Charley Patton – Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues

A percussive truthfulness. A synthesis of conflict and beauty. A futuristic maturity. An opening out toward multidimensionality through simplicity.
— Yusef Komunyakaa

Aw take my picture,
hang it up in Jackson’s wall
Aw take my picture,
hang it up in Jackson’s wall
Anybody asks you “What about it?”
Tell ’em “That’s all, that’s all.”
— Charley Patton

It’s fitting that there exists only one authenticated photo of Charley Patton, the man widely regarded as the founder of the Delta blues. It’s not that this lone snapshot heightens Patton’s mystique; we’ve long had a fairly complete portrait of the artist. Scholars have traced his lineage and limned his childhood, they’ve plotted the arc of his career and chronicled his exploits. No, it’s the archetypal nature of Patton’s music, the utter irreducibility of his blues, that imbues this monolithic image with such resonance and power.

Much as Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Bill Monroe did in their way, Patton forged not just a style but a new musical language. His wry vocal shadings, knotty cross-rhythms, and alchemical bottleneck work served as blueprints for everyone from Bukka White and Robert Johnson to Roebuck Staples and Howlin’ Wolf. Indeed, Patton’s recordings of tunes such as “Pony Blues” and “A Spoonful Blues” proved touchstones for virtually every blues musician who followed in his wake — and, from Canned Heat to Cream, for many a rock band as well.

The son of a preacher man who whipped him whenever he so much as looked at a guitar, Patton endured his father’s beatings to become, by 1920 or so, the pre-eminent live performer in the Mississippi Delta. Still, he was hardly the first blues singer to record. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among others, had been cutting sides for a half-decade by the time Patton, then around 40, ventured off Dockery’s Plantation to make his first recordings for Paramount in 1929.

Neither was Patton the most virtuosic country blues musician of his era. Son House sang with greater intensity; Tommy Johnson’s blues were more lyrical. Willie Brown was a flashier guitarist, Robert Johnson more of a poet. Yet from their “percussive truthfulness,” to the way that, through their very simplicity, they “open…out toward multidimensionality,” Mister Charley’s blues evince every one of the transcendental qualities that Yusef Komunyakaa, writing about jazz poetry, enumerates in the passage cited above.

Disciple Bukka White once claimed he wanted “to be a great man like Charley Patton.” But as evidenced by Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues, Revenant’s opulent new 7-CD box, Patton’s blues were so singular — hermetic even — that no one save maybe kindred spirit Big Joe Williams has approximated their like since.

A percussive truthfulness

The Delta blues grew out of the West African “talking drum” tradition, a radically percussive approach to playing where just about anything you can bang on takes precedence over wind instruments and guitars, and where rhythms, stacked one on top of another, signify far more than melody.

Patton, whose compositions rarely employed chords and frequently eschewed the familiar diatonic scale, embraced this polyrhythmic first principle with a vengeance. So much so, in fact, that as the liner notes to an early compilation of his recordings attest, his “rhythms assume such importance in each work that they ultimately become the work itself.”

More than any of his inheritors or peers, Patton grasped that inherently linear vehicles such as words and melodies couldn’t begin to do justice to the tortuous, often conflicted, feelings he sought to convey. Only the driving, heavily-accented cadences he growled, scratched, or rapped out on his hollow-body guitar — and typically pitted against each other — could invest those tangled webs of emotion with anything close to the force of truth.

Take the sprung, atavistic sequences of beats he stomps out on “Down The Dirt Road Blues”. Metrically divorced from the song’s lyrics, these flurries of notes, coupled with the syncopated figures Patton chokes off on his guitar, capture the dissonance he feels as he stands at a crossroads with his lover. Charley knows which way he’s going, but his special rider has her doubts, and her hesitation’s killing him. Patton’s “dirty” vocal timbres heighten this tension, blurring the lines between the barbs of hostility and hurt he has yet to — and may never — sort out for himself.

“Pony Blues”, another case of Patton “sacrificing” diction for pathos, achieves a similar effect. Stressing beats over syllables, his ravaged groaning renders palpable the mire of desire and dis-ease at the record’s core.