User:Ghmyrtle/sandbox

William "Billy" King (1875 – 1951) was an African-American vaudeville comedian and showman, who was described as "a living link between the Harlem Renaissance and nineteenth-century black minstrelsy."

He was born in Whistler, Alabama.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NgIYlUbaoAoC&pg=PA662&lpg=PA662&dq=%22billy+king%22+vaudeville&source=bl&ots=IEqLZOhA6c&sig=wYBKQNdrKIndNFpO-h1M75uMZVM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilx6qZt67QAhVfFMAKHdaDBdUQ6AEIHTAB#v=onepage&q=%22billy%20king%22%20vaudeville&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4ePerohXDIUC&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=%22billy+king%22+vaudeville&source=bl&ots=3G9VgKV_gW&sig=HwZxBG8Z5i4Xpwxwj22SREgZsTQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwilx6qZt67QAhVfFMAKHdaDBdUQ6AEILTAF#v=onepage&q=%22billy%20king%22%20vaudeville&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=94Vkm-y_3CEC&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&dq=%22billy+king%22+vaudeville+1875&source=bl&ots=FaSfa4MR19&sig=7PNZbT7FE3qwS6bxeCcm7hxNARg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjm2YzD0a_QAhUhOsAKHWvVAd0Q6AEIIjAC#v=onepage&q=%22billy%20king%22%20vaudeville%201875&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DVsKAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=%22billy+king%22+vaudeville+1875&source=bl&ots=0gfyQTvXFS&sig=ki57wMqOU5exUfqzNosGkkNC-Eo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjm2YzD0a_QAhUhOsAKHWvVAd0Q6AEIKTAE#v=onepage&q=%22billy%20king%22%20vaudeville%201875&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IJQyBe_wDj8C&pg=PA264&lpg=PA264&dq=%22billy+king%22+vaudeville+1875&source=bl&ots=KvjS_MRHV_&sig=xNziUkWiZeDZaCaoARyEzoObq5s&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjm2YzD0a_QAhUhOsAKHWvVAd0Q6AEILDAF#v=onepage&q=%22billy%20king%22%20&f=false

http://omhof.com/inductee/the-oklahoma-city-blue-devils/

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Lattimore Vernon Brown (August 20, 1931 – March 25, 2011), known as Sir Lattimore Brown, was an American R&B and soul singer.

http://www.sirlattimorebrown.com/legend.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8498824/Sir-Lattimore-Brown.html Sir Lattimore Brown Sir Lattimore Brown, who has died aged 79, was perhaps the most unfortunate artist in the annals of soul music.

Sir Lattimore Brown Photo: GETTY 6:06PM BST 06 May 2011 A singer, songwriter and band leader active on the "chitlin' circuit" of the eastern and southern United States between the 1950s and 1970s, Brown shared a stage with the likes of Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Muddy Waters and Otis Redding. His 17 singles on seven labels, made between 1960 and 1975, were minor hits. But wider recognition was not encouraged by the online All Music Guide's declaration that he had "retired from music in 1980 and passed away in Arkansas in the subsequent decade". Certainly fortune did not smile on Brown. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005 he was badly injured and his home in Biloxi was destroyed; shortly afterwards his wife died of a heart attack, news of which took five months to reach him. Reduced to living in a trailer home, in 2007 he was stabbed, robbed of his Veterans' Association benefit and left for dead. But these were merely the latest in a series of disasters to which he was prone throughout his life. He was born LV Brown at Mound Bayou, Mississippi, on August 20 1931, and brought up in cotton fields by his sharecropping grandfather, having never known his parents. While attending a local church he formed a vocal group, The Shady Grove Specials. But after one too many beatings from his aunt, he left aged 12, beginning an itinerant life. By 15 he had married and at 17 he enlisted (illegally) in the Army. The registration process obliged him to invent a full name, and he chose "Lattimore Vernon Brown". After three years in Korea and Vietnam (before the latter war had officially started), he returned to Mississippi to find his wife pregnant with another man's child. In disgust, Brown again went on the road, in 1953 ending up in Memphis, where the music scene was beginning to boom. He joined a travelling minstrel show touring the South, and in 1957 met Jimmy "Buzzard" Stewart, through whom he signed with Zil Records, which in 1960 released his first single, Somebody's Gonna Miss Me. After two more, unsuccessful, singles he moved to Dallas, where he set up a club called the Atmosphere Lounge and put together a band. Renowned for their rare ability to read music, they were frequently booked on chitlin' circuit tours. ADVERTISING

Brown's extensive contacts helped to keep his club busy until disaster struck in 1963, when his "sleeping" business partner, Jack Ruby, shot President Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, live on television. Eventually resettling in Nashville, Brown secured a deal with the label Sound Stage 7, and recorded with the producer Willie Mitchell in Memphis. In 1966 he added "Sir" to his name and the next year signed to Otis Redding's touring agency RedWal, only for the star to die in a plane crash shortly afterwards. Brown's tribute Otis Is Gone (1968) was his most successful recording, but if he thought his fortune had changed, he was wrong. In the early 1970s he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and remarried, setting up The Silver Slipper club with his new wife. It was a successful business, but once again bad luck intervened when she died after unsuccessful heart surgery. Brown drifted back to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he married again. But his new wife died of lung cancer, so he returned to touring the South. In 1974 an up-and-coming pianist called Benny Latimore shortened his name to "Latimore", and when his fans mistakenly bought tickets to Brown's gigs, there were riots. Work began to dry up for Brown and he was forced to stop performing when he heard that the southern mafia (who owned most of the venues he played in) were furious about the costs of the concert mix-ups, and had put out a contract on his life. Unsurprisingly, Brown thereafter kept a low profile. A compilation appeared of his work, This Is Lattimore's World (1977), but he never received any royalties. In the early 1980s he opened Owl's Club in Little Rock, which became a popular after-hours hang-out for local musicians, including one Bill Clinton, who played sax there in his brother Roger's band. But by the end of the decade business had declined and Lattimore once again hit the road. It was during his convalescence from the mugging in Biloxi in 2007 that a nurse put him in touch with the vintage soul enthusiast and blogger Red Kelly, leading to Brown's first recording in 33 years, Pain In My Heart. The next year he returned to performing, and in 2009 Nobody Has To Tell Me – a remastered collection of his recordings – was released, with liner notes by John Ridley and Red Kelly. In 2010 Kelly helped to reunite Brown with his children, grandchildren and first wife – all of whom survive him. A deeply religious man, Brown reflected on his misfortunes: "God has blessed me. I've been through many trials and tribulations in life, but so many of us have. The greatest thing in life is to let your heart be kind and respect others as you would have them to do unto you." Lattimore Brown died on March 25. He had found a new home at Pensacola, Florida, only to be struck by a car while crossing a road nearby.

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Alfoncy Harris (born Alphonse Harris, March 5, 1876 – December 9, 1942) and his wife Bethenea Harris were African-American blues and vaudeville performers and musicians who recorded in the 1920s and 1930s.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/alfoncy-harris-mn0000001860 Artist Biography by arwulf arwulf Alfoncy Harris was an old-styled big-voiced blues singer active during the 1920s and '30s whose legacy amounts to a small number of recordings, some of which have been reissued in connection with more famous artists, or on widely circulated historic blues collections. His first records appear to have been made in Memphis, TN, on January 31, 1928, for the Victor company with his wife, Bethenea Harris, and a trio consisting of clarinetist Douglas Williams, pianist Blaine (some sources say Elaine) Elliott, and drummer Sam Sims. According to the discographies, Alfoncy briefly blew into an alto saxophone on this session. "I Don't Care What You Say" was followed by "That Same Cat," a song credited to Alfoncy but clearly patterned after "That Same Dog" by Butterbeans & Susie, the better-known and more successful vaudeville blues duo after whom many a husband-and-wife team patterned their acts. On November 26 and 27, 1929, Alfoncy and Bethenea recorded a pair of duets for Victor in Atlanta, GA. On "Teasing Brown" b/w "This Is Not the Stove to Brown Your Bread," the two were backed by banjoist William Shorter and 12-string guitarist Blind Willie McTell. Four additional titles, "Lucaloosa Blue Front Blues" (on which Alfoncy played clarinet), "Get Back Blues," "Learn Something Blues," and "What Do I Care?," were also waxed at these sessions but remained unissued. Alfoncy's last known recordings, "No Good Guy," "Absent Freight Train Blues," and "South Land Blues," were made for the ARC label in Dallas, TX, in October 1934 with pianist Curtis Jones. These were included as bonus tracks on Document's Complete Works, Vol. 4 Curtis Jones collection in 1995. The originally issued McTell titles have cropped up on a number of collections under that guitarist's name. The Douglas Williams selections made their CD debut in 1997 on a Document anthology of duets by George Williams and Bessie Brown among examples by five other vaudeville and blues duos from the same time period. They were then presented by Jazz Oracle among Williams' complete works in 2000, followed by unprecedented exposure via inclusion on Bluebird's highly acclaimed When the Sun Goes Down: The Secret History of Rock & Roll compilation in 2002.

http://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/talent/detail/42294/Harris_Alfoncy_vocalist

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oxdloWgNSPEC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=alfoncy+bethenea+harris&source=bl&ots=eaq1VmyBTX&sig=cANDWMz1OxbH4QThugc8lGzjKVA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwinyb2369LPAhXMLsAKHYD-B304ChDoAQgiMAI#v=onepage&q=alfoncy%20bethenea%20harris&f=false

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Charlie or Charley Patton<insert footnote> (April 1891 (probable)<insert footnote> – April 28, 1934), was an American Delta blues musician. Considered by many to be the "Father of the Delta Blues", he created an enduring body of American music and inspired most Delta blues musicians. He lived most of his life in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta, but toured widely and recorded frequently, becoming one of the most popular musicians of the period among African-American audiences. According to musicologist David Evans: "There can be no doubt that during his lifetime he was the “king” of the Delta blues." The music writer Robert Palmer considered him one of the most important American musicians of the twentieth century.

FOOTNOTE: [Patton (who was well educated by the standards of his time) spelled his name "Charlie", but many sources, including record labels and his gravestone, use the spelling "Charley."]

Family background and early life

Patton was born in Hinds County, Mississippi, near the town of Edwards. There is uncertainty over his birth details; many births in Mississippi at the time were not registered. Most sources, and his gravestone, follow the evidence in the 1900 United States Census that Patton was born in April 1891, but the years 1881, 1885 and 1887 have also been suggested. Researchers Bob Eagle and Eric S. LeBlanc have suggested, on the basis of a World War I draft card, that he was born at a location known as Heron's Place near Edwards on July 12, 1885.[ref] The spelling of his name also varies between sources; his early original record releases and gravestone give the spelling as Charley, but the 1900 census and his family use Charlie, and at least two marriage certificates give his name as Charles.

Patton's ethnic background was mixed. He was one of the three sons of Bill and Annie Patton, who also had nine daughters. Suggestions in some sources that his genetic father may have been former slave Henderson Chatmon, several of whose children became popular Delta musicians, are dismissed by biographer David Evans. Patton was described by John Fahey as having "light skin and Caucasian features." His grandfather Bill Patton Sr. was white; his father Bill Patton Jr. was of mixed white and Black Indian ancestry; and his mother also had some Indian ancestry. Because of his relatively light complexion, there was speculation (by Howlin' Wolf, among others), that he was of Mexican or Cherokee descent. In "Down the Dirt Road Blues", Patton sang of having gone to "the Nation" and "the Territo'", referring to the Cherokee Nation's portion of the Indian Territory (which became part of the state of Oklahoma in 1907), where a number of Black Indians tried unsuccessfully to claim a place on the tribal rolls and thereby obtain land. Evans concludes that his ancestry would have been "at least one-quarter Caucasian, probably one-quarter to one-half Indian, and the remainder African." Patton was officially considered African-American, but, according to Evans: "It is important to recognize the fact that Charley Patton’s cultural and emotional background was as mixed as his racial background."

In 1897 (according to Palmer) or between 1901 and 1904 (according to Evans), his family (including his white grandfather Bill Patton Sr.) moved 100 miles (160 km) north to the 10,000-acre (40 km²) Dockery Plantation, an efficiently-run cotton farm and sawmill on the Sunflower River near Ruleville, Mississippi. Charley's grandfather Bill Patton Sr. had a supervisory role on the plantation; and Bill Patton Jr. (Charley's father) eventually saved enough money working there to buy land and set up a store at Renova, north of Cleveland, Mississippi, in the late 1920s, shortly before his death.

By the standards of the time, Charley Patton had a relatively good education, to at least the ninth grade. Claims by Son House that Patton was illiterate are thought to be untrue, though Evans states that Patton "did neglect his education in his later years and probably allowed his skills to decline. As a traveling bluesman he probably didn’t have too much need for reading and writing other than handling correspondence about playing jobs and recordings." As a child Patton also received a religious education; his father was an elder of the local church, and he would have attended Sunday school as well as religious services, some aspects of which appear in his recordings.

He began playing the guitar from the age of about seven, and owned his first instrument at 14. He played with members of the Chatmon family, some of whom later formed the Mississippi Sheiks, around Bolton and Edwards. On moving to the Dockery Plantation, he came into contact with Henry Sloan, who became his principal musical influence and tutor in the emerging blues styles of guitar playing. Patton carried his guitar around with him while he was doing farming and logging work on the plantation, and began performing regularly at local dances and house parties. According to his family he also became adept on the kazoo, although no recordings of his playing exist.

Life in the 1910s and 1920s

Patton "considered music to be a career, a profession. It was not a part time or spare time activity. It was his livelihood, and he rarely did any other kind of work except to help his father." Although he continued to work intermittently with his family on the plantation, interviews with family members and other musicians suggest that he performed regularly at juke joints, outside stores, and at house parties, receiving tips as well as payments from store and cafe owners. Some sources suggest that he may also have performed in medicine shows, but this is uncertain. Patton performed at Dockery and nearby plantations and began a regular performing association with Willie Brown. Tommy Johnson, Fiddlin' Joe Martin, Robert Johnson, and Howlin' Wolf also lived and played in the area and Patton served as a mentor to the younger performers.

He mostly performed in the Delta area, within the north-western part of the state of Mississippi, traveling between the homes of friends and family members, and became a very popular performer in that area. Unlike most blues musicians of his time, who were often itinerant performers, Patton played scheduled engagements at plantations and taverns. Through his activity as a performer, he "was able to live at least as prosperously as his father, and [had] a maximum of physical mobility... [but] was never able to establish a permanent home or a stable family life." By the 1920s, Patton's reputation had grown so that he would travel to perform for weeks at a time in cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and New Orleans, as well as in logging towns in Georgia and Louisiana. Patton was in great demand as an entertainer, and his popularity was such that he was regularly asked to perform at dances for white people as well as African-Americans. His nephew Tom Cannon said: "He made an excellent living... He’d get a new car every year... He always wore a suit every day of his life.... He wore his suits and shined shoes, and a different woman every year, two a year sometimes... He kept two or three guitars.... On one of his guitars he had a lot of gold pieces plastered all on it. He had ‘em real fixed up to play ‘em..."

The ultimate reasons for Patton’s extraordinary popularity in the Delta are hard to pinpoint. Clearly, Fahey was right, in a sense, in stressing Patton’s role as a consummate entertainer. He could give an audience what it wanted in the way of repertoire and style, and he did many tricks with the guitar, snapping the strings, playing it behind his head and between his legs, flipping it, tapping on it with his fingers, and so forth. But there were plenty of other blues artists who could do tricks and gave audiences what they wanted. Many, like Willie Brown, may have been technically better and more versatile guitarists and were often judged so by their peers. Others, like “Son” House, had better natural voices. But there is something special that seemed to set Charley Patton beyond the others in his own day and which still exerts a great power through his records almost seventy years after his death. There is a special quality of timing in his singing and playing that is hard to define but immediately arrests the attention. Beyond this there is a sense of absolute conviction in his singing and playing. To a greater degree than the others, over a longer period of time, on a more regular basis, and equally in front of black and white audiences, Charley Patton was able to plumb the depths of feeling contained in his blues, spirituals, and other folksongs. Even when he garbled his words or meaning or made mistakes on the guitar, as he occasionally did, the feeling is there: one of overwhelming intensity. It is a feeling that Palmer has aptly called deep blues, a phrase used by blues artists themselves as their ultimate aesthetic criterion for the music and its performers.32 And despite his occasional mistakes and shortcomings, his records reflect a feeling of intense pride in his work. He may have considered his recording sessions to be just another job, he may not have rehearsed his songs as much as he should have, but underlying this casual approach and willingness to please all audiences there was a strong oneness and wholeness of character and talent in a man that people were trying to make into “two folks.”

He married several times (possibly eight times, though some may have been common-law marriages) and had many other relationships, in various locations around the Delta. His reported marriage partners included Gertrude Lewis (1908), Millie Bonds (c.1908), Dela Scott (1913), Martha Christian (c.1917), Roxie Morrow (1918), Minnie Franklin (1921), Mattie Parker (1924), Bertha Reed (1926), and finally singer Bertha Lee. He had a daughter with Millie Bonds, two sons with Sallie Hollins, a daughter with Martha Christian, perhaps two children with Bertha Reed, and possibly others.

Musical and performance style Robert Palmer described Patton as a "jack-of all-trades bluesman", who played "deep blues, white hillbilly songs, nineteenth-century ballads, and other varieties of black and white country dance music with equal facility". Patton was a small man, about 5 feet 5 inches tall, but his gravelly voice was reputed to have been loud enough to carry 500 yards without amplification. He gained popularity for his showmanship, sometimes playing with the guitar down on his knees, behind his head, or behind his back. His niece Betty Turner said that he "could take the guitar and make it talk... put it behind his head and take his fingers.… He could use a guitar any kind of way and pick it, swing it over, and never lose the tune...".

Recordings and later career

As mentioned, for a time in the early 30s he lived in Memphis giving guitar lessons. He also played in cities to the north and south where friends and relatives had settled. Feeling nostalgic for real downhome blues, they would summon him by letter or telegram, as his niece described:

Charley Patton never really found his niche either. He embraced a new form of “black” music, the blues, through which he was able to lead a rambling life, always on the move, very popular among both whites and blacks in the Delta, and never having to commit himself to a permanent status. His “niche” in the system consisted of placing himself outside the system and actually avoiding a niche, never permanently accommodating, never letting himself be pinned down. He remained to the end The Masked Marvel. * * *

He was popular across the southern United States and performed annually in Chicago; in 1934, he performed in New York City.

He influenced the singing style of his young friend Chester Burnett, who went on to gain fame in Chicago as Howlin' Wolf.

Death

Patton settled in Holly Ridge, Mississippi, with his common-law wife and recording partner, Bertha Lee, in 1933. He died on the Heathman-Dedham plantation, near Indianola, on April 28, 1934, and is buried in Holly Ridge (both towns are located in Sunflower County). His death certificate states that he died of a mitral valve disorder. The death certificate does not mention Bertha Lee; the only informant listed is one Willie Calvin. Patton's death was not reported in the newspapers.

A memorial headstone was erected on Patton's grave (the location of which was identified by the cemetery caretaker, C. Howard, who claimed to have been present at the burial), paid for by musician John Fogerty through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in July 1990. The spelling of Patton's name was dictated by Jim O'Neal, who also composed the epitaph.

David Evans

Charley Patton died on April 28, 1934, some three months after his final recording session. During the preceding five years he had become the most extensively recorded of the early Mississippi folk blues artists, leaving behind a legacy of fifty-two issued songs as well as accompaniments of other artists.

