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Son House/1930 Session	Interview 10.20.22
Louise Johnson	On the Wall	Juke Joint Saturday Night
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	1930 Session and Putting the Focus on Patton	Interview 10.20.22
Charlie Patton & Willie Brown	Moon Going Down	The Best Of
Charlie Patton & Willie Brown	Bird Nest Bound	The Best Of
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Charlie Patton's Guitar Playing	Interview 10.20.22
Charley Patton	Some Summer Day	Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Bertha Lee/Delta Big Four	Interview 10.20.22
Charley Patton & Bertha Lee	Oh Death	Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs
Delta Big Four	I Know My Time Ain't Long	Screamin' & Hollerin' The Blues: The Worlds Of Charley Patton
Booker Miller	Talks Patton Playing Religious Songs	Gayle Dean Wardlow Interview 1968
Charley Patton	I'm Goin' Home	The Best Of
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Summing Up Patton and His Legacy	Interview 10.20.22
Charley Patton	Magnolia Blues	The Best Of
Charlie Patton	Stone Pony	Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs
Gayle Dean Wardlow & Ed Komara	Crafting the Book and Historical Context	Interview 10.20.22
Charlie Patton	Green River Blues	The Best Of

Show Notes:

 

I have done many interviews over the years, and I certainly have my favorites such as frequent guest John Tefteller, the late Joe Bussard, Larry Cohn and particularly Gayle Dean Wardlow who I first interviewed in his home in Milton, Florida several years back. Gayle has been researching the blues probably longer than any still with us. Around 1962 Pete Whelan and Bernie Klatzko encouraged Wardlow to find information on some long-forgotten Delta bluesmen, particularly Charlie Patton, who was revered by those New York collectors known as the Blues Mafia. He teamed up with Stephen Calt (he passed in 2010) and the two worked for some two decades on the King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton which was published in 1988. It was a work of prodigious research but also a flawed, controversial book that gave Wardlow and Calt’s critics plenty of ammunition to point out its problems. It was time for an overhaul for several reasons; Patton’s stature, due to reissues and publications, has risen greatly since the book’s initial release and there has been a fair bit of new information that has shed light on Patton’s background. With the help of blues scholar Ed Komara (whose name rightly belongs on the cover), the book has been substantially reshaped and truly lives up to the promise of the first edition. It’s a lively, vibrant portrait of Charlie Patton that fleshes out the man and the musician and makes a persuasive case that Patton, not Robert Johnson, was the true King of the Delta Blues, something Gayle emphasizes several times in our interview. Over the course of these shows Gayle and Ed take a deep dive into Patton’s world and were gracious to answer my numerous questions. Along the way we hear plenty of great music from Patton and musicians in his orbit such as Willie Brown, Son House, Tommy Johnson, and others plus I use some of Gayle’s original interviews from the 1960s to round out the story. Just a note that I have edited the interviews to fit the show.

Both Editions of King of the Delta Blues

Starting in the early 60s, Gayle knocked on doors, tracked leads and used his journalism background to find documentation like death certificates to fill in the life of these mysterious bluesmen. Over the years he has written dozens of liner notes and articles in magazines like Blues Unlimited, 78 Quarterly, Blues & Rhythm and Living Blues. Many of his articles were collected in the book Chasin’ That Devil Music. In addition to co-authoring the Patton book, he co-authored Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson (with Bruce Conforth which was published in 2019). His most recent piece is Memories of Tommy Johnson in the latest issue of The Frog Blues and Jazz Annual.

Early on, Wardlow found information on Patton, including an ex-wife, and when Bernard Klatzko came down to Mississippi in 1963, found additional people who knew Patton in Holly Ridge, Dockery’s Plantation and Lula. He also found information on Tommy Johnson, including locating a contemporary of his in Ishmon Bracey who had recorded for Victor in 1928 and Paramount in 1930 as well as interviewing Johnson’s brother Ledell. From Bracey he located and interviewed H.C. Speir a record store owner and talent scout who helped Tommy Johnson, Charlie Patton, Skip James, Son House, Robert Johnson and others to get on record. Speir became the subject of Wardlow’s first blues feature article, “Legends of the Lost,” published serially in 1966 by Blues Unlimited. During the mid-1960’s, Wardlow supplied tape copies of rare records to Klatzko and Whelan for their Origin Jazz Library reissues, providing notes on musicians few knew anything about. The very first album on that label was Charlie Patton! 1929-32 (reissued as The Immortal Charlie Patton 1887-1934 in 1964 with notes by David Evans) in 1961 with notes by Bernie Klatzko. The label’s second release, Really! The Country Blues 1927-1933 was issued in 1962 with notes by Wardlow. He also wrote notes for 1963’s The Mississippi Blues 1927-1940.

