Charley Patton
By Manfred Curinckx.I’m delighted to take you back to the early days of Mississippi blues with this article on the great musician Charley Patton. He is rightfully considered as one of the most impressive, important and influential bluesmen that ever recorded. But who was he? He was a man of mixed race, said to be part African-American, part White, part Native American, born in 1891 in the Edwards/Bolton area in Mississippi. That is somewhat halfway between Vicksburg and Jackson, just south of the Delta. The Mississippi Delta is often thought to be the area where the Mississippi joins the Gulf of Mexico, but that is not the case. The Delta is an area between the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River, stretching to the north roughly from Vicksburg towards Memphis Tennessee. Charley was not a tall man, standing only about 5 and a half foot. His parents were sharecroppers. There is debate on who his biological father was, Bill Patton or as per a legend a man called Henderson Chatmon. Henderson was an early suitor of Charley’s mother. He was the head of the Chatmon family, of which various members formed and played in The Mississippi Sheiks. At the end of the 1890’s, the entire Patton family moved north to the Dockery Plantation close to Ruleville, in the heart of the Delta. Dockery farm was started by Will Dockery as a large cotton plantation in 1895. It was there that the young Charley met a man called Henry Sloan, a guitar player/musician that used to live in Charley’s native area and had moved to Dockery a couple of years prior to the Patton family. Henry was reportedly a great guitar player of who we sadly have no recordings, excelling in the blues style that would make Charley famous later on. By no means Charley invented the blues, nor was he the first to record blues. Henry reportedly taught Charley to play guitar but it wouldn’t take long before Charley became skilled. Already in his late teens, he was a fine blues guitar player, perfomer and songwriter. Another early blues pioneer, named Willie Brown, also lived at Dockery. Charley and Willie often played together on the plantations and juke joints in the Delta area in the early 1920’s, and Willie would often accompany Charley on his recordings later on from the end of the 1920’s. Other great musicians that worked at Dockery were Tommy Johnson, Son House, David (Honeyboy) Edwards and Pop (Roebuck) Staples. They all performed and made name as Delta blues players in the area on plantations, picknicks, fish fries, in juke joints….2 other great blues guitar players would soon follow, Robert Johnson and Chester Burnett (Howling Wolf), both of them being heavily influenced by Charley from seeing him play in juke joints (often with Willie Brown and Son House). Charley made his first recordings in 1929 and would regularly do so until 1934. His recordings like Pony Blues, High Water Everywhere, Dry Well Blues, Mississippi Boll Weavil Blues, Pea Vine Blues … provide us with a window on Charley’s world at that time. High Water Everywhere tells us about the great flooding of the Mississippi River in 1927, following almost continuous rain from the second half of 1926 until april 1927.