Patton was the first recorded black folk artist to comment directly and extensively on public events that he had witnessed or experienced and to treat events in his own life as news. He was also the first recorded black folk artist to mention white people from his own community in his songs, sometimes unfavorably. He did all of this while continuing to live his life in the Mississippi Delta, a region which featured perhaps the most rigid racial caste system in the entire nation.1

Charley Patton was almost certainly born in 1891, making him more or less a younger member of the first generation of folk blues singers, the originators of this genre. It is known that Patton himself learned some of his music from other artists who were a few years older. He is nevertheless the earliest Mississippi blues artist about whom we have much information, although much of this information comes from the last five years of his life during which he made his recordings. He was extraordinarily influential on other Mississippi blues artists and was a role model in both music and lifestyle for many of them. Among the many artists he is known to have influenced or inspired are Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, “Son” House, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, and Roebuck “Pops” Staples. Bukka White, a great Mississippi blues artist eighteen years Patton’s junior, recalled saying as a child that he wanted “to come to be a great man like Charley Patton.”2 White was not alone in his great respect for this man. It is probably fair to say that Charley Patton is the only black person of his generation to live virtually his entire life in Mississippi who still has a national and international impact and whose name and accomplishments are known to many outside his immediate family and community over a century after his birth and almost seventy years after his death. This piece does not purport to be a full-scale biography but is mainly concerned with matters of personality and with reaching an understanding of the social context of Patton’s life and music. It is based largely on the internal evidence in Patton’s songs that contain biographical details and allu¬sions and on interviews with relatives and associates of Charley Patton, particularly his sister Viola Cannon, his niece Bessie Turner, his nephew Tom Cannon, and Tom Rushing, a figure in one of his songs.3

Previously published accounts4 of Charley Patton’s life, character and personality have been based on the evidence of his records as well as interviews with fellow blues artists (especially “Son” House), friends, relatives, ex-wives, and girl friends. The first publication to give much significant information about Patton was a booklet by Bernard Klatzko published in 1964 as the notes to a reissue album of some of Patton’s records.5 Klatzko obtained his information during a brief field trip to the Delta in 1963 with fellow researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow. Although their interviews of a number of Patton’s relatives and friends were brief and superficial and contained some errors, Klatzko was nevertheless able to piece together an outline of Patton’s life that served as a useful starting point for further research. As for Patton’s lifestyle and personality, Klatzko revealed that he was popular with women and had married several times, that he was fond of drinking liquor and tended to be argumentative. Klatzko also revealed that Patton traveled constantly and was well known in Mississippi. A subsequently discovered photograph showed Patton as having a rather light complexion and curly hair, clearly the product of a mixed racial ancestry. Based on the evidence of Patton’s performing style on his records, Klatzko speculated that the artist felt some sense of outrage, stating, “It must have seemed strange to a man like Patton who looked little different from white men to be relegated to a second class status. At any rate, Charley’s outrage, whatever sparked it, was released in the blues.”6 Later researchers have largely ignored this speculation or tried to paint a portrait of Patton as a carefree entertainer.

About the time that Klatzko presented the first factually based outline of Charley Patton’s life, “Son” House was rediscovered. House had known Patton for the last four years of the latter’s life and was a Mississippi blues artist of comparable stature to Patton. House clearly found some of Patton’s character traits hard to comprehend or annoying. He told Stephen Calt and Nick Perls in an interview published in 1967 that Patton was argumentative, far from generous with his money, unable to read and write, and careless about his music, preferring to clown for the audience rather than take care to structure his songs coherently.7 In an article published in the same magazine issue as House’s interview, Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt (writing under the pseudonym of Jacques Roche) work from House’s assertions and paint an unflattering portrait of Patton as illiterate, self-centered, a drunkard, a glutton, and a hustler of women.8

In the same year Samuel Charters, drawing upon Klatzko’s booklet and an interview with Patton’s last wife Bertha Lee, presented a more favorable image of Charley Patton and tried to interpret the meaning of some of his songs.9 Stephen Calt, however, soon returned to the offensive. In the notes to the then most widely circulated reissue album of Patton’s recordings Calt asserted that Patton “never learned to read or write and passed most of his time . . . in total idleness,” that he was a “perpetual squabbler,” “extraordinarily tight with money,” always courting women and entering sham marriages with them, beating his wives, and “eating out of the white folks’ kitchen.” Calt adds that Patton was “reportedly disavowed” by his daughter from one of his marriages. 10

In the first book-length study of Charley Patton’s life and music the late John Fahey mainly tries to assemble known facts into a coherent account of Patton’s life.11 Although Fahey actually did some fieldwork in Mississippi as early as 1958, most of his information was supplied by Bernard Klatzko, Gayle Dean Wardlow, and myself. Fahey did subsequently interview a number of other musical figures who knew Patton, including apparently Bertha Lee, Patton’s last wife, and Sam Chatmon, who claimed to be Patton’s brother. Fahey mentions Patton’s drinking and fighting but does not dwell on these topics. His life history attempts to be factual rather than anecdotal. Fahey does, however, suggest that Patton did not have a particularly profound personality or sensitivity to the world around him. He stresses the fact that Patton was first and foremost an “entertainer” and had a “limited picture of the world.”12

The most sympathetic portrait of Patton to date is found in the late Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues.13 It is based primarily on Patton’s recordings and previously published information as well as new information gained from Joe Rice Dockery, the owner of the plantation on which Patton’s family lived, and several musicians who had learned from Patton, including Hayes McMullen, Howlin’ Wolf, and Roebuck Staples. Even when discussing Patton’s drinking and his less than tender treatment of women, Palmer attempts to see Patton’s life in the context of the period and the social system in which he lived, stating, “Charley Patton saw a world of changes during the fifty-odd years of his life, but the system was in effect in the upper Delta before he was born, and it outlasted him by several decades. He adapted to it well enough despite his lingering rage, which he tended to take out on his women, sometimes by beating them with a handy guitar. He suffered his dark moods and his occasional repentances and conversions, but he also had fun, or something like it. He rarely worked for whites except to furnish a night’s entertainment, and he was never tied to a menial job or a plot of land for very long. He went where he pleased, stayed as long as he pleased, stayed as intoxicated as he pleased, left when he wanted to, and had his pick of the women wherever he went.”14

Unfortunately, the positive effect of Palmer’s treatment of Charley Patton has been considerably offset by two of the more recent works to deal with this artist, the first being a screenplay by Alan Greenberg about the life of Delta bluesman Robert Johnson.15 In two fictionalized scenes, based largely on the writings of Calt and Fahey, Greenberg depicts Patton as preaching a comic sermon, drinking furiously, dancing lewdly, talking dirty, fighting with his wife Bertha Lee, who cuts his throat, being dragged off unconscious, later playing music at a riotous house party unconcerned about a murder that has just taken place there, and finally being bested in a musical competition by an upstart Robert Johnson. In a third scene Patton has died, and his funeral degenerates into a drunken tribal dance. The overall picture of Patton’s character is negative in the extreme. The second of these more recent works is a 1988 book-length treatment of Patton’s life and music by Calt and Wardlow which, while containing much valuable research and analysis, perpetuates the image of Patton as a degenerate sociopath.16

Many writers have discussed the musical stylistic characteristics of various recorded performances of Charley Patton or transcribed and commented upon lyrics of some of his songs. Fahey attempted to do this in a comprehensive manner for all of Patton’s then-extant recordings.17 While writers like Charters and Palmer have tried to find serious meaning in Patton’s song texts, there has been another strain of criticism attempting to show that Patton’s songs were often garbled and incoherent and that the artist was merely providing casual entertainment and not attempting to transmit a serious message or meaning. While there are admittedly difficulties in transcribing some of Patton’s texts and while some criticism of his compositional technique may be justified, it would appear that the negative view of Patton’s lyricism, like the negative view of his character, is based largely on an interpretation and exaggeration of some remarks of Patton’s fellow bluesman “Son” House. House sang with fairly precise diction, his pieces generally maintained consistent musical structures, and his songs display consistent and extended thematic development over several verses or even in their entirety with an impression of some degree of lyrical stability and prior rehearsal. House was critical of Patton for not maintaining these same standards in his compositions, memorably commenting, “Charley, he could start singing of the shoe there and wind up singing about that banana.”18

Based on House’s remarks and an attempt to decipher some of Patton’s recorded lyrics, Stephen Calt characterizes the artist as frequently incoherent and prone to garbling.19 The strongest criticism of Patton’s lyricism, however, comes from John Fahey, who notes the “disconnection, incoherence, and apparent irrationality” and “stanzaic disjunction” in many of Patton’s songs, stating that “various unrelated portions of the universe are described at random.”20

There is general agreement among all of the writers on Charley Patton that he was someone important. Many of these writers, however, have failed to find any redeeming sensitivity in the man, and some have even found fault with his art, criticizing him for a kind of sloppiness consistent with his alleged personality. His greatness, such as it is, is ascribed simply to his role as a consummate entertainer. While I do not intend to view him as a saint or to deny the possibility of fault in his work, I hope to set the record straight by introducing new information and interpretations of Patton and his music which reveal a special artistic sensitivity and show that he was not only a singular artist but one who was indeed quite serious about his work. * * * A CCORDING TO the 1900 United States Census, Charley Patton was born in April 1891. It is not known whether his name was spelled Charley or Charlie. Both spellings occur on his records and even on his death certificate. I use the spelling Charley, which was found on his Paramount records that first introduced his name to the world.

Charley’s interest in religion continued throughout his life and was not abandoned when he became confirmed in his career as a musician. This fact should be clear from his recording of ten issued religious sides at three of his four recording sessions. These songs must be considered as a unity with his blues and not as some sort of recording studio afterthought or a mere recollection of songs learned in childhood. Patton continued to perform these songs in family contexts, and in his close-knit family there were many such contexts. He also performed from time to time in church programs, probably alongside local quartets and other soloists. His recorded church songs concentrate on several distinct themes, all of which were clearly important in his life and most of which are also found in his blues recordings. The most important of these themes is death and the afterlife in heaven. Charley had seen a brother and seven sisters die young, had worried about his brother Will dying in battle in France, had survived the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River, had been present at many violent and potentially violent scenes at barrelhouses and house parties, and came close to dying in 1929 when his throat was cut by a man who was jealous over the attention his wife paid Charley at a dance. For about the last two years of his life he was aware of his own impending death from heart trouble. Heaven was viewed as an ideal world, free from troubles, a world he could never find in all his wanderings on earth. The second major theme in his religious recordings is the journey to heaven. This preoccupation is paralleled in his blues with their many references to towns, roads, boats and trains, and it was certainly part of his actual lifestyle. Other themes in his spiritual recordings were his personal dignity and determination, worry about his mother, personal depression, the troubles of this world and the comfort found in God and Jesus.

All of these were important themes in his own life. It is of interest to note that none of his recorded spirituals contains denunciations of various sins, a topic which is otherwise a common theme in the black spiritual song repertoire. Patton was certainly self-righteous enough in his blues, but as one who might have been viewed as a “sinner” by other churchgoers, he probably would have considered it hypocritical to denounce drinking, fornicating, dancing, and other sins. Bessie Turner recalls several other spirituals that Charley Patton sang in addition to the ones he recorded, all of which dwell on these same themes. Among them are “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Old Ship of Zion,” a favorite hymn (which he would have sung unaccompanied), and a song he composed or adapted with reference to the 1927 flood called “God Will Take Care of You.” The lyrics that Mrs. Turner could remember were:

As you travel in the land, man don’t understand, But God will take care of you, God will take care of you. Through every day, along the way, God will take care of you, God will take care of you. Your troubles may be heavy but your burden will be light. God will take care of you, God will take care of you.

Charley, of course, also recorded a two-part blues about the flood with far more specific detail, “High Water Everywhere” (Paramount 12909). He was also well known for his ability to make the guitar imitate the voice of a man praying, a virtuoso technique he displayed on “Prayer of Death, Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 12799).

Charley not only performed and recorded religious songs but for most of his life wrestled with what he thought was a calling to be a preacher. This must have been a genuine concern to Patton and should not be dismissed as casual fits of remorse, as some writers have done. Charley preached on a number of occasions, and his sister Viola stated that he even taught others to preach. His niece Bessie Turner states:

He started to preaching and quit. Let me tell you what happened one time. He was young, and everybody went to hear Uncle Charley, because he done put that guitar down then. He was going to preach up there in Mound Bayou.25 That night people was at the church like that, you know, because he was a guitar picker that had quit, and he was going to preach. Uncle Charley got right at the church and seen all them people. He looked in there and said, “Sure, I’m gone!” Went out in the cornfield and stayed out there all night long. He did that, and grandmama and them sat out there and waited on Uncle Charley to come in the pulpit to preach and ain’t seen Uncle Charley til next morning. He did that. And the next time he preached. The next time he made up his mind, and he went on up there, and he preached like he’d been preaching for ten years. He knowed that Bible just like that. It was the thirteenth chapter of Revelations. He preached it down to the eighteenth, from the thirteenth chapter down to the eighteenth chapter of Revelations. I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget his hymn:

Jesus is my God, I know His name. His name is all my trust. He would not put my soul to shame, Or let my hopes be lost.

That was his hymn. He’d sing that hymn all the time when he got up in church. He could just take his time and say his prayers so good. The next thing you know, he was back on that guitar.

Patton recorded a brief sample of his preaching in the midst of his singing of “You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die” (Paramount 13031). Although he stumbles in his delivery once, the recording shows him to have been a more than capable preacher. His imagery is excerpted from Chapters 1, 4, 21, and 22 of the Book of Revelation, Patton’s favorite book of the Bible, and dwells on the appearance of God and the holy city of heaven. But Charley Patton ultimately made his greatest mark in blues.

T HERE IS no doubt that Charley Patton was a famous man in the parts of Mississippi where he lived and made music. His fame was well established there even before he began to record his music in 1929. He is well remembered by other blues artists as well as by the people who comprised his audiences. The degree of enthusiasm for Charley Patton in the Delta probably rivaled that in a later era for artists like Elvis Presley and James Brown. His fame was so great that he spawned at least one imposter, as recalled by his niece. There can be no doubt that during his lifetime he was the “king” of the Delta blues. If he had lived into the 1940’s, he would almost certainly have been sought out for field recordings by researchers from the Library of Congress. In the 1950’s he probably would have played a significant role in the American folk music revival, and in the 1960’s he undoubtedly would have become known internationally. Unfortunately he had to leave these roles to longer-lived contemporaries like Leadbelly and to his successors such as Big Joe Williams and Howlin’ Wolf.

Even in his own lifetime Charley Patton had established a fame among Delta whites almost equal to his fame among blacks, and there are suggestions in his recordings that he was reaching for an international fame that would come to him only posthumously. It was not uncommon for black musicians to perform for white audiences in the South on a local basis, but it was rare for them to have a broader regional fame among whites. Only a few, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith, were known nationally among whites at this time. Tom Rushing, the Deputy Sheriff of Bolivar County, says, “He was a pretty prominent Negro among the people, and everybody liked him.” Rushing compared his fame to that of the international track star Jesse Owens, whom Rushing was also proud to have met at a track meet at Mound Bayou in 1934. (A picture of Rushing and Owens shaking hands was printed in the local newspaper.) Rushing observed that both were southern boys who came from obscure rural backgrounds and became world famous. Joe Lavene, who was in the record business in Clarksdale, recalled following Patton to large picnics where he played and selling his records there in large quantities. White musicians played with him, including the fiddler who owned the store at Holly Ridge and a young harmonica player recalled by his sister Viola. His niece stated:

The biggest he played was white. The white nation would be calling him. They wanted him. And then he was teaching boys how to play. He done a lot of that too, young boys, youngsters, how to pick a guitar, you know, white and colored. But there was more white than there was colored. It was up there in Memphis. He used to be out there, out in Orange Mound. He used to teach them how to pick guitar, a bunch of the white and colored.… They was paying him to teach them how to pick guitar.

Charley played frequently for white house parties, picnics, dances, and wedding parties. Near the end of his life he was playing for whites on the majority of his jobs, and his widow Bertha Lee stated that his last performance was at a white dance.30 Even his recording sessions, supervised by white talent scouts and engineers, apparently turned into parties. H. C. Speir, who owned a music store in Jackson and first recommended Patton to Paramount Records, enjoyed being entertained by Patton, and Bertha Lee recalled that, after they finished their 1934 recording sessions, they would have dances in the studio for Vocalion recording executive W. R. Calaway and others.31 His popularity with white audiences increased after he began his recording career in 1929 and appeared to be gaining a national reputation.

Charley’s niece stated that the whites liked his blues as well as his “love songs”:

The biggest he played was for whites. [He played] all them kind. That’s what they liked, the blues. And then he had love songs too, “I’ll miss you, honey, when you’re gone,” all that, just different things. “I dreamed of you last night; I woke up this morning, the sun was shining bright; I thought about you; You ought to been lying on my right.” Just a lot of old love songs. He put out a lot of good songs. He used to sing “Good Morning, Little School Girl.” He loved that song. That was for the young folks too.

http://www.paramountshome.org/index.php?view=article&catid=45:new-york-recording-laboratoriesartist&id=77:charley-patton-biography-part-2-dr-david-evans&option=com_content&Itemid=54 Charley Patton Biography (part 2) - Dr. David Evans

used with the gracious permission of David Evans and Dean Blackwood of Revenant Records 11/3/05

• * * O NE OF THE most unfathomable aspects of Charley Patton’s life is his actual personality. As already noted, several writers have painted a rather negative picture of the man. This picture, however, is not consistent with the great respect that was accorded to him. His nephew states that he was “friendly with everybody.” Rev. Rubin Lacy, a former blues singer, who knew Charley in the Delta around 1929 or 1930, stated, “I thought he had fine ways and actions. He wasn’t no bad man.... He had a good record. He stood good. He had no bad marks on him. Oh yeah, he was a nice guy.”33 Some of Patton’s alleged failings might be taken another way. For example, “Son” House has stated that he was tight with his money.34 On the other hand, this might be viewed as an inclination to save or not spend his money foolishly. Unlike most blacks in the Delta, Charley had money throughout the year, and there must have been many “friends” who approached him for loans. Knowing from his father how the credit system worked in the Delta, Charley probably wisely chose not to “furnish” his friends for the year.

There is no doubt that Charley Patton drank liquor. Possibly he could have been classified as an alcoholic. The nature of his profession meant that he would always be in an environment where drinking was a normal form of behavior. He must have had many drinks offered to him. But for all the reports of his drinking, there are none that have him “sloppy drunk” or unable to perform at his best. The main reports of heavy drinking come from the last two years of his life, when he knew he had heart trouble. Possibly in these years his consumption of alcohol was no greater than it had been earlier, but he was simply less able to withstand its effects. His sister Viola stated that “he hardly drank at all.”35 Reverend Rubin Lacy’s comment was simply, “Well, his drinking, a lot of us fellows did that.”36 Perhaps the situation is best summed up by Tom Rushing, a former deputy sheriff of Bolivar County whose specific duty it was to arrest the makers of moonshine whisky. Rushing said, “He seemed to be a more or less sober man. I don’t think, probably he would have ever gotten where he did if he’d been fighting that hundred proof corn whisky.”

Charley Patton’s argumentativeness seems to have been confined mainly to his relationships with women. These relationships will be examined shortly. His relatives have stated that he was friendly, and most other musicians agree with this assessment. There are consistent reports, however, that Patton argued frequently with Willie Brown. Brown was an outstanding artist and technically may have been a more accomplished guitarist than Patton. He was not as charismatic, however, and perhaps doubted his ability as a singer, preferring to accompany other artists. Charley was undoubtedly aware of Brown’s ability and may have felt threatened. Other blues musicians in particular rated Brown highly and tended to compare his playing favorably to Patton’s. Patton was proud of his popularity and may have resented Brown’s reputation among their fellow musicians. He and Brown are said to have argued mainly over musical matters. Perhaps, though, their arguments were more in the nature of “lovers’ quarrels.” Patton and Brown did, after all, perform together off and on for about twenty years, the longest partnership in either musician’s career. Patton had partially taught Brown, as he did many other musicians to the end of his career. Even after Brown moved to Lake Cormorant in the northern part of the Delta around 1930, he continued to play frequently with Patton. Patton was furthermore responsible for calling Brown to the attention of a record company, something he did also for such artists as Henry Sims, “Son” House, Louise Johnson, and Bertha Lee.