Bertha Lee Pate/Patton, photo by Ann Charters, Chicago, 1965

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. Patton’s life has come into sharper focus since this book was first published thanks to research by people like David Evans, DeWayne Moore an others. Still, as the book points in the aptly title chapter, Through The Past Darkly (1880s-1900), “much about his life remains cloudy and uncertain.” The books draws on historical documents and numerous first had recollection from those who knew Patton like Elizabeth and William Moore, Hayes McMullen and Booker Miller among others. These recollections were based on interviews conducted by Wardlow in the 60s and are available online for anyone to listen to.

Patton’s sister Viola Cannon once told her son Tom that her brother learned guitar as a ten or eleven year old and ‘come up playin’.’ But Patton himself told his protégé Booker Miller that he began to play guitar around the age of nineteen or twenty.” It seems he was playing music as early as 1906 or 1907. As for who Patton learned from, it’s been suggested he make have picked up a good deal from Earl Harris and Henry Sloan. Sloan was born in January 1870, in Mississippi, and moved to Dockery’s about the same time as the Patton’s, between 1901 and 1904.

Patton 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. ‘Tom Rushen Blues’ was actually a reworking of Ma Rainey’s ‘Booze and Blues’ cut in 1924. I always liked Tony Russell’s snapshot of Patton: “His sometimes strangled utterances, already half choked by the surface noise of old discs, gradually revealed themselves to be passages from an oral history of black Mississippi in the 1910s and ’20s: its dirt roads and rivers, drinking places and jails, the pest ravaged cottonfields of ‘Mississippi Boweavil Blues’, the drought of ‘Dry Well Blues’, the flooded bottomlands of ‘High Water Everywhere’ and, turning from natural disasters to man-made ones, the layoff of railroad workers in ‘Mean Black Moan.’ These reports, and the many other types of songs he recorded, from blue-ballads like ‘Frankie And Albert’ and rags like ‘Shake It And Break It’ to hymns and transformed popular songs, are delivered in a voice as tough as steel, to guitar melodies as densely springy as ryegrass. It is extraordinary music, not always easy to understand, but so full of incident that it quickly becomes totally absorbing.”

Paramount recorded some of the greatest blues performances of the era and full credit should go to talent scouts like Henry C. Spier, a music store owner from Jackson, Mississippi. Speir scoured the south for talent and was responsible for getting Son House, Skip James and Charlie Patton on record. In the article Revisiting Ralph Lembo DeWayne Moore contends that Speir was not the talent scout responsible for Charlie Patton’s June 1929 recording session, and David Evans, in a subsequent letter to the editor of the ARSC Journal, supports his findings. Gayle and researcher Ed also penned a letter to the editor refuting his claim.

Paramount asked Gennett to record 14 tunes by Patton at their Richmond, Indiana studio in June 1929. “Pony Blues” b/w “Banty Rooster Blues” was the first issued. The coupling was a hit and Paramount labeled his second release, “Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues”, as by The Masked Marvel. The advert bore a drawing of a blindfolded singer and the clue that this was an exclusive paramount artists. Anyone guessing his identity would get a free Paramount record of their choice.  In all, Patton recorded 38 numbers for Paramount in 1929, some issued the following year, with two gospel songs issued under the pseudonym Elder J.J. Hadley.

Patton’s basic blues themes–the “Spanish tuning” arrangement he recorded first as “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” and that Willie Brown recorded as “Future Blues,” Son House recorded as “Jinx Blues,” and Tommy Johnson recorded “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 Blues. Booker Miller recalls Patton referring to the melody as “Maggie.” In the book the authors state that “the underlying guitar arrangement would be used on Patton’s records at least seven times, more often than any of his other accompaniments.”

