Charley Patton – Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues

A synthesis of conflict and beauty

Writers have made much of the raw, visceral, at times forbidding properties of Patton’s music, and there’s no denying them. His feral yowl was the model for Howlin Wolf’s hair-raising lower-register moan. And the way the flood of cascading rhythms in “High Water Everywhere” unleashes violently, only to let up and then rage out of control again, is quintessential Patton.

Yet what’s even more striking listening to his recordings today, especially this sprawling set, which includes sides by Patton acolytes Son House, Willie Brown and others as points of reference, is just how nuanced and sophisticated — how artful — his blues were for his or any other age.

Hitching complex African musical devices such as voice masking and call-and-response techniques to the more streamlined dramatic and pop sensibilities he gleaned from vaudeville and hillbilly tunes, Patton fashioned an intricate blues prototype that transposed the traditions of his predecessors into a brand new key. One has only to compare the criss-crossing vocal and instrumental conversations he carries on with himself in “Spoonful” to the ragtimey variant popularized by his contemporary Charlie Jackson to hear that something different — some new synthesis — was being born.

A futuristic maturity

Much the same forward-reaching quality, or “futuristic maturity,” to use Komunyakaa’s more evocative phrase, is also evident in the scope and sweep of Patton’s narratives. Unlike his minstrel and songster counterparts, Patton didn’t just rehash the ballad-sagas of folk heroes such as Casey Jones and John Henry. He took lines and verses that had been circulating for generations and applied them to the floods, dry spells, and weevil-‘deviled cotton of his day.

Others might have personalized and localized the blues before Patton, but few gave them as indelible a subjective and sociological stamp. Or, for that matter, animated as vivid, coherent — and, from time to time, downright hilarious — a demimonde, one populated, among others, with trifling women, wanton preachers, whiskey-spawned tormentors, and sinners in the hands of an angry God.

Again, Patton was hardly the bard Robert Johnson was; nevertheless, from lines such as “My baby’s got a heart like a piece of railroad steel” and “Oh yeah, evil walkin’ at midnight when I hear the local blow,” there’s plenty of plainspoken poetry here. Mystical-existential musings too. The passage “If I was a bird, mama, I would find a nest in the heart of town…So when the town get lonesome I’d be bird nest bound” doesn’t just convey a longing for a sense of home in a world that won’t afford one. Delivered with Patton’s soul-on-ice intensity, it betrays a depth of spiritual and emotional alienation worthy of Hank Williams — even Robert Johnson himself.

An opening out toward multidimensionality through simplicity

From his sung sermons to his duets with Willie Brown and down-home fiddler Henry Sims, Patton’s 60 or so recordings were rarely less than riveting (only a handful of his 1934 sides suffer, a result of his prematurely failing health; he died later that year). The Revenant set lets us hear absolutely all of them, and not just with brighter sonics and less surface noise, but, more importantly, in context — alongside recordings by most of the singers who ran with Patton or inhabited his orbit.

Commentary on Patton’s life and legacy abounds here as well. There’s everything from a CD’s worth of interviews with his peers, to extensive essays and song notes, to a reprint of a monograph on the bluesman by the late Revenant co-founder and Patton-inspired guitar pioneer John Fahey. Per Revenant’s usual lavish standards, the CDs come in a hardcover “78-album” style book, including full-size repros of Paramount’s 1929 Patton ads and of labels from all of his Paramount and Vocalion recordings.

Ultimately, though, no amount of packaging, however extravagant, can testify to Patton’s perpetually self-surpassing artistry more eloquently than his imperious body of work. Indeed, it’s a monument to the sides he left behind that, nearly 70 years after his death, listeners will recognize many of them, even if they’ve only heard versions done by others under titles such as “Little Red Rooster” and “Big Road Blues”. Even if you’re hearing Patton for the very first time, much as the one extant photo of him does, his “originals” will reveal themselves to be not just definitive, but at once singular and singularly inexhaustible.