Patton’s attitude toward and treatment of women may not have been exemplary in all cases, but they become a bit more understandable when one realizes two facts. One is that Charley clearly believed that the Patton family deserved his primary loyalty. His niece and nephew both have said that he was very generous and helpful to his parents and sisters. As a corollary to his attitude that he should help the Patton family, particularly its women, Charley evidently believed that his own wives or girl friends should be self-supporting. He made good money himself and must have thought that he deserved a woman who did the same. “Son” House has said that Patton was the kind of man who liked to have a woman who worked in the white folks’ kitchen. In this way he wouldn’t have to pay for her food, as the woman could bring home enough left-over food from the kitchen to feed them both.37 House may have been generalizing from the particular position of Bertha Lee, Patton’s last wife and apparently the only one House knew. However, even if this was generally the case with Patton, his attitude is quite understandable. As someone with a cash income, Patton was automatically a highly desirable mate. Charley Patton was in a position to have plenty of casual affairs with women, but for his steady woman he probably wanted someone of economic standing similar to his own.

The other important fact to keep in mind is that Charley was extremely attractive to women. He had that special charisma that attaches itself to certain entertainers and causes women to fall at their feet. He was good looking, made good money, came from a well respected family with good connections, and didn’t have to work under a “bossman.” Charley’s niece described a typical scene:

You know, women will pull up on musicians, won’t they? I noticed that on TV. Them boys be out there singing, and they just have to hold them back from them. They just be reaching. That’s just the way they was about Uncle Charley. Gather around that buggy. You know, there was more buggies then than there was cars. They gather around that surrey, and they’d just be... “Charley, Charley, kiss me, kiss me!” All that stuff. That make his wife jealous, she quit him. Just a mess, you know.

Although Charley’s act, with all of its movements and guitar tricks, was certainly erotic and his songs are full of references to his enjoyment of women and sex, he must have also been able to convey the impression that it was an act. Otherwise his life probably would not have lasted long. Reverend Rubin Lacy, a former Delta bluesman, neatly summed up the situation:38

Charley Patton, just like any other musician, he had sense enough not to pay a whole lot of woman attention, bragging, and trying to act a fool. If I had did that, I’d have been in trouble long ago, wouldn’t have been here now.

Certainly any bluesman who played as much for whites had to be especially careful in this regard. He was no doubt as attractive to many of the white women he played for as he was to the black women. However, any display of interest on their part could be very dangerous, and interest on his part could be fatal. No incident of this sort has ever been reported about Patton. There was the problem, though, that he could control his own behavior but could not fully control that of others. There are jealous people everywhere, and Patton ran the danger of becoming the focus of someone’s frustrations and jealousy. This was always his mother’s fear, and in 1929 this fear was realized. The story was recounted by Patton’s niece Bessie Turner:

My uncle, everybody was in love with him. He used to sing, “I got a little old woman, she got two gold teeth.” He had a record [i.e., a song] made out of that. And a man got so jealous because his wife was there dancing, and she had two gold teeth.… He stood on the outside of the door, up there in Mound Bayou. When they stopped playing and the dance was over, Uncle Charley started out. That man hit Uncle Charley with a razor, hit him there [in the neck] and cut him clean around there. And Uncle Charley was just bowing his head down like that. And they brought him on to Cleveland to the doctor. His shoes was full of blood. They had to scoop that blood out of his shoe. [The man] said, “He was trying to take my wife.” That was in 1929. It hurt him bad, cut him from here around there. The doctor said it was lacking a hair of cutting that goozle loose.

Tom Cannon states that the razor attack took place at a house party on the George Carter place near Mound Bayou. After this, Charley frequently wore a scarf to keep the scar from showing. The attack probably took place early in 1929. On a Paramount Records publicity photograph, almost certainly taken at the time of his June 14, 1929, recording session, his short collar and coat are raised considerably on his left side. Patton evidently did this deliberately in order to hide the scar, although it made his bow tie look askew. Charley was lucky to have survived this razor attack, and he bore the scar of it for the rest of his life. Whether it affected his singing is not known. It took place in the year of his first two recording sessions, probably before at least one of them, but his singing sounds strong throughout.

According to Patton family legend, Charley had eight wives. This was probably his own reckoning. Given his popularity with women, he probably had many casual affairs between his marriages and may even have had more than one wife simultaneously in different locations, not to mention the possibility of brief outside affairs. The picture is confused and will probably never be fully disentangled. It is doubtful that he actually went through the legal formalities of marriage and divorce eight times. In fact, I have been able to trace six legal marriage records, but I have not made a complete examination.

Research at the Bolivar County courthouse in Cleveland has revealed four marriage records of Charley Patton, and two more were found at the Sunflower County courthouse in Indianola. None was found at the Coahoma County courthouse in Clarksdale. A thorough search at other courthouses, such as in Greenville, Vicksburg, and Jackson, might reveal further marriage records. On September 12, 1908 in Cleveland, Charley and Gertrude Lewis applied for and were granted a marriage license, but a certificate of marriage was never completed. Patton swore that he had reached the age of twenty-one; he was only seventeen at the time. Gertrude swore that she had reached the age of eighteen. On April 18, 1913, Charley married Dela Scott in Indianola, with Will Dockery listed as a witness. Charley’s marriage to Roxie Morrow was celebrated by Reverend W.C. McCoy. The license was granted on the day of the marriage, November 12, 1918. Charley and Roxie stayed together longer than most of his marriages lasted, perhaps about three years. Tom Cannon stated that they lived on Dockery’s. On December 21, 1921, Charles Patten (sic) and Minnie Franklin were granted a marriage license in Indianola, and were married on January 5, 1922. A marriage license was granted to Charles Patten (sic) and Mattie Parker on June 7, 1924. Tom Cannon recognizes the name Mattie Parker but can give no further details. On April 22, 1926, Charlie and Bertha (or Burtha) Reed were granted a marriage license and married by Reverend D.W. Spearman. The marriage certificate was filed on May 8.

We do not know what Charley’s criteria were for considering a relationship to be a “marriage” or how he distinguished a “wife” from a girlfriend. One would presume, however, that in his mind a marriage had at least the characteristics of a common residence over a period of time, a residence which Charley would call “home” and to which he would return after his trips to play music, and a reasonable degree of faithfulness to one another. He is said to have argued and fought frequently with his women. His nephew states simply, “He didn’t stay with his wives too long.”

Gertrude Lewis was apparently Charley’s first wife. Nothing more is known about her. The 1908 marriage could not have lasted long. His second wife was Millie Bonds, who may have lived on Dockery’s plantation. Millie claimed to have married Charley in 1908, when he would have been only sixteen or seventeen years old. Millie and Charley had one daughter, the aforementioned China Lou. The family lived on Dockery’s. It is not known how long the marriage lasted. Charley remained close to China Lou and visited her often, having established a cordial relationship with her stepfather. Her cousin Bessie Turner stated that China Lou greatly admired her father, learned to sing just like him, and kept some of his records throughout her life. She died of a stroke around 1962, and her mother died around 1968. Both had lived in the town of Boyle, just a few miles west of Dockery’s. Minnie Franklin apparently came from Vicksburg or the hills to the east of that city, perhaps around Bolton. Charley’s sister Viola said that he met her in Merigold in 1921 right after he left Dockery’s.39 Apparently she left with his money and best gun, and Charley followed her to Vicksburg.

Charley had two sons, born in 1916 and 1918, by a woman named Sallie Hollins, whom he met in Kentwood, Louisiana. She moved with her children to Sunflower Plantation north of Dockery’s, although she did not continue to live with Charley there and he seldom visited. A daughter, Rosetta, was born to Martha Christian in Renova on August 10, 1917. Rosetta states that her parents were married at the Cleveland courthouse, although no marriage record has been found there. Nevertheless, a birth certificate for Rosetta exists, listing her father as Charley Patton, aged 32, a resident of Bolivar County, whose occupation was “farimiling” [sic]. Martha was listed as aged 29, a housewife, and a resident of Bolivar County. The birth certificate states that it was a “legitimate birth.” Perhaps Patton overstated his age out of fear of the military draft for World War I. Rosetta’s mother’s family owned land at Renova. She states that her parents’ marriage only lasted a year or two, but that Charley frequently visited her and her mother until around 1932 and would give Rosetta money. On one visit Charley brought a daughter named Willie Mae, slightly older than Rosetta, who lived in Mound Bayou. Charley also told her of a son who died in infancy. Between 1924 and sometime in 1930 Charley is said to have lived with a woman named Sudy, east of Merigold.40 She may have been the same woman as the Bertha Reed whom Charley married in 1926 and with whom he apparently had two children.

Charley apparently left the area around Merigold and Renova in the latter part of 1929 when his first records were released. At this point he apparently became headquartered around Clarksdale or Lula. In October of that year he brought the fiddler Henry Sims from nearby Farrell to his recording session, and “Son” House recalled that in early 1930 Charley was living at Lula. He left Lula in August41 of that year for another recording session with House, Willie Brown, and a young woman named Louise Johnson, whom Patton was trying to court.42 Possibly around 1931 or 1932 he lived with a woman named Lizzie.43 Around this time is when Charley probably lived in the Orange Mound section of Memphis. His last wife was Bertha Lee Pate, whom he had met at Lula. They apparently didn’t begin living together until 1933, when Bertha was about sixteen years old. They moved to Holly Ridge in Sunflower County between Indianola and Leland. Charley’s nephew and niece have stated that he and Bertha were happy together though others have recalled them arguing frequently in public. Bertha Lee herself seemed to have good memories of her brief marriage to Charley Patton.44 Apparently unlike any of Charley’s previous wives, Bertha Lee was herself a blues singer and even played some guitar. Charley probably had a kind of respect for her that he didn’t have for his other wives. He may have treated her as a musical protegée. In turn, she apparently took good care of him at a time when he knew he was suffering from heart trouble. She also seems to have understood his ways and his moods, which may have given her a special hold on him. At least she suggests this in her probably auto¬biographical “Mind Reader Blues” (Vocalion 02650), which she recorded in 1934. [See lyric transcription in the song notes section, disc 5/track 24.]

If, as the song declares, Charley had caused Bertha Lee to worry, she indeed would not have to worry long, for he died three months later. Charley probably knew that the end was near. One of the songs he and Bertha Lee recorded together was a powerful spiritual titled “Oh Death” (Vocalion 02904), containing the frequently repeated line, “Lord, I know my time ain’t long.” Perhaps around March, 1934, “Son” House, Patton, and Willie Brown traveled to Jackson to make some test recordings of “Sanctified” songs. The one piece House later recalled was a song featuring Charley’s singing called “I Had a Dream Last Night Troubled Me.”45

Patton’s death certificate indicates that the onset of his fatal heart trouble occurred on January 27, 1934. This was just three days before the beginning of his recording session for Vocalion in New York. Probably Charley was experiencing some problems with his health and consulted a doctor to determine if he should make the trip. Charley’s sister Viola stated that a doctor had told him to stop playing music, a warning which may have taken place at this time. Nevertheless, he made the trip to a chilly New York City. His performances sound strong, though a few times he can be heard breathing heavily and he has a little trouble hitting some high notes accurately. In three days he and Bertha Lee recorded twenty-nine songs, a number that indicates that he still had plenty of strength at the time. Eight of the songs they recorded were religious titles, and, as noted above, “Son” House indicates that Patton made some further test recordings of religious songs in Jackson after he returned from New York. Apparently this was only a few weeks before he died.

In early April he gave his last performance. It was a dance for whites, probably not too far from Holly Ridge. He had been suffering from bronchitis, perhaps from a winter or spring cold. Bertha Lee stated that he returned home hoarse and unable to talk or get his breath properly. He remained in bed after that and had to sleep with the windows open in order to get enough air to breathe. 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. His sister said that an attempt was made to take him to a hospital, but his car was bogged in mud from the spring rains. 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. His niece Bessie Turner described his last days and his death:

And finally one morning he went off and composed some records. And he came home with a shortness at his heart. That was on a Wednesday.… Saturday morning he called his wife and said, “I’m fixing to leave you now.” And he started to preaching. He said, “I’ve got to preach the text of the Revelation.” He started to preaching that morning. He preached all that week, and the next Saturday he passed on. And she called us. I was up there in Shaw, Mississippi, then. She called us and told us that he had passed. Us came down there and looked at him. He had the Bible over there in his hand and his hand up there across his breast. He was gone. They had his funeral that Sunday down there at Holly Ridge. He didn’t want to go to no undertaker. He told ‘em, “Don’t carry me to no undertaker.” Said, “Carry me right away from this house to the church and from the church to the cemetery.” He died that Saturday, and we buried him that Sunday, ‘cause he didn’t want to go to a undertaker. That Saturday night they had a big wake for him. A lot of his boys who sang with him was right there too. I’ll never forget the last song they sung, “I’ll Meet You in the Sweet Bye and Bye.” They sung that so pretty and played the music, you know. Couldn’t nobody cry. Everybody was just thinking how a person could change around right quick, you know. Changed right quick and then preached Revelation, the thirteenth chapter of Revelation. It says, “Let your light shine that men may see your good work and glorify our Father which art in heaven.” I’ll never forget it. He said, “Did you hear that? My light been shining on each side. I let it shine for the young; I let it shine for the old.” Said, “Count my Christian records and count my swinging records. Just count ‘em. They even!” And you know he was just smiling, just tickled to death. Looked like he was happy when he was going.

Charley Patton had just reached the age of forty-three when he died. It is not known who preached the funeral sermon or what was said. The funeral was well attended, however. Charley’s nephew says, “They had a big funeral. It was people from every which way, white and black.” A Willie Calvin served as the informant for Patton’s death certificate. Ironically, Calvin gave Patton’s occupation as “farmer,” a type of work that Charley hated and strove all his life to avoid.

• * *

A N EXAMINATION of the recordings of Charley Patton yields some important additional insights to his life and character. In striving for such insights, however, one must use considerable caution and be aware of several variable factors. In the first place, blues singers do not always sing about themselves, even when it appears that they do. In many cases they will describe the thoughts or actions of others as if they were the singer’s. Patton did this in at least one song, which will be discussed later, and perhaps in others. Blues singers also borrow verses and whole songs from other singers, frequently by learning them from records. Over a quarter of Patton’s blues recordings, both of his popular song versions, and at least one of his spirituals were influenced by earlier recordings of other artists. Finally, many blues singers, including Charley Patton, make use of a body of traditional verses, shared by hundreds of other blues singers, which they individually rework and recombine to create new songs. Although Patton created a number of highly original verses and songs, he relied heavily on traditional verses as building blocks for his compositions. Thus much of his actual language is not his own but is borrowed from the shared tradition of folk blues.46

Just how Charley Patton created his blues songs is not known for certain. Nevertheless, when one listens to his records, there is a great impression of spontaneity in his singing. Patton draws heavily upon the body of shared traditional verses, but he seems to do so largely at the time of performance. Many of his songs seem only minimally planned or rehearsed, particularly in their texts. Patton seems to have pulled together in advance a melody, a guitar part, and one or more key verses, which would give the song a certain degree of identity, and then added other verses at the time of performance. Hints of such spontaneity are to be found in the fact that there are usually slight variations when he repeats a line as well as many interjected comments. It appears that Patton was often trying to recreate a sense of context and a live audience in the recording studio. This spontaneity and unrehearsed quality is matched in the recordings of only a few other early blues recording artists, among them Patton’s contemporary, Henry Thomas, and two of his disciples, Tommy Johnson and Big Joe Williams.

Patton’s apparent spontaneity, combined with often imprecise diction and a high degree of surface noise on many of his records, has caused some writers to consider him sloppy, illogical, and sometimes incoherent. He does indeed make occasional mistakes in his singing and playing, but it can be shown that many of his songs have a kind of unconscious structure and coherence based on principles of contrast and association of ideas.47 Furthermore, the high degree of spontaneity in his songs provides us with a rare opportunity to glimpse a folk blues artist actually at work on his songs. Even his blues recordings that are thematic from beginning to end convey the impression that they are versions of these songs that happened to be captured in a recording studio, that they are part of a compositional continuum that never resulted in a finished or definitive version. Just as Patton himself was constantly on the move and not content to stay in one place long, so also were his repertoire and his songs themselves constantly shifting. This quality may be annoying at times, but it allows us an insight into the mind and mental processes of one of the most important blues singers of all time and reveals statements and ideas that other blues artists might have suppressed in an effort to make their songs more polished.

The foregoing discussion should not be taken to mean that Patton’s songs and recordings were entirely unplanned and the result of unconscious mental processes. Patton did have a strong interest in composing songs and certainly was capable of doing so in a conscious manner. He simply appears to have had little interest in finalizing his compositions. For him the process was more important than the product. This attitude would explain his apparent casual behavior in the recording studio that so annoyed “Son” House.

Charley’s niece stated, “He’d dream a song, and he’d get up and write them.” Many folk blues artists have made exactly the same statement about their own compositions. Evidently Charley would write down the ideas he had in dreams and probably worked them out in rough form with the guitar. He probably continued to work with the idea as long as it retained its appeal to himself and his audiences. He seems to have been especially fond of composing topical blues about his own troubles and those of his friends and neighbors. These dealt not only with the usual difficulties of the man-woman dynamic but also with such subjects as arrests, a flood, a drought, and human insensitivity.

Prior to his last recording session he seems to have made an attempt to prepare some songs for the studio. He also used his wife Bertha Lee to help him compose. As a blues singer herself, she was no doubt a sympathetic listener and an intelligent critic. His niece stated:

I went over to Holly Ridge to see him and spent a week over there, with him and his wife Bertha. And he composed a blues then, “Good morning, little school girl; I want to have a talk with you.” That was a good one too. He had a hit on that one, “Good Morning, Little School Girl.” He was singing and told us to sit in another room and see how it sounds. You know, he made his own songs. And when he got through with that, a white fellow said, “I’ll give you twenty-five dollars for that one right now. That’s the first record I want, ‘Good Morning, Little School Girl’”.… He’d compose, and his wife Bertha would write them as he named it to her. Then he’d get off to hisself, fasten up in a room and give the tune to it. “Bumble Bee, Bumble Bee,” I remember I was at his house when he composed that one. “Bumble bee, bumble bee, won’t you please come home to me. You got the best stinger of any bumble bee I ever seen.”

THE FIRST OF these songs was not among those that were released from Patton’s 1934 session. If he ever recorded it, he did so under another title. The second song was given to Bertha Lee to sing and was recorded under the title “Yellow Bee” (Vocalion 02650). In fact, it is based closely on an earlier recording by Memphis Minnie. In this case, at least, Patton’s concept of composing did not preclude a wholesale borrowing from another artist’s record. And even while his niece’s statement seems to suggest a more formal approach to composition, the actual results of the final session reveal just as much spontaneity as on his earlier records. In the case of “Good Morning, Little School Girl” Patton seems to have been simply recreating the situation of listening to one of his records, probably to test potential audience reaction and sales of a new song. In the case of “Bumble Bee” he seems simply to have included his wife in his normal process of composition by having her write down ideas as they came to him rather than writing them himself. Perhaps even then he intended that she should sing the song in the studio.

In addition to singing about his own and his friends’ troubles and hard times, Charley Patton had several other favorite themes in his blues and other secular songs. One theme that occurs repeatedly is movement. In Patton’s case it was movement out of necessity. This necessity was both economic and emotional. Charley had a “home” with his parents or other relatives, but he couldn’t stay there and still exercise his talent fully and make a good living. He seems to have been determined to have his talent recognized and not do manual work like an ordinary black man in the Delta. He developed this attitude at a time when Delta society was becoming strictly divided into black and white groups. The kind of ambiguous status that he sought, which would enable him to avoid the status of “nigger,” could only be obtained through movement. Travel for Patton meant freedom and options. It was a bold and potentially dangerous course to take, since it could leave him outside both organized white and black society. Nevertheless, he steered his course quite successfully, choosing a most “black” form of expression, the blues, as a means of escaping the lot of being an ordinary black man. He was certainly not trying to be white, which was obviously impossible under the circumstances. He simply wanted equality and recognition of his individuality and the freedom that was the exclusive property of the whites, yet he also wanted to remain in the Delta, his home. His dilemma was that, in order to maintain this freedom and be “at home,” he had to travel constantly.