In 1930, Arthur Laibley who had produced Charley Patton’s last session for Paramount, stopped in Lula to arrange another session with Patton. Patton told Laibley about Son House and about two other musicians Willie Brown and Louise Johnson, setting the stage for one of the blues most legendary recording sessions. The group headed to the Paramount studios in Grafton, WI, where House recorded six songs at the session: three of which were long enough to fill both sides of a 78: “Dry Spell Blues,” “Preachin’ The Blues,” and “My Black Mama.”

Willie Brown played with Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, mostly playing second guitar. Little is known for certain of the man whom Robert Johnson called “my friend-boy, Willie Brown” (“Cross Road Blues”). Brown is heard with Patton on the Paramount sessions of 1930 and cut” M & O Blues and” and “Future Blues” at that date as well as playing behind Patton “Moon Going Down”, “Bird Nest Bound” and “Dry Well Blues.” In 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Brown with Son House, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Leroy Williams. Brown played second guitar on three performances by the whole band, and recorded one solo, “Make Me A Pallet on The Floor.” Brown died in Tunica, Mississippi in 1952 at the age of 52.

Kid Bailey left behind just one 78 recorded in 1929 at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis: “Rowdy Blues b/w Mississippi Bottom Blues.” Gayle believes that Willie Brown is playing guitar on “Rowdy Blues.” David Evans puts forth that Bailey was actually Willie Brown.

Louise Johnson was barrelhouse pianist and girlfriend of Patton’s who went to Grafton to make records with Patton Brown and House. She cut four sides at that session, her sole recorded legacy. From the book Preachin’ The Blues Dan Beaumont writes: “North of Robinsonville, Patton directed Ford to visit the Kirby plantation where they picked up a young woman named Louise Johnson, who was one of Patton’s girlfriends. Johnson sang and played piano in a barrelhouse operated by a Liny Armstrong.

Wardlow found numerous informants who knew and played with Patton like Booker Miller, Nathan “Dick” Bankston and Willie and Elizabeth Moore. One of the most important was Booker Miller who played with Patton for a time and Patton told him a fair bit about his life. Miller continued playing blues for a few years after Patton’s death, into the time of Robert Johnson’s recording sessions. Although Miller had turned to the church in 1937 and later became a minister, to the end of his life he was willing to talk about his bluesman days. Gayle interviewed extensively in the 60s and was set to record him but Miller passed shortly before the recording date.1937 and later became a minister, to the end of his life he was willing to talk about his bluesman days. Gayle interviewed extensively in the 60s and was set to record him but Miller passed shortly before the recording date. Nathan “Dick” Bankston was born in 1897 near Crystal Springs. Bankston, who played in the Drew-Dockery area, was active as a bluesman in the 1920s. He first met Patton around 1914. Gayle interviewed him in Memphis in 1967.

Bertha Lee met Patton in 1930 and remained his partner until his death in 1934. W.R. Calaway, who had formally worked at Paramount, was now working for the American Record Corporation and contacted Patton about recording once again. Charley and Bertha Lee traveled by train to New York and between January 30 and February 1 recorded twenty-nine songs. Only twelve of these were ever released. She sings lead on “Yellow Bee” and “Mind Reader Blues” with “Dog Train Blues” left unissued. She also duets with Patton on the gospel numbers “Oh Death” and “Troubled ’bout My Mother.” According to Gayle, “Bernie Klatzko found Bertha Lee in Chicago a few years after he and I were the first researchers to go to Holly Ridge/Dockery’s in 1963 and on to Lula where Bernie got an address on Bertha from a relative in Lula. He then went to Chicago and interviewed her with Howlin Wolf present. He wrote about it if I recall in 78 quarterly or another publication. But Klatzko was the first to find her and interview her in the mid 60s.” She was also interviewed by Don Kent and interviewed and photographed by Sam and Ann Charters.

Patton’s death certificate indicates that the onset of his fatal heart trouble occurred on January 27, 1934. In early April he gave his last performance. It was a dance for whites, probably not too far from Holly Ridge. Bertha Lee stated that he returned home hoarse and unable to talk or get his breath properly. He was visited by a doctor on Tuesday, April 17, and again on Friday, April 20. Many relatives and fellow blues singers and friends visited him during this final illness. . The end came on the morning of Saturday, April 28, 1934, and he was buried the following day at Longswitch Cemetery, less than a mile from his last home at Holly Ridge. He was 43.