Patton Pending: The Real King of the Delta

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to put our finger on just where the blues began but, the fact of the matter is that it really can’t be done. The Delta Blues, much like the region it comes from, has tributaries. We’ve already talked about a few of them, but there are many others that fed into what would become the relentless torrent we call The Blues. We talked about the man who “discovered the blues” as well as its reigning monarch, but there is more to the story.

Let’s look at blues lore in terms of elementary school history. We covered Christopher Columbus (W.C. Handy) and the pilgrims (Robert Johnson) but we’ve skipped over Jamestown because it’s dark and less family friendly. But now, you’re in college and it’s time for the truth. Robert Johnson isn’t the King of the Delta Blues--at least not fully. Awhile back someone at Columbia Records gave him that designation, but most blues scholars will tell you that someone else deserves the distinction: Charley Patton. For a full biography of Patton, told in a pretty interesting format you can go here but I'll give you the cliff notes.

Patton was born in southern Mississippi in 1900 and moved north to the Delta around age 9. By 19, he was a seasoned performer and songwriter. He learned the blues from his mentor, Henry Sloan, who some like to speculate was that lone traveler that Handy overheard that fateful Delta night--but it really doesn’t matter, because no one could teach Patton how to become the legend he became. He had it within himself and if he had any help from the Devil, it’s only because he had a bit of that in himself as well.

Patton was a womanizer and a no-good vagrant who could spin a yarn and sing a tune that could win over nearly any one he came into contact with--including Robert Johnson. Now, when we last left our hero he was a satanic showman, literally poisoned to death for being too much of a threatening badass heart-throb. But, in 1926 Robert Johnson was little more than an annoying kid that thought he could hang with the big boys and who stuck to Patton and his friends well, like this:They practically laughed him out of town and into the arms of the Devil.

But what made Charley Patton worthy of such idolatry? Part of it was his playing style: expert poly-rhythmic picking, employing the body of the guitar as rhythmic accompaniment. The kind of playing we usually attribute to guys like this: Yeah, Patton invented it.

Another factor that made Patton a legend was his showmanship. You know that behind the back, through the legs, guitar trickery we usually credit to guys like Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, and T-Bone Walker:

Yeah, Patton invented that too. Son House called it Charley’s way of “clowning,” for our purposes we’ll call it Charley’s way of “being a complete badass.” Which, incidentally brings us to our next point: Charley Patton unwittingly invented the archetype of a rock star, simply by being himself.

He lived a hard, fists-up, no-holds-barred kind of existence. Which shows up quite a bit in his music. If you listen to his recordings done for Paramount in the late 1920s--all issued on 78s and harder to find in a record store than a black cat bone, thanks to the kindness of audiophiles the digital copies are pretty easy to come by... at least until SOPA passes--the words are barely intelligible. That is mostly because Patton didn’t exactly cater to the headphones crowd. He played good time, juke-joint-on-a-saturday-night, out-into-the-streets-fightin’ music. And he tackled such subjects as prison and hard drugs--sometimes in the same tune:

At the risk of sounding like a complete Clapton fangirl, I feel compelled to point out that the above tune served as inspiration, in part, for both of these:



Patton, like Johnson, is important for what he did, but mostly for what he started. No other blues figure served as a blueprint for rock ‘n’ roll, or for other blues musicians, quite like Patton. Perhaps a new coronation is in order.