Besides travel, Patton sang about women, particularly the difficulty of finding a woman who would stick with him and tolerate his lifestyle. No doubt, women wanted him to settle down. But this would have meant giving up his freedom and becoming more like that ordinary black man. He may have made attempts to settle down in some of his marriages, but he never sustained a settled lifestyle. His attitude seems to have been that his talent and freedom were things that a woman should appreciate. If she would keep the home fire burning and remain faithful to him, he would support her and return to her from his travels. In several of his blues he sings a favorite line, “You’ve got a home, mama, long as I’ve got mine.” Patton does not seem to have found such a woman until perhaps at the end of his life. He and Bertha Lee were said to be happy together, although there are also the reports that they argued and fought. As a blues singer herself, she may have understood Charley better than his other wives had. Still, she had to travel with him sometimes to hold the relationship together.

The difficulty of maintaining relationships with women seems to have produced two other themes in Charley’s life and songs: drinking and fighting. These themes had dramatic surface manifestations in his life and seem to have impressed people who knew him. Unfortunately, they also served to obscure his deeper motivations and had the potential to cast a shadow over his personal reputation.

The one remaining great force in Patton’s life and music was religion. We have already noted that the subjects of his religious recordings closely paralleled those of his secular songs, particularly the themes of the journey to heaven, his personal dignity, depression, and the troubles of this world. Religion was very much on Charley’s mind throughout his life, but it was apparently not part of his frequent practice except in performing spiritual songs, a few occasional attempts to preach in public, and on his deathbed.

• * *

C HARLEY PATTON’S first recording session for Paramount Records took place on June 14, 1929, in the Gennett studio at Richmond, Indiana. The fourteen songs that he recorded at this session give a remarkable insight into his personality and his main concerns. This is especially true of the first four songs, making it appear that Patton wanted to tell his audience emphatically who he was and what was on his mind. Curiously, he began his recorded legacy not with a blues song about himself but on a more objective and symbolic level with a version of a folk ballad titled “Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues” (Paramount 12805). The boll weevil is a little black insect that bores into the cotton bud (known as a “square”), preventing it from blossoming. It swarmed into Texas from Mexico in the early 1890’s and, moving at a rate of about sixty miles per year, reached Mississippi early in the twentieth century. It devastated the Delta cotton plantations and acted as a great leveler between whites and blacks. Many writers have pointed out how black farmers identified with the boll weevil despite the difficulties the insect created for blacks as well as whites. Despite every effort to control it, the boll weevil survived and spread, defying every force that the rich and powerful planters could muster against it, making its home on their plantations and forcing them to come to terms with it. Charley Patton in particular must have identified with this insect that was constantly on the move, looking for a home. Several of his verses clearly reveal the appeal of this subject for him. [See esp. stanzas 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10 of lyric transcription in song notes section, disc 1/track 12.]

The title of Patton’s next piece, “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” (Paramount 12805), suggests that he viewed the song as a kind of generic blues, a general statement of the things that concerned him. Indeed, it does serve as an outline for the topics on which he would elaborate in many subsequent recordings, topics such as the necessity to travel, his mother’s concern about his lifestyle, his search for a “home,” his difficulty in maintaining relationships with women, and the conflict between the blues and religion. [See lyric transcription in song notes section, disc 1/track 6.]

Patton’s next song, “Down the Dirt Road Blues” (Paramount 12854), is brilliant both as a performance and as a composition. According to the recording session ledger, the song’s original title (and probably Patton’s own) was “Over the Sea Blues.” This would have been a better title, as it suggests the expansiveness of Patton’s imagination and that he was capable of thinking in universal terms. The song provides an important insight into Patton’s deepest concerns about his own identity and purpose in life. [See lyric transcription, disc 1/track 3.] The first and last stanza serve to create a framework for the song and state his overriding concern. Patton is going down a “dark road” to “a world unknown.” He doesn’t know what the future holds for him, but he says that he won’t let himself be worried. Stanza 2 and the last line of stanza 5 state that his woman is trying to drag him down and that she doesn’t really care about him or his concerns. He knows that he needs a woman’s company, however, so he will take one with him on his journey. If he can’t take his own “high brown,” he will take another man’s. In the midst of these thoughts about the direction of his life and his relationship to women, he deals with the question of his own identity in stanzas 2-4. He introduces this theme with a remarkable image of frustration and rage (“I feel like chopping”). Then, in a series of extraordinary allusions, he deals with his own racial ambiguity, expressing the problem in terms of racial homelands. “The Nation” means only one thing. It is the Indian Nation, which became part of the state of Oklahoma in 1907. Did Charley make some kind of pilgrimage there earlier in his life, or did his “black Indian” grandmother perhaps take him there for a visit? He seems to be saying so. There are actually communities of black Indians in Oklahoma. In any case, whether he really traveled there or only did so in his imagination, Patton states that somehow he found it impossible to maintain an Indian identity. No doubt this was true. His racial makeup may have been more Indian than anything else, but his only strong cultural link was through his grandmother, and even she had to live out her life in the Deep South where everything was viewed in black and white. Stanza 4 must refer to Europe, the home of white people. Charley Patton had not been there himself, but his brother had fought there in a “white folks’ war” and could hardly have brought back a very favorable report. Charley knew that he couldn’t fully participate in white society, and he seems to be saying it obliquely in this stanza. Stanza 5 must refer to the Delta, the Negroes’ “home,” where “every day seem like murder.” Patton certainly could have played the role of a Negro and probably had to do so at times, but throughout his life he seems to have done everything possible to resist this classification. Patton does not really resolve his dilemma. He simply heads for “a world unknown” and vows not to worry about it.

Patton’s fourth recording was “Pony Blues” (Paramount 12792), his biggest hit and signature song. It deals with the problem of establishing and maintaining relationships with women and opens with a traditional stanza that seems to take up where the previous song left off. In the fourth stanza Patton expresses his preference for brownskin women in a striking simile and spurns black women. In his sixth and final stanza he opts for temporary relationships with women without the legal obligations of marriage. Each stanza reflected real patterns in Patton’s life. [See lyric transcription, disc 1/track 1.]

Patton’s next three blues all deal with relationships with women and merely elaborate ideas he had already expressed. The last of these, “Pea Vine Blues” (Paramount 12877) takes its title from the Pea Vine railroad line, so called because of its winding route. This line was originally constructed by Will Dockery to connect his plantation with the nearby town of Boyle.48 It was taken over by the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad and extended to Rosedale. Patton merely uses the line as a setting for his song and does not elaborate further on it. His second stanza does, however, foreshadow the epic two-part “High Water Everywhere” (Paramount 12909) that he would record at his next session:

And the levee’s sinking, and I, babe, and I... Spoken: Baby, you know I can’t stay. The levee’s sinking; Lord, you know I ain’t gonna stay. I’m going up the country, mama, in a few more days.

IN HIS NEXT recording, “Tom Rushen Blues” (Paramount 12877), Charley Patton gave the first indication of his propensity for making a song out of “anything that come kind of odd” (his niece’s description). Perhaps for the first time in recorded blues a singer mentions local white people in a song and even offers some unfavorable criticism of one of them, Tom Day, the town marshall of Merigold. The discussion of national political issues is fairly uncommon in the blues, but discussion of local issues and politicians is almost non-existent. To do so was quite daring for a man who had lived in the Delta a long time and expected to stay there. Perhaps it is of some significance that, after his first recording session, Patton seems to have increased his traveling and was seen less often around Dockery’s, Cleveland, Merigold, and Mound Bayou. [See lyric transcription, disc 1/track 8.]

The melody and some of the lyrics in stanzas 1 and 4 are taken from an earlier recording by Ma Rainey, “Booze and Blues” (Paramount 12242), but most of the language is Patton’s own. The real Tom Rushing was born in 1898 near Tylertown, Mississippi, and moved with his parents to the Delta around 1910 when the boll weevil devastated the family farm. He was in a marine officer training program during World War I and served in the navy during most of the 1920’s. In 1928 he married and returned to the Delta, settling in Merigold. He immediately became a deputy for Sheriff Joe Smith of Bolivar County. His main duty was breaking up moonshine stills and arresting the moonshiners who made it and the bootleggers who sold it. He remained a deputy sheriff until 1932, when Prohibition was repealed. Bonded whiskey became legal again, and the Delta counties voted almost immediately to allow its sale. Moonshining and bootlegging decreased dramatically, and Rushing found that he couldn’t make as much money as before. He took a job as a tractor salesman and around 1944 bought a farm east of Merigold on the Sunflower River from his savings.

Rushing thought well of Patton, and the feeling was probably mutual, as Patton gave Rushing a copy of the record that he kept for many years. It would appear that Rushing was, as he stated, “a pretty important figure among the Negroes,” and Patton wanted to honor him in a song. On the other hand, Halloway (the song’s moonshiner) was a friend of Patton’s and probably an “important figure” in his own right. Patton probably sympathized with his plight and wanted to call attention to it in a song. He apparently did so by merging his own character with Halloway’s. He does this in stanzas 1, 4 and 6, which are sung in the first person as if Patton were singing about his own experiences. This is a common technique of blues composers, but Patton may have been induced to compose in this way because Ma Rainey’s record, which influenced his own, is also composed in the first person. As a final ironic footnote to this story, Tom Rushing’s farm became Mississippi’s first legal winery in 1977, specializing in fine wines made from Mississippi’s native Muscadine grape.

Charley Patton followed this topical blues with two lighter pieces in a ragtime style, both dealing primarily with the pleasures of sex. In one he states that he will fight and kill for his “spoonful.” Patton concluded the session with four spiritual sides, including the two-part “Prayer of Death” (Paramount 12799), in which he demonstrated his technique of making the guitar say prayers. The songs cover the full range of his favorite religious themes, including death and the journey to heaven, the troubles of this world, depression, trust in God, and his personal dignity.

Patton’s first records sold rather well, and he was called back to the studio only some four months later in October, 1929. In the meantime he seems to have relocated his base of operations from the Merigold and Mound Bayou area to the Clarksdale area. The session was held at Paramount’s main studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, and to it Patton brought fiddler Henry Sims from the little rural community of Farrell near Clarksdale. His total of twenty-four recorded songs, combined with fourteen from his first session, made him Paramount’s most prolific recording artist for 1929, an indication of the confidence that the company had in his sales potential.

Most of Patton’s songs at the second session were blues and spirituals, but he also recorded two older folk ballads and versions of two popular songs that had been hits earlier in the 1920’s and were probably especially popular with white audiences. One of them, “Runnin’ Wild Blues” (Paramount 12924), may have had a certain autobiographical application to Patton’s lifestyle, but his text is rather garbled. The folk ballads, “Elder Greene Blues” (Paramount 12972) and “Frankie and Albert” (Paramount 13110), along with “Jim Lee, Parts 1 and 2” (Paramount 13080 and 13133), all draw heavily from the black folksong tradition and may represent an early stylistic level in Patton’s music, the kind of material he learned from Henry Sloan and other mentors. “Elder Greene Blues” is, in fact, related melodically to versions of “Alabama Bound,” a song that Patton’s niece identified in Sloan’s repertoire. Although the song is thoroughly traditional, Patton may have felt some personal identification with the theme of “Frankie and Albert,” which deals with the violent conclusion of a lovers’ triangle, but his text is rather confused as a narrative account. “Elder Greene Blues,” about a backsliding churchman, is also quite traditional, but it too contains verses that Patton could have identified with, particularly this one:

I love to fuss and fight, I love to fuss and fight, Lord, and get sloppy drunk off o’ bottle and bond, And walk the streets all night.

Most of Patton’s blues from his second session deal with the usual themes of travel and women troubles. In some of these, however, are embedded a few topical references. In “Circle Round the Moon” (Paramount 13040) and “Hammer Blues” (Paramount 12998) there are brief mentions of serving a sentence on a road gang and being shackled in preparation for a train ride to Parchman Penitentiary in northern Sunflower County. It is not known whether these verses refer to an experience of Patton or of one or more of his friends. If he did serve a jail sentence, it was probably a brief stretch on a county road gang for something such as public drunkenness or simply possessing liquor and not a sentence at the state penitentiary at Parchman, which was for more serious crimes. In all of the information on Patton’s life gathered so far, no one has mentioned a serious crime or long jail sentence on his part. Another blues, “Joe Kirby” (Paramount 13133), contains a cryptic reference to the owner of a plantation near Tunica, Mississippi. According to “Son” House, Mr. Kirby was a popular figure among the local blues artists, but it is at present impossible to know what Patton meant when he sang, “Some people say them Joe Kirby blues ain’t bad.”

Of all Patton’s blues on the themes of women and travel from his second session, perhaps the most interesting textually is “Rattlesnake Blues” (Paramount 12924). [See lyric transcription, disc 2/track 4.] While the precise events underlying this song are unknown at present, Patton’s general meaning is clear enough. The song opens with a remarkable simile. The coiled rattlesnake is the perfect symbol for someone who is both ready to defend himself against attack and ready to strike without warning. No doubt Patton saw himself as a man who was always ready. One should also not fail to recognize the latent sexual symbolism of the rattlesnake. Patton’s readiness, then, enables him to “snake” his way through the world around all obstacles. In the next two stanzas he suggests the southern and northern limits of his world. Shelby, Illinois, must be the town of Shelbyville in that state. It is not known what connection Patton had with this town, but for his audience it no doubt serves more as an expression of great distance than of a literal place on the map. In fact, Patton had already been much farther north than Shelbyville. In these two stanzas Patton also states that he travels because his woman keeps company with another man, perhaps while he is absent. Nevertheless, he seems to have no particular animosity for the rival and is even willing to shake hands with him. Evidently his rage is reserved for the woman with “a heart like a piece of railroad steel.” Vicksburg, in stanza 4, is an image of “home,” a safe place where Patton had friends and relatives and would be treated well. It is meant to contrast with the distant places mentioned in the two preceding stanzas. The final stanza contains another remarkable simile, this time applied to his woman and meant to balance the simile in the first stanza as well as provide further motivation for his travel. This is a brilliantly structured and brilliantly performed blues, all the more extraordinary if it was indeed composed spontaneously.

Patton’s best known song from his second session is the epic two-part blues about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River, “High Water Everywhere” (Paramount 12909). This flood, which took place in April and May of 1927, was the worst on that river in modern history. Heavy spring rains had caused the river and its tributaries to swell up and eventually burst the levees. The first break came at Dorena, Missouri, then at Pendleton, Arkansas, sending waters swirling through much of eastern Arkansas. Perhaps the worst break occurred on April 21 at Mound Landing, eighteen miles north of Greenville, Mississippi, flooding much of the Delta. Further breaks occurred in Louisiana, as the waters rushed toward the Gulf of Mexico. In all, sixteen and a half million acres of land were flooded in seven states, over 162,000 homes flooded and 41,000 buildings destroyed, over 600,000 people made homeless and without food, and between 250 and 500 people killed including officially 78 in Arkansas and 125 in Mississippi.49

Blues about this flood were recorded by such popular artists as Bessie Smith, Sippie Wallace, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Barbecue Bob. Charley Patton and Greenville-based singer Alice Pearson, however, are probably the only blues artists ever to record a song on this theme who actually experienced the flood. But there is a directness and sense of personal involvement and real drama that is found in Patton’s recording and nowhere else. While the other artists expressed sorrow and sympathy for the victims, Patton’s narrative conveys a very real sense of fear, confusion, menace, and rage. Patton’s nephew has placed him at the little community of Gunnison near the Mississippi River, when the flood struck, while his niece placed him about ten miles further east at the town of Shelby. Both places were affected by the flood, though not as severely as towns like Rosedale, Greenville, and Leland. Dockery’s, Mound Bayou, and Merigold did not experience any significant flooding. Although Patton himself may not have felt directly the worst effects of the flood, he did know hundreds of its victims and had traveled all over the territory that was devastated. Thus he could compose and sing about the flood from a level of personal experience that the other blues recording stars could not muster. [See lyric transcriptions, disc 2/tracks 1 and 2.]

Part 1 of the song is set in Mississippi and portrays mainly the sense of confusion and mounting fear of someone caught in the Delta with the water rising around him in all directions. Patton’s description is not tied to any one location. Instead he becomes a kind of “Delta everyman” constantly changing his mind about where to go as he hears fresh reports of rising water. This must have been the real experience of thousands of people like Patton. His phrase, “I’ll tell the world,” in the last line of stanza 1 should probably be taken quite literally. The attention of the world was fixed on this disaster, and Patton here sets himself up as a spokesman for thousands of Delta residents who had no other voice to tell their story to the world. Following an amusing mistake in the first line of stanza 6, he introduces a remarkable image of entire counties being literally carried away by the water and deposited on the shore of another county. The mood of fear and confusion in Part 1 changes to a mood of stark terror in Part 2. No longer is one able to compare reports and ponder where to go to find higher ground. Now the water is up to the singer’s bed, and the only hope is for rescue. Part 2 is set in Arkansas and evidently is based on the experiences of friends of Patton (cf. stanza 2), although typically Charley sings some verses in the first person as if he himself had experienced the events. In fact, he alternates between the viewpoints of a rescuer and one of the rescued. In truth, there wasn’t much difference. Those with access to boats became rescuers. Those without boats hopefully became the rescued. Charley paints a grim picture of islands being created and then submerged by the rising water, rescue boats blowing horns and people unable to hear them, a lifeboat itself sinking in the flood, and reconnaissance airplanes flying overhead unable to offer direct assistance. One lifeboat did, in fact, sink when it was drawn into a crevasse in the levee near Helena, Arkansas, drowning eighteen refugees. The mood of helplessness that Patton depicts of both the victims and the rescuers is awesome and terrifying. The final chilling stanza, with its imagery of complete devastation and an absence of life anywhere, is one of Patton’s greatest musical moments and one of the greatest in all of recorded blues.

Charley Patton recorded one final topical blues at his second recording session, a piece called “Mean Black Moan” (Paramount 12953). It deals with the consequences of a railroad strike in Chicago and is thus the only topical blues by Patton that is not set in the Delta. [See lyric transcription, disc 2/track 13.]

The events underlying this song have not yet been fully investigated, but it probably concerns a railroad shop workers’ strike in 1922. Whether Patton composed this piece at the time is not known. It is also not certain whether Patton understood the issues that provoked the strike or whether he even cared. He seems much more concerned about the consequences of the strike. In the first place, it inconvenienced him, perhaps interfering with his travel plans. But he is also concerned about the plight of the workers who are hungry and unable to pay their rent. They seem to be literally oppressing Patton with their “mean black moans,” lying in front of his door and standing around his bed. The language of this piece is remarkable, as the striking men are merged with their own complaints or “moans” and Patton himself assumes the persona of a striker’s wife and then of one of the strikers in stanzas 5 and 6. We have seen this technique before in “Tom Rushen Blues.” Patton, the Masked Marvel, was a master of changes of voice and character, imitating the voices of women, friends, and members of an audience in his vocal asides and jumping from one persona or perspective to another in his singing. It is a compositional technique that defies completely all the logic of western literary and artistic expression, yet it is remarkably effective in Patton’s hands.

Patton’s third recording session was held in August,50 1930, again in the Paramount studio at Grafton, Wisconsin. He brought with him singer/pianist Louise Johnson, along with “Son” House and his old partner Willie Brown. Patton only recorded four songs; all have Willie Brown playing second guitar and are among Patton’s finest performances. Interestingly, this is the only session where he recorded no spiritual songs. Paramount was feeling the Depression and experiencing financial difficulties. Perhaps they wanted to stick with Patton’s blues, which had enjoyed the greatest success in the past.

Two of Patton’s blues from this session deal with the usual themes of women troubles and travel. “Moon Going Down” (Paramount 13014) is mostly about travel, but it does contain a reference to the burning of a mill in Clarksdale. The theme is not developed, however. “Bird Nest Bound” (Paramount 13070) draws some of its lyric material from an earlier recording by Ardell Bragg, “Bird Nest Blues” (Paramount 12410), but Patton greatly transforms the original into a song that expresses a longing for a permanent home. “Some Summer Day” (Paramount 13080) also draws its melodic and some of its lyric material from another record, the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Sittin’ On Top of The World” (Okeh 8784), recorded earlier in the year. It mentions a woman’s man who went off to prison, but the theme’s relation to Patton’s life remains a mystery. Patton’s remaining song from this session, “Dry Well Blues” (Paramount 13070), deals with another natural disaster in the Delta, a drought that was taking place at the time.51 Patton views the situation, as usual, in personal terms while at the same time identifying with the people of Lula. His concern is with the breakup of a happy domestic situation. The dry spell caused everyone to lose their homes, their money, and their women. These were all things that Patton valued highly, and they were important themes in his life and songs. [See lyric transcription, disc 5/track 1.]

The text alternates between scenes of “before” and “after,” while Patton alternately moves between his own persona and that of a typical resident of Lula. It is highly unlikely that Patton himself was raising cotton and corn or tending trees at Lula, though he may have been “living at ease” through his usual earnings as a musician. He uses the imagery of farming in order to give the song greater appeal to his Delta audience. He paints a picture of “citizens” who probably also “lived at ease,” who had cooperated in drilling a well for the town and obtained enough water for individual irrigation channels. Intertwined with the theme of the loss of this water supply is the theme of the loss of the town’s women. Thus, by fastening on a topical event, Patton makes literal truth out of one of the most common traditional blues stanzas:

You never miss your water until the well goes dry. You never miss your rider until she says good-bye.

In several of the blues from Patton’s 1930 session there is a suggestion that he is tiring of the constant travel and tempestuous relationships with women. He seems to want to find a permanent home and a woman with whom he can settle down and “live at ease.” Apparently, however, he found it impossible to make Lula his home. The drought that he sang about may have had something to do with this, but we have elsewhere noticed in Bertha Lee’s “Mind Reader Blues” that he apparently got in some kind of trouble there and was forced to leave town, as was Bertha Lee herself. Just what happened and when this took place are not clear. The years 1931 and 1932 are obscure in Patton’s life story. He probably tried to settle in Memphis sometime during these years and made money giving guitar lessons and performing locally. The Depression had set in, however, and money was extremely scarce. Charley probably suffered some tough times, at least to a moderate extent, and he apparently returned to his usual pattern of moving about the Delta. He occasionally played with “Son” House and Willie Brown, who had settled in Robinsonville and Lake Cormorant respectively, in the northernmost part of the Delta.

If Patton failed to find a permanent home during this period, he did find a rather compatible mate in Bertha Lee, one who could both create a home life for him as well as sometimes travel with him to perform music. In 1933 they settled in Holly Ridge in a house owned by a white man named Tom Robinson for whose family Bertha Lee became the cook. By 1934 the American record industry was beginning to make a comeback from the worst effects of the Great Depression. W.R. Calaway, who had formerly worked for Paramount, was now working for the American Record Company 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, probably because of Patton’s death three months after the session and the poor sales of the initial releases. Unfortunately the remaining masters were lost or destroyed. Two of the twelve issued songs are spiritual duets by Charley and Bertha, and two others are blues vocals by Bertha. The remaining eight pieces are blues and a ragtime dance piece sung by Charley.

http://www.paramountshome.org/index.php?view=article&catid=45:new-york-recording-laboratoriesartist&id=78:charley-patton-biography-part-3-dr-david-evans&option=com_content&Itemid=54 Charley Patton Biography (part 3) - Dr. David Evans

used with the gracious permission of David Evans and Dean Blackwood of Revenant Records 11/3/05

Here are two Charlie Patton ads Alex found in Cedarburg in 2000. These were the first full-body illustrations of Patton to be found. One was used by the Boerner Company from Port Washington to release his 1934 recordings. Paramount by then was defunct. Here are two Charlie Patton ads Alex found in Cedarburg in 2000. These were the first full-body illustrations of Patton to be found. One was used by the Boerner Company from Port Washington to release his 1934 recordings. Paramount by then was defunct.

There are two main subjects of the songs from this last session. One is Bertha Lee herself and Charley’s evident satisfaction with her. Unlike the women in most of his earlier blues, he has a consistently positive attitude toward Bertha throughout the session. The second main subject is Patton’s relationships with important white people. This topic had emerged briefly in “Tom Rushen Blues” at his first recording session, but there he was adopting another man’s situation as his own. In his songs about the flood and the dry spell he was the spokesman for the entire Delta population, black and white. Even in “Mean Black Moan” he did not take sides in a labor dispute that doubtless had racial implications but concentrated instead on the hardships of the workers out on strike. In his last session, however, he is definitely singing about his own personal experiences and frequently with a tone of bitterness. It may have seemed to him that the delicate balance of forces that had preserved his ambiguous social status was crumbling. He was aware of his heart trouble and was trying to settle down more and stay in one place. This inevitably weakened his social position and forced him more into the typical status of a Delta Negro. At the same time he was performing increasingly for white audiences but finding increasing difficulties in his relationships with whites. Throughout the songs of his last session there is not only bitterness but a sense of an impending great crisis in his life, a sense that the threads that had held his life together up to now were beginning to unravel. Perhaps he knew he was about to die and didn’t care what the consequences of his song-statements might be. At any rate, he was far more directly outspoken at this session than he had ever been before. This was the case both about sex and about local characters and events. It was also the case about the subject of death itself. Charley had recently witnessed a horrible axe murder at a country supper at Four Mile Lake. According to Big Joe Williams, who claimed to have witnessed the event along with Patton, a gambler named Henry Freeman had killed another gambler named Quicksilver over a woman. Patton and Williams, who was playing music with him, were called as witnesses, and Charley made up a song about the event. This was probably the song he recorded entitled “The Delta Murder,” which remained unissued.52 Big Joe Williams recalled one of the verses:53

I know poor Quicksilver gonna hear Gabriel when he sound. He gonna raise up in the grave, but the poor boy got to lay back down.

Patton used the image of an axe in his recording of “Jersey Bull Blues” (Vocalion 02782), but here its meaning appears to be purely sexual. Nevertheless, it is perhaps of some significance that Patton at this point had merged the imagery of sex and violent murder. Charley and Bertha Lee also recorded a spiritual called “Oh Death” (Vocalion 02904). Their version is based on an earlier recording entitled “I Know My Time Ain’t Long” (Paramount 12948) by Charley’s friends, the Delta Big Four quartet. “Oh Death” is one of the most powerful and chilling songs on this subject ever recorded. Patton’s involvement with the song is total, and he must have known that his own time was indeed not long.

Bertha Lee is the focus of several songs from Patton’s last session. Her own singing of “Yellow Bee” (Vocalion 02650), a song based on an earlier recording by Memphis Minnie and one that Charley apparently taught to Bertha prior to the recording session, is frankly sexual and employs imagery of a long stinger, making honey, and buzzing around a hive. Charley’s recording of “Hang It On The Wall” (Vocalion 02931), a remake of a ragtime dance song that he had recorded at his first session in 1929, is also quite sexual as Charley calls out to Bertha Lee, who was probably dancing in the studio. Immediately before this piece Patton recorded “Poor Me” (Vocalion 02651), a tender love song in which he mentions Bertha Lee by name. In “Stone Pony Blues” (Vocalion 02680), recorded earlier in the session and an updated version of Patton’s 1929 hit of “Pony Blues,” Charley seems to be saying in a metaphorical way that he has given up other women and settled down: “I got me a stone pony and I don’t ride shetland no more.” His “stone pony” can be found “hooked to his rider’s door” and “down in Lula town somewhere,” an obvious reference to Bertha Lee whom he had first met in Lula. Later in the song there occurs a stanza that declares that he is not interested in any of the women in his audience:

Well, I didn’t come here to steal nobody’s brown. Didn’t come here to steal nobody’s brown. I just stopped by here, well, to keep you from stealing mine.

No doubt Patton found these lines useful at his live performances to avoid dangerous situations. They contrast markedly with the verse he addressed to the women in his earlier “Pony Blues”: “I don’t want to marry, just want to be your man.” But there is also a hint of trouble in “Stone Pony Blues.” Twice Patton sings the line, “And I can’t feel welcome, rider, nowhere I go.” No doubt Patton’s settling down was beginning to limit his opportunities and forcing him to accept conditions that were not entirely to his liking, conditions that he could always avoid in the past simply by leaving. This same contrast of apparent bliss and ominous foreboding is found in “Love My Stuff” (Vocalion 02782). The first three stanzas border on being positively lewd, as Patton sings of his delight in his hot “jelly,” his “stuff,” and his rider’s way of shimmying. But then the mood suddenly turns grim for the last half of the song. In stanza 4 he mentions an apparition of the devil, but his full meaning is not clear. Then he states that he feels compelled to leave in a hurry, drawing his imagery from the 1927 flood that he had sung about in an earlier record. [See stanzas 4, 5, 6, disc 5/track 18.]

Several of Charley’s songs from his last session mention the activities of white people and Charley’s relationships with them. Big Joe Williams told me that Patton made up “Jersey Bull Blues” (Vocalion 02782) about a bull belonging to his landlord in Holly Ridge, Tom Robinson. The record’s lyrics, however, merely develop a sexual metaphor of a bull for three stanzas before introducing the axe imagery that was discussed previously. Patton probably told Robinson that the song was about his bull as an easy way of paying him a compliment. He also seems to have paid a compliment to a favorite railroad engineer in “Charley Bradley’s Ten Sixty-Six Blues,” a piece that remained unissued. “Son” House has stated that Bradley drove Engine Number 1066 on a route from Memphis to Vicksburg, and everyone liked the way he blew his whistle as his train sped through the Delta.54 Patton had probably ridden the Ten Sixty-Six many times.

Another unissued song, “Whiskey Distillery,” may have mentioned local white people. Its title perhaps suggests a theme such as Patton had developed earlier in “Tom Rushen Blues.” Illegal activities had been very much in the news in the two years prior to Patton’s last recording session. The Depression was at its worst, and many people, desperate for money, turned to careers of crime. People like A1 Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Ma and Pa Barker, and Bonnie and Clyde became household names to millions of Americans and heroes to many as they flamboyantly defied the law. Revenue agents seeking unpaid taxes and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s notorious “G-Men” pursued these criminals relentlessly and were not above using ruthless methods to hunt down or wipe out these fugitives from justice. Things had changed from a few years earlier when an officer like Tom Rushing could quietly arrest a moonshiner or bootlegger and take him in to the county courthouse to pay a fine. Criminals were now more apt to carry and use weapons, and law officers were more likely to get tough first and ask questions later. Charley Patton was evidently concerned about this situation and recorded “Revenue Man Blues” (Vocalion 02931) as a kind of warning to others on the danger of police brutality. “If he hollers and you don’t stop, you will likely be knocked out,” he sings, and “If they see you with a bottle, they will almost break your neck.” The theme is not developed further, however, as Patton reverts to some verses he had previously sung in 1930 in “Bird Nest Bound.” He concludes with a stanza that hints at bad luck and trouble and seems to suggest a series of personal failures.

Oh, I wake up every morning now with the jinx all around my bed. Spoken: Oh sure. I wake up every morning with the jinx all around my bed. Spoken: You know, I had them jinx (. . . ?) I have been a good provider, but I believe I’ve been misled.

If Patton’s references to whites were brief or obscure in these songs, they were quite explicit and detailed in “High Sheriff Blues” (Vocalion 02680). It contains the melody and guitar part and a few of the verses that he had used in 1929 in “Tom Rushen Blues.” It also deals with a jailhouse experience, but this time it is Patton’s own. Bertha Lee stated that she and Charley were both jailed in Belzoni following a row at a house party and that it was none other than W. R. Calaway of the American Record Company who bailed them out.55 Belzoni is the county seat of Humphreys County, which lies just to the south of Sunflower County where Patton was living at the time. Humphreys County has a rather unsavory reputation among blacks for race relations, and it was not one of Patton’s more frequented parts of the Delta. Unlike the case in most of the other Delta counties, Patton was probably not very familiar with the law officers there. In the song he protests his treatment in the jail. He evidently needed either whiskey or medical treatment, or both. Charley knew he had heart trouble by this time, and he had increased his drinking, perhaps to try to blot his troubles out of his mind. [See lyric transcription, disc 5/track 13.]

Patton must have been demoralized by being thrown in jail in a relatively strange place like Belzoni, but he was probably hurt far worse by being told to stay off Dockery’s plantation. The man who told him to leave was Herman G. Jett, who served for forty years as the general manager or overseer of the plantation and was a good friend of Will Dockery. The incident evidently took place at the end of 1933 or in January of 1934, not long before Patton’s final recording session, for he describes it in his “34 Blues” (Vocalion 02651). Charley’s nephew Tom Cannon, who lived nearly his entire life on Dockery’s and as of the late 1980s still occasionally did work there, described what happened:

He had done lived on Dockery, was growed up on Dockery, had been there for years. After he [Charley’s father] moved off, Charley come back in there. Sometimes he would pick a little cotton on Dockery, but the biggest he did was put out music. As long as his daddy was there on Dockery, he didn’t say anything to him about coming back and forth on Dockery. But he [Charley] carried a couple of men’s wives off from Dockery, and they were tore up about that. And when Mr. Jett met him coming on the place, Mr. Jett told him that he didn’t want him hanging around Dockery no more. Then he put out that record about Herman Jett.… He had fun out of Mr. Jett when he sent him that record back after Mr. Jett told him that. He had been around Mr. Jett ever since he was a boy up until a man. Mr. Jett laughed. He wasn’t mad at him. They didn’t have no falling out.

Jett may have laughed about the incident, considering it all in a day’s work, and as a lifelong Dockery worker Tom Cannon perhaps underestimates Charley’s reaction. His “34 Blues” is anything but mild in its criticism of Jett. [See lyric transcription, disc 5/track 17.]

Charley is saying that the year 1934 had started badly for him. We don’t know if he really was broke at Christmas time. It seems unlikely, as the workers on the farms had just received their settlements, and there were probably plenty of parties where Charley could have made money. The white folks too had sold their cotton and were probably in a mood to celebrate with music. But the general economic climate of the country was bad. It was still a time of severe economic depression, and Charley was most likely taking the role of spokesman for the poor people of the Delta. This view is strengthened by his third stanza, in which he calls attention to the pathetic plight of women and children who can’t afford to buy a railroad ticket and are forced to try to bum rides on freight trains. Herman Jett, on the other hand, owned two cars and could afford to burn up his gasoline on something as trivial as riding around in the fields behind one of the farm workers. (Harvey Parker was a tenant on Dockery’s and an old friend of Charley Patton.) Charley had been driven from the home where he had grown up, and his pride had been wounded. Rather than swallow this bitter pill in silence, he contradicted his opening line and “told everybody.” This song was on the first record that Vocalion released from the session. We must admire Patton’s bold move in referring to Mr. Jett by his first name and sending him a copy of the record.

• * *

CHARLEY PATTON did not leave Mississippi, nor was he spared to see a brand new year. In his last years his music had become very popular with Delta whites, and the difficulty he had in maintaining the same freedom and security that whites enjoyed must have weighed heavily upon him. During his final recording session he was openly criticizing the social status quo in the Delta. His last playing job was for whites, and one wonders what songs he performed there. Did he sing “High Sheriff Blues” and “34 Blues”? Did the white folks understand what he was singing about? Did they care? Charley Patton has been dead for almost seventy years, and it is over a century since he was born. He was one of the originators of the blues, one of the first generation of blues artists, yet he also seems to have anticipated the internatio¬nal interest in blues that is now taking place around a hundred years after he and others began to create this music. Charley Patton was indeed the “great man” that the young Bukka White thought he was. He will be remembered and discussed worldwide for his own brilliant accomplishments, while the other “great men” of the Delta that he sang about will be remembered only because they figured in Charley Patton’s life and songs.

ENDNOTES 1 For insight into the social conditions and caste system of the Delta during the 1930’s see the following works: Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937); Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); and David L. Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).

2 Samuel Charters, The Bluesmen (New York: Oak Publications, 1967), p. 34. For similar statements by other Delta bluesmen see Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981), pp. 61-63.

3 Viola Cannon and Bessie Turner interviewed by David Evans and Marina Bokelman, Greenville, Mississippi, August 22, 1967; Tom Cannon interviewed by David Evans and Marina Bokelman, Dockery, Mississippi, August 25, 1967; Bessie Turner interviewed by David Evans and Bob Vinisky, Greenville, Mississippi, March 10, 1979; Tom Rushing interviewed by David Evans, Robert Sacré, and Bob Groom, Cleveland, Mississippi, April 9, 1985; Tom Cannon interviewed by David Evans, Robert Sacré and Bob Groom, Cleveland, Mississippi, April 9, 1985. Tom Cannon interviewed by David Evans and Michael Leonard, Cleveland, Mississippi, December 8, 1986. I am grateful to Michael Leonard for further help in research at the courthouses in Belzoni and Cleveland, Mississippi, in December, 1986.

4 5 For my earlier assessment of Patton’s career and music see “Charlie Patton’s Life and Music” in Charlie Patton, Blues World Booklet No. 2, ed. Bob Groom (Knutsford, England; Blues World, 1969), pp. 3-7 (reprinted in Blues World, No. 33, Aug., 1970, 11-15). See also David Evans, “Blues on Dockery’s Plantation: 1895 to 1967,” in Nothing But the Blues, ed. Mike Leadbitter (London: Hanover, 1971), pp. 129-132.

6 5 Bernard Klatzko, notes to The Immortal Charlie Patton, Origin Jazz Library 7, 12” LP, 1964. A reprint of this document is included in this set.

6 Ibid.

7 Nick Perls, “Son House Interview - Part One,” 78 Quarterly, 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), 59-61.

8 Gayle Dean Wardlow and Jacques Roche, “Patton’s Murder - Whitewash or Hogwash?,” 78 Quarterly, 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1967), 10-17.

9 Charters, pp. 34-56.

10 Stephen Calt et al., notes to Charley Patton, Founder of the Delta Blues, Yazoo L-1020, double LP, ca. 1967.

11 John Fahey, Charley Patton (London: Studio Vista, 1970). A reprint of this book is included in this set.

12 Ibid., pp. 29, 26.

13 Palmer, pp. 48-92. R. Crumb has published “Patton,” an illustrated biography of Charley Patton in Zap Comix, No 11 (1985), based largely on the account in Palmer’s book. Subsequently this and other Crumb strips on blues figures were collected in R. Crumb Draws the Blues (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993).

14 Palmer, pp. 56-57.

15 Alan Greenberg, Love in Vain (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 38-45, 95-105, 109-118.

16 Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988).

17 Fahey, op. cit.

18 18 Perls, p. 61.

19 Jacques Roche, “The Words,” 78 Quarterly, 1, no. 1 (Autumn, 1967), pp. 51-52, 54, Stephen Calt, “The Country Blues as Meaning,” in Country Blues Songbook, ed. Stefan Grossman, Hal Grossman, and Stephen Calt (New York: Oak Publications, 1973), p. 22.

20 Fahey, pp. 60, 62, 65.

21 Pete Welding, “David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards,” in Nothing But the Blues, ed. Mike Leadbitter (London: Hanover Books, 1971), p. 135. See also Palmer, p. 89.

22 For more information on these artists see Evans, “Blues on Dockery’s Plantation: 1895 to 1967.”

23 For more information on Will Dockery and his plantation see Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi (Chicago: Goodspeed, 1891), Vol 1, pp. 652-653; and Marie M. Hemphill, Fevers, Floods and Faith: A History of Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1844-1976 (Indianola, Miss.: Marie M. Hemphill, 1980), pp. 403-405.

24 On Charley’s application for a marriage license to Gertrude Lewis in Cleveland, Mississippi, on September 12, 1908, he made his mark (X) by his name recorded by the court clerk. Tom Cannon states that Charley must have been “pulling somebody’s leg.” Probably the clerk, a Chas. Christmas, simply wrote Patton’s name on the form and asked him to add his mark, assuming that he was illiterate.

25 Bessie Turner may have meant Renova, where her brother recalled Charley preaching in a church located on land owned by the family. Tom Cannon states that Charley did most of his preaching in parts of the hill country where he was not well known as a blues singer.

26 Charters, p. 37.

27 Henry Balfour, “Ritual and Secular Uses of Vibrating Membranophones As Voice-Disguisers,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 78 (1948), 45-69.

28 This phase of his career must have been brief, as he cannot be clearly identified in Memphis city directories during the years 1924-1934.

29 Welding, p. 135.

30 Charters, p. 56.

31 Ibid., p. 54.

32 Palmer, ibid.

33 Reverend Rubin Lacy, interviewed by David Evans, John Fahey, and Alan Wilson, Ridgecrest, California, March 19, 1966.

34 Perls, p. 59.

35 Klatzko, ibid.

36 Lacy, ibid.

37 Perls, p. 59.

38 Lacy, ibid.

39 Klatzko, ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 See Endnote 51.

42 Perls, p. 61.

43 Palmer, pp. 70-71.

44 Charters, p. 56.

45 Perls, p. 60.

46 For a discussion of the workings of this folk-blues tradition see Evans, Big Road Blues.

47 See, for example, ibid., pp. 146-150; and David Evans, “Structure and Meaning in the Folk Blues,” in Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 432-434.

48 Hemphill, pp. 403-404.

49 For a concise description of the flood and its effects see Pete Daniel, Deep’n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

50 See Endnote 51.

51 Elsewhere in this set the other authors have used June as the likely date for the Patton sessions in which “Dry Well Blues” was recorded. An examination of the Clarksdale Daily Register newspaper for the months of June-August, 1930, sheds some light on events underlying “Dry Well Blues” and incidentally helps us to date the Paramount recording session. The paper begins to take notice of continued unusually hot and dry weather on June 26, but only in a rather light hearted editorial. Not until July 8 is there a front page article with a tone of alarm, “Dry Spell For Delta Without Any Surcease.” Headlines continued to recount the disaster through August, with the August 8 headline reading “Crop Is 500,000 Bales Short” and a story on August 15 reading “Drought Takes Huge Farm Toll.” There can be little doubt, then, that Patton’s recording session took place no earlier than late June and most likely in July or August. “Son” House stated in 1964 that it was in August. (“Son” House, interviewed by Alan Wilson, November 5, 1964, Cambridge, MA.)

Meanwhile, the Daily Register on July 15 ran an official notice of intention to issue $5,000 in municipal bonds, entitled “Bond Issue for Improvement, Repair and Extension of the Water Works System of the Town of Lula, Coahoma County, Mississippi.” On July 20 it published a short article titled “Lula Booms,” that stated, “In keeping with the progress of Lula, one of the most progressive of the small towns of the Delta, officials have added a street sprinkler, that is keeping the streets dust free and adding much to the pleasure of living in that wide-awake town. The town has recently issued a few thousand dollars in bonds and is boring a second artesian well to supply the demands of a growing town.” On the same day the paper’s headlines read “62-Day Drought Hangs On.” On August 1 it reported that the water lines of Vicksburg had gone dry, and on August 10 it ran an editorial titled “When the Well Goes Dry.” Against this background we can possibly detect a subtle subtext of social criticism in Patton’s song. While the white “citizens” are confidently buying municipal bonds and boring a second well to add to their “pleasure of living” by keeping their streets dust free and maintaining their irrigation channels, the ordinary men and women are losing their trees, crops, homes and families. For the most part, Patton is simply reporting facts, but it is hard to imagine that he was not struck by the contrast of the confidence shown by the “citizens” and the devastation wrought by God’s hand.

52 Four Mile Lake is located in Humphreys County a few miles northeast of Belzoni. Courthouse records reveal that James Manuel (evidently the man that Williams knew as “Quicksilver”) was accused of murdering Henry Freeman. Williams stated that the two men (whose identities he evidently reversed) fought over a woman named Velma Larry, and she is listed as a witness for the defense. Charles Patton [sic] and Bertha Lee Patton are listed as witnesses for the state, but Joe Williams was not listed as a witness for either side. An indictment was filed against Manuel and a bench warrant issued for his arrest on March 6, 1934, in the Circuit Court of Humphreys County. He was arrested the following day. Charley and Bertha Lee and the other state’s witnesses were called to Belzoni on March 12, and the trial was apparently held on March 15. There is no record of a verdict, and no newspaper accounts that would further clarify the situation. Although the indictment was issued in March, the crime could have been committed any time after December 20, 1933, when the court was last in session in Belzoni. The court next met on March 6, the day that the arrest warrant and subpoenas were issued. Thus, it is quite possible that the murder took place before Patton’s recording session began on January 30. [Booker Miller’s account of the event which occasioned the song “The Delta Murder” is quite different. See interview of Miller on disc 7. –Ed.]

53 Big Joe Williams, “Big Joe Talking,” Piney Woods Blues, Delmark DL-602, 12” LP (1958). Williams’ statement contained the first published information about Patton’s life.

54 Fahey, p. 110.

55 The incident referred to in “High Sheriff Blues” probably stems from the murder of Henry Freeman. As suggested above, this murder, to which Patton and Bertha Lee were witnesses, could have taken place before Patton’s recording session. My guess is that James Manuel and all of the witnesses were arrested at the scene of the crime and brought to the Belzoni jail until the details could be sorted out. Thus Charley and Bertha would have spent some time in jail until Mr. Calaway got them out. R. Carlos Webb was a deputy sheriff of Humphreys County and probably the man who made the arrests at Four Mile Lake and brought Manuel and the witnesses to the jail at Belzoni. John D. Purvis was the sheriff. Purvis was probably convinced by Calaway that the Pattons were of good character and not directly involved in the crime, and he evidently ordered Webb to release them (“let poor Charley down”). Patton’s attitude seems to be critical of the fact that he was placed in jail by Mr. Webb, but he apparently is grateful to Sheriff Purvis for letting him off to travel to his recording session. As in the earlier “Tom Rushen Blues” the reference to thirty days in jail should probably be taken merely as a figure of speech and not literally.

http://www.wirz.de/music/pattofrm.htm Charley Patton aka Charlie Patton aka The Masked Marvel aka Elder J. J. Hadley

b. July 12, 1885 at Heron's Place, between Bolton and Edwards, Hinds County, Mississippi

d. April 28, 1934 in Heathman-Bedham, out from Indianola, Sunflower County, Mississippi buried in a former cemetery then belonging to the New Jerusalem M.B. Church on the Robinson Plantation in Holly Ridge, Mississippi

http://www.elijahwald.com/patton.html Charlie Patton – Folksinger by Elijah Wald

Who was Charley Patton, and what the hell was he singing about? There are infinite arguments about Patton’s lyrics. His growling, slurred diction, and the fact that his recordings were often made on mediocre equipment and survive only in scratched and beaten copies make words and phrases utterly indecipherable. Combined with the gaps in what we know of his life and character, this creates an almost irresistible opportunity for historians to shape him into whatever they want him to be. Take the first line of “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” one of his earliest and greatest recordings: Is he a haunted, Delta mystic singing, “I’m going away to a world unknown,” as transcribed in the liner notes to an ornate new box set and a half-dozen web sites? Or is he a popular country entertainer singing, “I’m going away to Illinois,” a common theme of the great exodus of black Mississippians to Chicago? There is no “right” answer, but how one hears a line like this can be emblematic of the whole way one looks at blues.

For some forty years, “Delta blues” has been used as a synonymn for the most tortured and soulful strain in American music. Never mind that the region produced gentle, light singers like Mississippi John Hurt, country string bands like the Mississippi Sheiks, racy comedians like Bo Carter, slick, jazzy performers like Joe and Charlie McCoy, and smooth, urban stars like Memphis Minnie and Big Bill Broonzy--or that (Hurt excepted) these were the Delta’s biggest record-sellers. In popular legend, the Delta blues scene was dominated by haunted, Devil-harried guitarists whose records remain the gold standard for “deep” blues. Robert Johnson is the most famous name in this pantheon, but among aficionados Charley Patton is almost universally hailed as the founding, defining genius, the source of a musical lineage that runs through Johnson to the Chicago masters and on to encompass virtually everything now called blues.

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. His trademark guitar arrangements were adopted by Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown, as well as younger players like Howlin’ Wolf, Roebuck “Pop” Staples, all of whom hung around him in order to master the pieces he had turned into local hits. He apparently gave formal lessons to some of them, using teaching as a secondary source of income in the weekdays between juke joint performances.

And yet, when we define Patton as the brilliant progenitor of blues as we know it, we are to a great extent limiting him, locking him into a stylistic straitjacket he never wore when alive. Of course, he was a great blues player. His basic blues themes--the “Spanish tuning” arrangement he recorded first as “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” and that reappeared as “Future Blues,” “Jinx Blues,” and “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”--are masterpieces, and no other solo player has matched his controlled and inventive rhythmic variations. Still, when historians base their assessment of Patton’s work on these pieces, they are seeing him through a prism of blues fandom that barely existed in his day, and shortchanging both his talents and the broader world in which he lived.

Great as they are and much as they have been immitated, those classic arrangements represent only one side of Patton’s recorded repertoire, and undoubtedly an even smaller proportion of what he played at live appearances. Remembered by history as a blues musician, Patton had grown up in the pre-blues era, and he played the full range of music required of a popular rural entertainer. Even though his recording career was sparked by the blues craze, only about half of his roughly fifty records can reasonably be considered part of that then-modern genre. The others are a mix of gospel and religious music, ragtime comedy like “Shake It and Break It,” ballads like “Frankie and Albert,” older slide guitar standards like “Bo Weavil” and “Spoonful,” and a couple of unclassifiable pieces that seem to be his reimaginings of Tin Pan Alley pop numbers, “Some of These Days” and “Running Wild.”

This was not a particularly unusual repertoire for the time and place. Back in those days before recorded entertainment, rural musicians were expected to perform whatever their audiences cared to hear, and many of them mastered an extraordinary range of styles, from minstrel comedy to square dance accompaniments. Even Robert Johnson, twenty years younger and a child of the blues era, made a streetcorner specialty of songs like “Ain’t She Sweet” and cowboy numbers. By the time Johnson recorded in the mid-1930s, though, producers were pushing black guitarists to stick to blues. Patton first recorded in 1929, and was one of the last rural African-Americans to have a chance to preserve his broader range of material on commercial recordings. Unfortunately, his non-blues material has generally been relegated to the background of his story, as if it were far less important than his blues work--some scholars have even argued, with virtually no evidence, that his non-blues repertoire was simply learned for white audiences. This has unfairly limited his appeal to modern listeners. Promoted as the deepest, rawest Delta bluesman of them all, Patton is rarely heard by people who are not already hardcore blues fans.

In fact, in many ways Patton’s recordings are more like Leadbelly’s than like Robert Johnson’s, and it would be easy to assemble a collection of his work aimed at folk and old-time country fans. In rural Mississippi, blacks as well as whites danced hoedowns and square dances, and when Patton used a sideman--even on blues records--it tended to be a fiddler, Son Sims. (Sims was still going strong in the 1940s, leading a country dance quartet that included Muddy Waters on guitar.) On the four of their duets where Sims took the lead, it is an education to hear how Patton plays. The songs are all blues in some sense, but the boom-chang pattern of his guitar accompaniments sounds a lot like hillbilly playing, albeit with a leavening of hot, syncopated bass runs. It does not sound white, exactly, but if a modern bluegrass group reworked these songs, Patton’s guitar would fit right in.

Patton’s way with pre-blues, “songster” material is even more interesting, and it is not a stretch to say that, had things worked out differently, he could have appealed to the same audience that made Leadbelly a folk icon. Admittedly, his recordings do not include a “Goodnight Irene” or “Midnight Special,” but it is worth remembering that Leadbelly only learned the latter song after being taken up by John Lomax as a folksong demonstrator. We have no idea how much more “folk” material Patton might have known, or how he might have adapted his formidable skills to suit a Greenwich Village audience. He was a notably versatile performer and musician and, unlike virtually any major blues singer besides Leadbelly, he was given to composing lengthy ballads about current events in his world, just the sort of thing the New York crowd would have prized and encouraged. His most famous topical song, “High Water Everywhere,” is a six-minute description of a Mississippi River flood, telling of the suffering caused throughout the Delta, and leading his listeners on a journey through the devastation:

The water at Greenville and Leland, it done rose everywhere, I would go down to Rosedale, but they tell me it’s water there.

He 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. Far from being bitter, passionate heart-cries, they used a lilting melody that would have fitted the smooth style of a Leroy Carr, or even a Gene Autry, and Patton sang with relaxed ease over a slide guitar line that shadowed his voice:

Lay down last night, hoped that I would have my peace, ee-yee (2x) When I woke up, Tom Rushing were shaking me.

The song is full of local color, mentioning Tom Day, the town marshal of Merigold, Mississippi, and a bootlegger named Holloway who was apparently one of Patton’s running buddies. As for the title character, Tom Rushing (his name was mispelled by whoever took down the title for Paramount Records) was a deputy in Bolivar County, and when some blues experts tracked him down in the 1980s he recalled Patton coming to see him after the record was released and presenting him with a copy. He considered this an honor, and described Patton as a important local figure--indeed, he compared him to the track star Jesse Owens.

Much has been made of the isolation of the rural Delta, and the poverty and racism that overshadowed the lives of black farmers and musicians. It is important to remember, however, that this was not the whole story, that a singer like Patton could have a relatively friendly (though obviously unequal) relationship with a white deputy, and that his arrest could lead to songs that show humor as much as despair. It is also worth noting that Patton’s song, despite its personal details, was a reworking of “Booze and Blues,” recorded by the “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey, with a jazz group directed by bandleader Fletcher Henderson. That is to say, far from being an opressed rural primitive, Patton was a professional musician using a modern pop style to tell a story that would interest and amuse local fans, both black and white.

“Tom Rushing Blues” combines Rainey’s verses about the misery of being stuck in jail without a drink with wry digs at the local power figures. Marshall Day, for example, would not have been somebody for a black sharecropper to trifle with in 1930s Mississippi, but Patton jokes that his badge is not a permanent possession and, “If he lose his office, now, he’s running from town to town.” Likewise, in his Depression lament, “34 Blues” Patton mocked Herman Jett, the white foreman who had ordered him to leave his home plantation, Dockery’s Farm, apparently because he had become involved in a marital dispute (Once again, he sent a copy of the record to Jett, who was amused):

Herman got a little six Buick, big six Chevrolet car (2x) (Spoken: My God, what sort of power!) And it don’t do nothing but follow behind Harvey Parker’s plow.

In both of these songs, Patton’s singing is notable for how laid-back and relaxed he sounds. Though he was famous for the volume and strength of his voice, which made it possible for him to be heard over a crowded room full of dancers despite the lack of amplification, and to keep this up for hours on end, many of his records find him in a quieter mood. His voice remains gruff, but he has no need to shout in the intimate surroundings of a recording studio, and his playing is equally gentle. This is particularly true of his slide work. In most cases, Patton used the slide in the old-fashioned, voice-like manner of the pre-blues era. It is the same sound one hears in Lemon Jefferson’s “Jack O’ Diamonds,” or Mance Lipscomb’s work, rather than the hard, slashing style associated with Delta masters like House, Robert Johnson, and Waters.

A perfect example of this is Patton’s very first recording, “Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues.” This is a cousin of the song that Leadbelly and others made into a folk standard, a ballad of the bol weevil, a tough little bug that was destroying cotton crops and impoverishing farmers throughout the South. Patton sings a particularly minimalist version of the song, essentially a single musical line punctuated with slide riffs, but full of the grudging, comic admiration for the pest that has led commentators to consider the song a veiled protest in which the bug represents the rebel urges of black sharecroppers:

Bol weevil left Texas, Lord, he bid me fare thee well, Lordy. (Spoken: Where you going now?) “I’m going down to Mississippi, going to give Louisiana hell,” Lordy.

It is interesting that Patton (or the recording agents) should have chosen this as his first song to record, since by 1929 such older, “folk” material was already falling out of favor on what was then called the “race” market. The accepted commercial wisdom of the time was that, while white rural Southerners were eager to buy “old fashioned songs,” their African American neighbors wanted hipper, contemporary material like the smooth blues ballads of Leroy Carr or the double-entendre hokum of Tampa Red. Both of these artists had breakthrough hits in 1928 and, combined with the economic conservatism that came with the Depression, essentially wiped out the market for idiosyncratic rural geniuses, which Blind Lemon Jefferson had pioneered only a couple of years earlier. Patton was the last Jeffersonian to make a significant impact on the blues market, and it is worth noting that only a half-dozen of his earliest records sold at all well, and even these almost exclusively in rural areas. (Jefferson, by contrast, was a big seller in country and city alike.)

Back home in Mississippi, the story was somewhat different. Here, recordings might slightly enhance a musician’s reputation, but they were in no way vital to local success. Son House, for example, was a very popular juke joint player, though he was a complete failure as a recording artist, his records selling so poorly that hardly any survived to be found by later collectors. Patton did much better, releasing 26 records to House’s four, but there is no reason to think that the recordings made up a significant part of his income, or that the failure of his later records to sell implies any lack of work on the local dance and picnic scene. On the contrary, all reports suggest that he remained a favorite performer right up to his death in 1934, and could easily have kept working and recording had his health not given out.

Indeed, one of the most misleading myths about the rural blues players is that they were all down-and-out ramblers, or sharecroppers trying to pick up a few extra bucks. It was a picture conjured up by John Lomax when he presented Leadbelly in overalls as an ex-convict, and was reinforced by the poverty in which many old blues singers were living at the time of their rediscovery in the 1960s, but in no way matches the life they led in the music’s heyday. Patton, for instance, always appeared in a nice suit, and according to some reports was given to buying a new car every year. He was not rich, exactly, but certainly was doing far, far better than the black farmworkers who came to the jukes on Saturday night, and probably earned more than a good many of the white country folk who hired him to play at their dances and outings.

Likewise, although Patton’s success was undoubtedly due in part to his astonishing abilities as a guitarist, and the depth and soul of his blues singing, it also owed a lot to his professionalism and skill as an entertainer. Friends interviewed in later years would comment on his dependability, the fact that he always showed up on time and took care of business. His performances were masterpieces of showmanship: he was famed for tricks like playing behind his head or between his legs, to the point that some rival musicians disparaged him as a mere trickster. Unfair as this seems to modern listeners, it highlights an important point: To his live audiences, Patton was not the subtle player and singer we hear on the records, nor particularly noted for his soulful depth. He was a man who banged out loud rhythms, shouted so he could be heard to the back of the room, and was a dazzling showman--despite his older, acoustic repertoire, he can in some ways be considered a predecessor to Little Richard and James Brown.

All of Patton’s varied skills come out on the records, though not necessarily in the ways one might expect. For example, the power of his voice is often most evident in his gospel work. (Much has been made of the absolute divide between secular and religious music in African American culture, so it is worth pointing out that, though Patton released his first gospel record under the alias “Elder J.J. Hadley,” his five other religious records came out under his own name to no apparent protest from the church folk.) Clearly inspired by the ferocious, shouting style of the Texas “street corner evangelist” Blind Willie Johnson, Patton delivered his best gospel sides with a fervor and vocal volume that is unmatched on any of his blues recordings. Some of his showmanship also comes through in the brief sermon he delivers on “You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die” (a reworking of Johnson’s “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond”). The Johnson connection further highlights a fact often forgotten by Mississippi blues patriots: Texas was a deep blues country as well, and few if any Delta guitarists were unmarked by Johnson’s and Jefferson’s hugely popular recordings. This was a quickly-moving musical world, in which styles shifted dramatically in a few years time, influenced by all the new sounds streaming in with traveling shows, records, and radio. When we listen to Patton sing his quirky reimagining of “Running Wild,” it is the sound of a man raised on 19th century country dances, hearing a song once or twice on the radio, then coming up with his own variation to record and ship to stores throughout the country.

Which brings us to the hippest sound in Patton’s repertoire, those blues songs that have made him a musical legend. Because, unlike Leadbelly, Patton did not find a white folk audience, and his recordings were directed at contemporary African American rural pop music buyers. And, great as his musical range was and whatever he may have done at live shows, it is those records that earned him a reputation outside the Delta, that were adopted by other players, and that are the bedrock of his enduring fame.

If one had to pick out one characteristic of Patton’s work that is unique and--despite many attempts both then and now--inimitable, it is the rhythmic control he displays on his greatest blues recordings. Take “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” the first recorded version of his trademark “Spanish” guitar arrangement. His playing is never hurried, and the rhythmic power comes not from direct forward momentum (as in Willie Brown’s magnificent reworking, “Future Blues,” now a staple of Rory Block’s repertoire), but from the constant variations and surprising accents. He keeps pausing in his playing, creating moments of tension, then coming back with completely different emphasis. Meanwhile, his relaxed vocal sets up still another level of complexity, sometimes joining the guitar, sometimes working in polyrhythmic counterpoint.

In these terms, Patton’s masterpiece is “Down the Dirt Road,” which for sheer rhythmic complexity is the most striking performance in the whole of blues. At times, Patton seems to be singing one rhythm, tapping another on the top his guitar, and playing a third on the strings, all without the slightest sense of effort. This is the work that distinguishes him from his peers, and that sets his circle of Mississippians aside from all the other players in the early blues pantheon. While no other player equalled his abilities, Mississippi consistently produced the most rhythmically sophisticated players in early blues. Perhaps this was due to the regional survival of African tradition exemplified by the “fife and drum” bands of the hill country to the Delta’s east, perhaps to the proximity of New Orleans and the Caribbean, perhaps in a large degree to the influence of Patton himself.

It is a mistake to view this music through the prism of modern blues, to see Patton and his peers as the progenitors of the first electric Chicago bands, and thus of the barroom boogie bands that fill suburban bars outside every Ameican city. His rhythms are a world--or at least a continent--away from the straight-ahead, 4/4 sound that defines virtually all modern blues. That is why so few contemporary players can capture anything of his greatness. There is the tendency to play his tunes for driving power, missing the ease, the relaxed subtlety that underly all of his work. It is a control born of playing this music in eight or ten-hour sessions, week after week and year after year, for an audience of extremely demanding dancers, and of remembering centuries of previous dance rhythms--not only the complex polyrhythms of West Africa, but also slow drags, cakewalks, hoedowns, and waltzes.

There is a lot more to be said about Patton’s blues work, but most of it has been said many times, in articles, essays, liner notes, and books. The debates come hot and heavy, scholars fiercely arguing over whether his lyrics are consciously obscure and poetic or simply careless, whether he carefully composed his songs or often assembled them on the spot. Some base involved theories on what they perceive to be a constant “angry” tone in his singing, which I do not even hear, or find clues to his deepest fears and desires in lyrics which I assume he picked up from other singers. They may perfectly well be right. The important thing is not to be scared off by the myths or debates, and to give the music a chance. In his lifetime, people listened to Patton because his music was fun and exciting, and he pleased audiences of varied colors, tastes, and economic backgrounds, finding something in his repertoire for each of them. Luckily, much of that range has been preserved on record, and it is too varied, interesting, and important to be left to the small circle of prewar blues fans.

©2002 Elijah Wald (originally published in Sing Out!)

http://www.msbluestrail.org/blues-trail-markers/charley-pattons-grave Charley Patton's Grave - Holly Ridge The most important figure in the pioneering era of Delta blues, Charley Patton (1891-1934), helped define not only the musical genre but also the image and lifestyle of the rambling Mississippi bluesman. He roamed the Delta using Dockery as his most frequent base, and lived his final year in Holly Ridge. Patton and blues singers Willie James Foster (1921-2000) and Asie Payton (1937-1997) are buried in this cemetery. Charley Patton has been called the Founder of the Delta Blues. He blazed a trail as the music’s preeminent entertainer and recording artist during the first third of the 20th century. Born between Bolton and Edwards, Mississippi, in April 1891, Patton was of mixed black, white and native American ancestry. In the early 1900s his family moved to the Dockery plantation. Patton’s travels took him from Louisiana to New York, but he spent most of his time moving from plantation to plantation, entertaining fieldhands at jukehouse dances and country stores, acquiring numerous wives and girlfriends along the way. The emotional sway he held over his audiences caused him to be tossed off of more than one plantation, because workers would leave crops unattended to listen to him play. Although Patton was roughly five feet, five inches tall and only weighed 135 pounds, his gravelly, high-energy singing style made him sound like a man twice his size. An accomplished and inventive guitarist and lyricist, he was a flamboyant showman as well, spinning his guitar, playing it behind his head and slapping it for rhythmic effect. He also preached in local churches, played for the deacons of New Jerusalem M.B. Church here and recorded religious songs, folk ballads, dance tunes, and pop songs. His most popular and influential record was the Paramount release that paired "Pony Blues" with "Banty Rooster Blues." Other Patton songs were noteworthy for their references to specific people, places and topical events in the Delta. "High Water Everywhere," a dramatic two-part account of the death and despair wrought by the great 1927 flood, is often regarded as his masterpiece. His songs offered social commentary and provided propulsive music for dancing. Patton sometimes employed multiple spoken voices to create his own cast of characters. While he was an inspiration to many musicians, including Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Bukka White, Honeyboy Edwards, and even Bob Dylan, the individualistic quality of his singing and playing was so inimitable that relatively few blues artists ever attempted to record Patton songs. Patton’s last wife, Bertha Lee, lived with him in Holly Ridge and recorded with him at his final session in New York for Vocalion Records in 1934. Patton died of mitral valve disorder at the age of 43. content © Mississippi Blues Commission

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/charley-patton-mn0000166058/biography Artist Biography by Cub Koda If the Delta country blues has a convenient source point, it would probably be Charley Patton, its first great star. His hoarse, impassioned singing style, fluid guitar playing, and unrelenting beat made him the original king of the Delta blues. Much more than your average itinerant musician, Patton was an acknowledged celebrity and a seminal influence on musicians throughout the Delta. Rather than bumming his way from town to town, Patton would be called up to play at plantation dances, juke joints, and the like. He'd pack them in like sardines everywhere he went, and the emotional sway he held over his audiences caused him to be tossed off of more than one plantation by the ownership, simply because workers would leave crops unattended to listen to him play any time he picked up a guitar. He epitomized the image of a '20s "sport" blues singer: rakish, raffish, easy to provoke, capable of downing massive quantities of food and liquor, a woman on each arm, with a flashy, expensive-looking guitar fitted with a strap and kept in a traveling case by his side, only to be opened up when there was money or good times involved. His records -- especially his first and biggest hit, "Pony Blues" -- could be heard on phonographs throughout the South. Although he was certainly not the first Delta bluesman to record, he quickly became one of the genre's most popular. By late-'20s Mississippi plantation standards, Charley Patton was a star, a genuine celebrity.

Although Patton was roughly five foot, five inches tall and only weighed a Spartan 135 pounds, his gravelly, high-energy singing style (even on ballads and gospel tunes it sounded this way) made him sound like a man twice his weight and half again his size. Sleepy John Estes claimed he was the loudest blues singer he ever heard and it was rumored that his voice was loud enough to carry outdoors at a dance up to 500 yards away without amplification. His vaudeville-style vocal asides -- which on record give the effect of two people talking to each other -- along with the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice would become major elements of the vocal style of one of his students, a young Howlin' Wolf. His guitar playing was no less impressive, fueled with a propulsive beat and a keen rhythmic sense that would later plant seeds in the boogie style of John Lee Hooker. Patton is generally regarded as one of the original architects of putting blues into a strong, syncopated rhythm, and his strident tone was achieved by tuning his guitar up a step and a half above standard pitch instead of using a capo. His compositional skills on the instrument are illustrated by his penchant for finding and utilizing several different themes as background accompaniment in a single song. His slide work -- either played in his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and fretted with a pocket knife, or in the more conventional manner with a brass pipe for a bottleneck -- was no less inspiring, finishing vocal phrases for him and influencing contemporaries like Son House and up-and-coming youngsters like Robert Johnson. He also popped his bass strings (a technique he developed some 40 years before funk bass players started doing the same thing), beat his guitar like a drum, and stomped his feet to reinforce certain beats or to create counter rhythms, all of which can be heard on various recordings. Rhythm and excitement were the bywords of his style.

The second, and equally important, part of Patton's legacy handed down to succeeding blues generations was his propensity for entertaining. One of the reasons for Charley Patton's enormous popularity in the South stems from his being a consummate barrelhouse entertainer. Most of the now-common guitar gymnastics modern audiences have come to associate with the likes of a Jimi Hendrix, in fact, originated with Patton. His ability to "entertain the peoples" and rock the house with a hell-raising ferociousness left an indelible impression on audiences and fellow bluesmen alike. His music embraced everything from blues, ballads, ragtime, to gospel. And so keen were Patton's abilities in setting mood and ambience, that he could bring a barrelhouse frolic to a complete stop by launching into an impromptu performance of nothing but religious-themed selections and still manage to hold his audience spellbound. Because he possessed the heart of a bluesman with the mindset of a vaudeville performer, hearing Patton for the first time can be a bit overwhelming; it's a lot to take in as the music, and performances can careen from emotionally intense to buffoonishly comic, sometimes within a single selection. It is all strongly rooted in '20s black dance music and even on the religious tunes in his repertoire, Patton fuels it all with a strong rhythmic pulse.

He first recorded in 1929 for the Paramount label and, within a year's time, he was not only the largest-selling blues artist but -- in a whirlwind of recording activity -- also the music's most prolific. Patton was also responsible for hooking up fellow players Willie Brown and Son House with their first chances to record. It is probably best to issue a blanket audio disclaimer of some kind when listening to Patton's total recorded legacy, some 60-odd tracks total, his final session done only a couple of months before his death in 1934. No one will never know what Patton's Paramount masters really sounded like. When the company went out of business, the metal masters were sold off as scrap, some of it used to line chicken coops. All that's left are the original 78s -- rumored to have been made out of inferior pressing material commonly used to make bowling balls -- and all of them are scratched and heavily played, making all attempts at sound retrieval by current noise-reduction processing a tall order indeed. That said, it is still music well worth seeking out and not just for its place in history. Patton's music gives us the first flowering of the Delta blues form, before it became homogenized with turnarounds and 12-bar restrictions, and few humans went at it so aggressively.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5340&ref=acom Birth: c. Apr., 1891 Hinds County Mississippi, USA Death: Apr. 28, 1934 Indianola Sunflower County Mississippi, USA

Blues Musician. Regarded as "The Father of Delta Blues". He was an inaugural inductee into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980. Patton was born near Edwards, Mississippi, of mixed African, Cherokee, and Caucasian descent. Around 1900 the family moved to the Dockery Plantation, a 10,000-acre cotton farm in Sunflower County known for the fair treatment of its workers, and this would be his home base most of his life. As a child he would sneak away to watch the sharecroppers' Saturday night dances, through which he fell under the spell of a mysterious old musician named Henry Sloan, his first teacher. Patton's father, a church elder, whipped him when he learned of the boy's fascination with "the devil's music", but later had a change of heart and bought him his first guitar. He took it with him into the fields where he was supposed to be working and was soon the main attraction at the Dockery dances. Physically slight in person (5'5" and 135 pounds), Patton was a larger-than-life performer whose snarling baritone voice could command the largest venues without amplification. He drove audiences wild with his violent polyrhythmic dance beats, stomping his feet while picking, sliding and slapping his guitar for half an hour at a stretch; then to lighten the mood he'd perform stunts such as playing the guitar behind his head or sticking it between his legs and pretending to ride it like a mule. As his notoriety spread through the Delta during the World War I era, he attracted a group of younger musicians that included his first great protégés, Willie Brown and Tommy Johnson. By the mid-1920s Patton was a star in Mississippi, and one of the few early bluesmen able to make a good living from his music. No more busking on street corners for him - he played scheduled gigs for white as well as black audiences, and supplemented this income by giving guitar lessons. He wore nice suits, drove a new car every year, and decorated his favorite guitar with gold coins. Otherwise he was tight with his money, using it to bankroll a personal independence enjoyed by few African-Americans in the South at that time. If he was an alcoholic, as is generally assumed, he didn't allow it to interfere with his business as a professional entertainer. Chasing women was his greatest weakness. He was married eight times and had innumerable flings before settling (more or less) with singer Bertha Lee in the 1930s. His exotic looks and charisma made him a magnet for the opposite sex and aroused the ire of their menfolk. This culminated in a 1929 incident where Patton was nearly killed outside a juke joint by a jealous husband who slashed his neck with a razor. Every now and then his conscience would overwhelm him and he would go up into the hills east of the Delta and preach the Bible, though these moods never lasted long. (A sample of his preaching can be heard in his 1929 recording "You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die"). Patton began his recording career after learning of Tommy Johnson's hit single with "Big Road Blues" (1928), a song he had taught Johnson a decade earlier. He contacted Jackson, Mississippi talent scout H.C. Speir and was enthusiastically recommended to Paramount Records. The label considered Patton their greatest find since Blind Lemon Jefferson. He cut 42 issued sides for them between June of 1929 and the Summer of 1930, followed by 12 released songs for Vocalion Records in January and February 1934. The best of them include his signature hit "Pony Blues", the epic two-part "High Water Everywhere", "A Spoonful Blues", "Down the Dirt Road", "Banty Rooster Blues", "Prayer of Death", "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues", "Shake It and Break It", and "Tom Rushen Blues". The dates of his discography show how close he came to never recording at all. The 1929 Wall Street Crash followed hard on his debut and the ensuing Depression virtually silenced the country blues market for a few years. (Paramount Records folded in 1932). When conditions had improved enough for Vocalion to summon Patton to their New York City studio, he was ailing from a chronic heart condition. He died just two months later, at his home in Indianola, Mississippi. In 1990, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame bought a tombstone for Patton's unmarked grave at Holly Ridge Cemetery. Like many important artists Charley Patton straddled two creative eras. He was raised in the fading days of the American "songster" tradition and his live repertory encompassed folk, spirituals, cowboy songs, Tin Pan Alley, and anything else his audiences wanted to hear. He wrote songs about current events and some of his lyrics - the ones that can be deciphered through his often incomprehensible diction - have a satirical edge. It has been argued that had he lived a little longer he could have become a crossover folk star like Lead Belly. But it is for the blues that Patton is celebrated, and where he left his deepest mark. More than any single performer he defined the raw, intense sound of Delta Blues and either personally mentored or influenced all the subsequent greats of the genre. Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, Robert Johnson, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James are among those whose blues styles can be traced back to Patton. A remastered 2001 edition of his complete recordings, "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues", won three Grammy Awards, including one for Best Historical Album. (bio by: Bobb Edwards)

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ZNfAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA213&dq=%22charley+patton%22+eagle+leblanc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjKk8nrgJvPAhXCaRQKHckQDyIQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22charley%20patton%22%20eagle%20leblanc&f=false

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John Snipes http://www.wirz.de/music/snipefrm.htm

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Tom Fletcher https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E_vRLcgEdGoC&pg=PA204&lpg=PA204&dq=%22tom+fletcher%22+negro+%22show+business%22&source=bl&ots=pqA6j2v4cT&sig=DtC1KTU3qbJmRq9G0085UREOEkY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiV95Gjy6rPAhXkJcAKHXrDAF0Q6AEIPTAI#v=onepage&q=%22tom%20fletcher%22%20negro%20%22show%20business%22&f=false

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Louis Vasnier (November 12, 1858 – January 24, 1902) was

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lf7NTiZVvy0C&pg=PA91&lpg=PA91&dq=%22Louis+Vasnier%22&source=bl&ots=ASRIZpUHLt&sig=E5oQL3k5cDZEo_rOCMSzhqgVb2w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjm57Sci6jPAhUROsAKHfpGCYcQ6AEITzAM#v=onepage&q=%22Louis%20Vasnier%22&f=false

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James "Jim" McKune (c.1910 – 1971) was an American record collector whose identification and collection of early blues recordings was influential...

https://ourblues.net/category/authors/james-mckune/

https://newhumanist.org.uk/1535/natural-truth Natural truth Marybeth Hamilton celebrates the passion of a record collector – by Marybeth Hamilton – WEDNESDAY, 18TH JULY 2007 On an undistinguished block in Brooklyn, New York, a few minutes walk from the Williamsburg Bridge, near a synagogue, a Portuguese grocery, and a Muslim community centre, stands an unrecognised landmark in American music. The building gives no sign of historic importance: its front door is boarded, its brick walls scarred and pitted, its windows encased in metal and grime. Yet decades ago it was a lodging house run by the Williamsburg branch of the YMCA, and it was here, in a single room on the uppermost floor one unknowable day in the mid-1950s, that the Delta blues was born.

Robert Crumb's sleeve art for The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, a compilation of early blues and country music (Yazoo Records)Born, that is, in the imagination of one of the YMCA’s long-term residents, a record collector named James McKune. A journalist turned postal worker, reclusive, homosexual and alcoholic, McKune conducted his life as a long downward spiral: moving into the Y around 1940, losing job after job as his drinking intensified, and eventually ending up on the streets, where he died at the hands of a violent stranger in 1971. Yet during his years at the Y he scavenged junk shops and used record stores to build up an extraordinary collection of blues 78s. In time that collection became the driving force behind the 1960s blues revival, when white Americans and Europeans discovered – one might say invented – a tradition that they called the Delta blues, constructed out of scraps of old recordings that African-Americans had long left behind.

I stumbled across McKune’s story while writing a book about the Delta blues, and his life intrigued me as a means to untangle a musical form too long enveloped in misperception and myth. For the last forty years the Delta blues has been revered by its largely white fans as a music of transcendent spiritual power, echoing with the voices of the huddled black “folk” and the harsh, anguished truths of the African-American past. As the eminent historian Leon Litwack puts it, to listen to the searing voices that comprise the tradition – Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James – “is to feel – more vividly and more intensely than any mere poet, novelist, or historian could convey – the despair, the thoughts, the passions, the aspirations, the anxieties, the deferred dreams, the frightening honesty of a new generation of black Southerners and their efforts to grapple with day-to-day life, to make it somehow more bearable, perhaps even to transcend it”. For filmmaker Martin Scorcese, Robert Johnson was a “haunted prophet” condemned to roam the blighted landscape of the Mississippi Delta and voice his people’s pain and privation, “possessed” as he was by “the spirit of the blues”.

Yet that vision of the Delta blues as a – perhaps the – primal form of African-American music sits uncomfortably alongside the facts. The awkward truth is that Delta sounds were never embraced by black listeners: in the twenties and thirties when they were recorded, Charley Patton’s discs sold only moderately; those of Son House, Skip James, and Robert Johnson sold not at all.

Even in the Mississippi Delta, the so-called Delta bluesman had limited appeal. A survey of the black bars of Clarksdale in the early 1940s found no local musicians on the jukeboxes; the most popular tracks were by Louis Jordan, Count Basie, and Fats Waller, no different from Harlem or the South Side of Chicago. Late one night in the Delta in 1941, the song collector Alan Lomax stumbled across a juke joint on the edge of a cotton field and opened the door to find a blaring jukebox and a roomful of people jitterbugging to Duke Ellington.

I wanted to track the hidden tastemakers who pushed those obscure Mississippi singers into the spotlight, and setting out on that trail took me to James McKune. “Jim McKune was like a grand doyen, if you will, a real mentor,” recalls record collector and blues historian Lawrence Cohn. “I mean, he was listening to Charley Patton before any of us even knew who Brownie McGhee was.” Collector Pete Whelan remembers: “He had all his records in cardboard boxes under his bed. And he would pull out one and say, ‘Here’s the greatest blues singer in the world’ [and] I’d say ‘Oh yeah?’, cause I had just discovered this guy, Sam Collins, who was great… Jim pulls out this Paramount recording by Charlie Patton, and, of course, he was right!”

The facts of McKune’s life are hazy. Born sometime around 1910, in Albany or Baltimore or North Carolina, he seems to have moved to New York City in the late 1930s, taking a job (which he soon lost) as a copy editor on the Long Island desk of the New York Times. In 1943, for reasons that are unclear, he began collecting what were then called “race records”, combing the pages of record trading magazines and poring through the bins at used record stores, like the Jazz Record Center near Times Square, where he turned up every Saturday afternoon.

He cut a striking figure: extremely thin, with sandy hair greying at the temples, wearing a white button-down shirt, black trousers, white socks, and black shoes, by all accounts his lone set of clothes. Engaging him in conversation was risky. “McKune had this way of talking,” Whelan remembers “he’d make these abrupt gestures, he was very intense, and everybody that he was talking to would be backing up against the wall, because he’d be, not pushing you back, but you’d be afraid of the hands and elbows coming at you.” In his pocket he carried a wants list that he distributed to other collectors: 1,300 78s recorded in the 1920s and 1930s on the most obscure labels by performers of whom no one else had heard.

At the top of that list was an itinerant Mississippi singer called Charley Patton. In 1944 McKune bought a scratched, worn copy of a 1929 Patton recording, “Some These Days I’ll be Gone”, and from the first notes he was hooked. What transfixed him were Patton’s rough-edged vocals, which to his ears sounded peculiarly delicate, a style at once ferocious and subtle, with “an intensity devoid of dramatic effects”.

He began hunting for records like Patton’s, marked by spare, sparse music, oblique, artful lyrics, and voices supercharged with emotion. From those searches he filled the cardboard boxes under his bed with what he came to call great “country blues” singers.

On principle, and out of necessity, he refused to pay more than three dollars per record, but most of these discs came far cheaper. McKune scorned every form of black recorded music that had any kind of popular following, be it the raucous sounds of Louis Jordan’s “jump jive” that appealed to an urbanising black population or the “hot jazz” of Louis Armstrong, whose recordings many white collectors prized. The records McKune hoarded came from the bottom of the discard pile, “considered worthless,” as one collector put it, “by everyone but McKune himself.”

In time, all that would change, and 78s by Robert Johnson and Charley Patton would fetch thousands of dollars, a transformation due in large part to his fellow collector Pete Whelan. In 1961, at McKune’s urging, Whelan made taped reproductions of the prize recordings from their collections, producing a series of blues LP anthologies (The Mississippi Blues; Really the Country Blues) released on his own Origin Jazz Library label. Almost immediately, the OJL reissues became the bible of a small but highly influential group of enthusiasts, among them the guitarist John Fahey, the rock critic Greil Marcus and the historian Lawrence Levine. For the journalist Robert Palmer, who would later write Deep Blues, a highly regarded Delta blues history, they were “the definitive country blues anthologies”, with their scratched, grainy sound and their unvarnished singers whose very obscurity seemed somehow testament to their integrity, to the raw authenticity of the songs that they sang.

Yet as the buzz around the OJL albums intensified, McKune slipped further into the shadows. He played no direct part in the accelerating blues revival, neither setting up record labels nor opening blues clubs nor writing chronicles of Delta blues history. Instead, he seems to have stopped listening to music altogether. In 1965 he moved out of the single room at the YMCA where he had lived for twenty-five years and began drifting the streets of Lower Manhattan, “sockless”, recalls one collector, “and apparently brain-damaged from alcohol”. In September 1971 his unclothed body was found bound and gagged in a welfare hotel on the Lower East Side. There was no trace of a record collection; he had either sold it or given it away.

Perhaps McKune’s retreat from the blues was inevitable. He had long recoiled from the sounds of popular music, devoting his life to connoisseurship, by its nature cultish, exclusive, even hermetic, whose pleasures lay in creating an alternative universe of aesthetics and taste. By the 60s he had lost control of that universe; his private passion was private no longer. Little wonder that his pride and exhilaration ebbed away, that he descended into frustration, depression and despair.

In its distaste for contemporary black popular music, its obsession with the authentic, primal sounds of black suffering, McKune’s brand of connoisseurship was in many ways troubling. Yet what drove it was the same quest for transcendence that has propelled the histories of religion and art. In a deeply secular age, McKune took refuge in a personal faith, in which poring through record bins in junk shops became a kind of pilgrimage and listening to old recordings became an act of devotion. “Only the great religious singers have ever affected me similarly.” he wrote of Charley Patton. In the end, he should be judged by what he left behind: a legacy of salvaged voices whose intense, mournful beauty has transfixed the world, voices he invested with wonder and reverence, by listening “silently. In awe.” ■

http://www.bkmag.com/2014/03/06/on-his-way-down-williamsburg-and-the-birth-of-record-collecting/ On His Way Down: Williamsburg and the Birth of Record Collecting BY AMANDA PETRUSICH 3.6.14. 10:12am Share on Facebook Tweet on Twitter Photo by Jack Whistance, courtesy of Gail and Bruce Whistance By Amanda Petrusich

There’s a pervasive, romantic notion of the Outsider as Omniscient Loner: preoccupied, brooding, mumbly. He is human—for example, he might read a paperback book that he tugged from the back pocket of his jeans, or gaze intently into a woman’s eyes for a beat too long—but he doesn’t celebrate holidays or use the toilet. He is usually leaning against a wall. This is one way of thinking about it.

Then there are the men—outsiders, also—who routinely congregated at the Jazz Record Center, a long-defunct music shop that once existed on the north side of West 47th Street in Midtown Manhattan, a now touristy stretch better known for its approximations of pizza and dubious (if well-lighted) electronics shops. In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they felt invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found each other.

BK13_RecordFeature_v0 The Jazz Record Center was operated by Big Joe Clauberg, a chunk of a man with a deeply creased face (his skin appears to fold back on itself, like the underside of a poorly reupholstered chair) and black eyes that expressed a deep aversion to certain kinds of nonsense. He came to New York from the Southwest, had worked as a circus strongman, and stumbled into the used-record business after being offered a few truckloads of cheap records from a wholesale jukebox operator.

“He was a giant,” the collector Pete Whelan told me. “He was very overweight. He would just listen to everybody, hardly saying anything. And he was very generous in his prices. Records that were really worth $10 or $15 then and that would be worth hundreds or maybe thousands now, he would sell for $1.”

Clauberg settled at the 47th Street location in 1941, bolstering his jukebox supply by selling new stock from smaller jazz labels. The store was originally called Joe’s Juke Box, then the Jazz Record Corner, then the Jazz Record Center. Its inventory was jazz heavy but eclectic, including “Everything from Bunk to Monk,” as a 1949 ad in the Record Changer, an early jazz collecting magazine, read. (The “Bunk” in question was almost certainly Bunk Johnson, the beloved New Orleans jazzman who lost both his trumpet and his two front teeth in a bar fight in Louisiana in 1931, but it’s tempting to consider its more colloquial use—one collector’s bunk being another’s prize, after all.)

Clauberg courted (and indulged) a perfect outcast harem. Many of the shop’s most beloved denizens weren’t even patrons, or at least not in the traditional sense. A Greek dishwasher and janitor named Popeye helped keep the place clean, rubbing oil into the floorboards as necessary. According to the collector (and former employee) Henry Rinard, who chronicled his experience working with Big Joe for 78 Quarterly, Popeye was a short, well-muscled man with no teeth, hair, or eyebrows, prone to mumbling to himself for hours “in gibberish not even another Greek could understand.” Clauberg let Popeye crash on the floor at night, and in exchange, Popeye performed additional odd jobs, like bringing Clauberg food from the joint where he washed dishes, cutting his hair, and helping him yank a rotten tooth from his gums using a pair of pliers (that’s what friends are for). Another regular, Abbie the Agent, wore “thick-lensed eyeglasses, smoked continuously, and was seldom sober.” An outcast from a wealthy Connecticut family, Abbie fetched cigarettes and wine for Clauberg, and periodically became so inebriated himself that he passed out on the Popeye-oiled floor. (His other nickname—and I think it’s the better of the two—was Horizontal Abe.) Rinard also wrote about one of Clauberg’s old hobo friends, a guy known mostly as the Sea Captain, who wore a wool hat, raincoat, and heavy, too-big, laceless boots, even in June. The Captain was something of an enigma, even to Rinard: “He was either Swedish or Norwegian; he understood English, but never spoke,” he wrote.

The clientele was no less unique. “It was very interesting,” Whelan recalled. “It was a stop on the way. There would be these characters that would be there. Specialists. One guy who just collected European jazz, named Hal Flaxer. He’s probably still around. I think he went through three or four wives and they all looked identical. I couldn’t tell the difference. They looked like twins of each other.” In her book In Search of the Blues, the scholar Marybeth Hamilton includes what might be the single greatest description of early record collectors flourishing in their natural habitat: “Saturday afternoons they met at Indian Joe’s, where they thumbed through the bins in between swigs from the bottles of muscatel that Pete Kaufman brought along from his store, suspending their searches briefly at three, when a man called Bob turned up with a suitcase of pornographic books.”

BK13_RecordFeature_h0 There’s only one published photo of the shop, which first appeared in Jazzways and was later reprinted in 78 Quarterly; it’s not even of the interior, but of the rickety wooden stairs leading to the door. The face of each step is painted with an incitement (records, hot jazz records, records 4 sale, step up save a buck, popular bands, hot jazz records), and I can only imagine the half-furious, half-wheezy sounds eager collectors made clomping up them, balls of cash wadded up in their pockets. Regardless of what the inside of the shop actually looked like—and chances are, it was fairly mundane—I like to imagine it crammed with weirdoes bickering in high-pitched voices, nostrils expanding, slowly swarming Bob and his suitcase. I like to imagine myself there, with a record or two tucked under my arm.

James McKune showed up at Big Joe’s nearly every Saturday night at six, and stayed until the store closed at nine, wandering off, on occasion, to eat supper at the Automat around the corner on Sixth Avenue. McKune was likely born somewhere on the East Coast in or near 1910, although no one knows precisely when or where (depending on whom you ask, he was from Baltimore, or North Carolina, or upstate New York). That McKune has no clear origin story—and that his end was equally inscrutable—only amplifies the mythic place he occupies in collecting lore. Maybe more than any other collector, James McKune was defined by his records.

McKune wasn’t the first 78 collector, but he was one of the earliest to single out rural blues records as worthy of preservation, and is arguably the field’s most archetypal figure. At the very least, he established the physical standard. He was flagpole skinny and otherwise nondescript (medium height, tapering hair), prone to wearing the same outfit nearly every day (a white shirt with rolled sleeves, black pants, white socks, black shoes). He had a tough time holding a steady job, and during his time in New York, he worked briefly as a subeditor for the New York Times, a desk clerk at the YMCA, a checker at a South Brooklyn beer distributor, and a mail sorter in a Brooklyn post office. He seemed generally irritated by the necessity of employment, and in a June 1944 letter to the collector Jack Whistance, wrote: “During the day (when it doesn’t rain) I continue my quest for a suitable job in [an] essential industry. In N.Y.C., be it said—not in Newark. I am a particular guy, perhaps alas. The jobs I can have I don’t want. And those I want I can’t get.” (Ironically, US unemployment was at an all-time low in 1944, at just 1.2 percent—about as close to “full employment” as economists believe is possible). According to all reports, he drank like a pro. In his letters to other collectors, he was exacting but not unlikable; his missives are impeccably punctuated and endlessly readable, packed with peculiar asides and unexpected jokes. Although he was constitutionally private—a loner in the most nonromantic sense—and wrote almost exclusively about which records he wanted or had recently acquired, McKune did seem to savor his correspondence. In a 1951 letter to Henry Rinard, he even mentioned his glee about receiving an Easter card from a pal for Christmas. “A delightful variation, which I would have copied but for the lateness of this melancholy December,” he wrote in neat, minuscule script. (He was also prone to hastily changing tone by writing NEW SUBJECT midletter, an underused literary device I aspire to someday employ.)

BK13_RecordFeature_h02 “Not that it means anything particularly, but he was gay, and I didn’t know that at the time,” Whelan explained to me one night. He and McKune first met at Big Joe’s. “I was at the time interested in getting blues on this particular label called Gennett. There was this guy Sam Collins on Electrobeam Gennett that I liked very much—he was an impassioned tenor. So I met this guy McKune,” he continued. “I was like 23 or 24 and he was 50. He had been collecting since probably the late 30s. Blues. One of the very few. He looked like a scarecrow. He would gesticulate when he talked, very excitedly. You’d find these elbows coming at you, and you kept backing up. I think in the late 1930s he was a reporter for the Long Island Star, and then became, I think, city editor. And then he gave it up and worked for the post office. And then he became an alcoholic.”

Unsurprisingly, McKune was also a bit of a crank. He was wildly discerning, even by collector standards, and owned just 300 records, all tucked into cardboard boxes and stored underneath his single bed at the YMCA on Marcy Street in Williamsburg. He often referred to his listening sessions as “séances” and was required to play records at a low volume so as not to enrage unsympathetic neighbors (thin walls). He fretted endlessly about his own taste. McKune’s desires were expansive, and he didn’t just want to collect the music he loved the most—he wanted to collect the best possible permutations of sound, and for those decrees to be definitive.

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McKune supposedly never gave up more than 10 bucks for a 78 (and often offered less than $3), and was deeply offended—outraged, even—by collectors willing to pay out large sums of money, a practice he found garish, irresponsible, and in basic opposition to what he understood as the moral foundation of the trade. He didn’t like the notion that records could generate profit for their handlers: in the fall of 1963, in another letter to Rinard, he referenced his skepticism of a fellow collector, writing, “Somehow, I distrust him. He bought some records from the Negroes in Charleston, S.C. He spent $19 or $20 and sold the records for more than $500.” For McKune, collecting was a sacred pursuit—a way of salvaging and anointing songs and artists that had been unjustly marginalized. It was about training yourself to act as a gatekeeper, a savior; in that sense, it was also very much about being better (knowing better, listening better) than everyone else. Even in the 1940s and 50s, 78 collectors were positioning themselves as opponents of mass culture, and McKune cultivated a fantastic disdain for pop stars as well as the so-called protest singers of the era. He thought, for example, that Woody Guthrie was bullshit, although by 1950 he’d come back around on folk music as a genre, a shift he attributed to getting older. (The career of Glenn Miller, though, was a constant source of jokes.)

I’m not sure what McKune was looking for, exactly. Maybe the same thing we all look for in music: some flawlessly articulated truth. But I know for sure when he found it.

In the 1940s, 78 collecting meant jazz collecting, and specifically Dixieland or hot jazz, which developed in New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century and was defined by its warm, deeply playful polyphony (typically, the front line—a trumpet, trombone, or clarinet—took the melody, while the rhythm section—banjo, guitar, drums, upright bass, piano, and maybe a tuba—supported or improvised around it). Because of its origins, collecting rare Dixieland records in 1942 was not entirely unlike collecting Robert Johnson records in 1968, or, incidentally, now: deifying indigent, local music was a political act, a passive protest against its sudden co-optation by popular white artists. As Hamilton wrote, “it meant training the spotlight on a distinctly black, definitely proletarian art form in an era when, as they saw it, jazz had been tamed, sweetened, and commodified, with white performers like Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman praised as its consummate practitioners.” But for whatever reason, blues records weren’t of any particular interest to early collectors. “The original 78 collectors despised country blues. They just liked jazz, and there were few exceptions,” Whelan explained. “It was a sharp divide. They thought it was less artistic. They were intellectuals.”

According to Hamilton, in January 1944 McKune took a routine trip to Big Joe’s and began pawing through a crate labeled “Miscellany,” where he found a record with “a sleeve so tattered he almost flicked past it.” It was a battered, nearly unplayable copy of Paramount 13110, Charley Patton’s “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone.” Patton had recorded the track in Grafton, Wisconsin, 15 years earlier, and he’d been dead for less than 10 when McKune first picked it up. Patton was almost entirely unknown to modern listeners; certainly McKune had never heard him before. He tossed a buck at a snoozing Clauberg and carted the record back to Brooklyn. As Hamilton wrote, “… even before he replaced the tonearm and turned up the volume and his neighbor began to pound on the walls, he realized that he had found it, the voice he’d been searching for all along.”

“Some These Days I’ll Be Gone” is one of Charley Patton’s more staid tracks, in both rhythm and narrative. According to Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt’s King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charley Patton, “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone” was “likely conceived for white presentation: it used diatonic intervals and featured the keynote as its lowest vocal tone, a technique Patton usually avoided in singing blues and gospel material.” Wardlow and Calt suspect the tune was conceived for “white square dances and sociables,” where Patton was likely accompanied by a fiddler who’d been tasked with playing lead over his strums. Lyrically, it’s a sweet imploration: don’t take me for granted, Patton warns. “Some these days, I’m going to be leaving / Some these days, I’ll be going away,” he slurs, strumming a faint, bouncing guitar line. For once, he sounds more amused than angry. You’ll see, he seems to grin. Just wait.

Charley Patton changed everything for McKune. I can run an assortment of scenarios—recounting all the fireworks-type stuff I imagine happened when he first dropped a needle to “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone”—but those particular moments of catharsis are too weird and too personal ever really to translate. What’s important is that McKune’s discovery of Patton set off an avalanche of cultural events, a revolution that’s still in progress: blues records became coveted by collectors, who then fought to preserve and disseminate them. In the liner notes to The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of, a collection of 78 rarities released by Yazoo in 2012, Richard Nevins called McKune “‘the man’ who set it all in motion, who led blues collectors away from the errors of their wayward tastes… a fantastic, brilliant young man… [his] perspectives had profound influence and resound even today.” In the same notes, Dick Spottswood—in conversation with Nevins and Whelan—spoke about how McKune raised the stakes for everyone, about how things changed: “All I’m saying is that the records themselves as collectible artifacts were not buy or die [before]. They were desirable records but they weren’t life or death. You know, the way they have since turned into.” After McKune, collectors became invested in rural blues. They sought those records with fury, the music was preserved and reissued, and the entire trajectory of popular music shifted to reflect the genre’s influence. A guy from no place, saving music from the same.

James McKune’s naked, strangled body was found, bound and gagged, in a grimy welfare hotel—the Broadway Central—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in September 1971. Detectives concluded that he had likely been murdered by a man he had solicited for sex; Whelan later called the perpetrator a “homosexual serial killer” with, he thought, five or six other homicides on his record. By then McKune had moved out of the YMCA and was living primarily on the streets of the Bowery among prostitutes and thieves. For those on the lookout for such parallels, McKune’s death did ultimately mirror Robert Johnson’s—who, as Hamilton pointed out, also died under “violent, mysterious, and sexually charged” circumstances. (The itinerant Johnson supposedly keeled over after taking a slug of poisoned whiskey, provided by a man whose wife he’d been eyeing or maybe worse.) Nobody knows for sure what happened to McKune’s record collection, although rumors still flutter up from time to time. It was likely sold, or stolen, or maybe given away bit by bit.

Excerpted from Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records by Amanda Petrusich. Copyright 2014 © Amanda Petrusich. Reprinted with Permission from Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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The Ferguson Brothers were African-American businessmen and booking agents based in Indianapolis. Denver Darious Ferguson (February 19, 1895 – May 11, 1957) was a printer and nightclub owner who has been credited with a leading role in establishing the chitlin' circuit of entertainment venues in the 1930s and 1940s that contributed to the growth of rhythm and blues music and, ultimately, rock and roll. He worked with his brother, property developer Sea Harious Ferguson (December 22, 1899 – March 10, 1974).

Both brothers were born in Brownsville, Kentucky, sons of Mattie (née Whitney) and Samuel Henry Ferguson. Denver was the eldest child in the family. He acquired a printing press, and around 1914 founded the Edmonson County Star newspaper in Brownsville. He was drafted in 1917, and after his discharge in 1919 moved north to Indianapolis. The following year he established the Ferguson Printing Company, and soon set up his premises on Indiana Avenue. Many of his clients organised a street lottery, the "numbers game" or "policy game", and Ferguson designed and printed tickets resembling a baseball scorecard. When his success in running the illegal racket started to draw unwelcome official attention to himself, he recruited his younger brother Sea to be the public face of the operation. Sea Ferguson opened a real estate brokerage in the city, and the two brothers became renowned locally for their generosity in extending loans and giving to charitable causes in the local black community.

In 1931, Sea Ferguson opened the Cotton Club nightclub in Indianapolis, and the following year Denver Ferguson opened the Trianon Ballroom, featuring Walter Barnes as his first star attraction. Barnes was experienced in touring with his band around the South, and wrote a regular column in The Chicago Defender until his death in the Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi in 1940. The Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) had collapsed in late 1930, and the Ferguson brothers drew on Barnes and his contacts to bring top black entertainers to Indianapolis. In 1938, Denver Ferguson opened the Sunset Terrace ballroom in Indianapolis, featuring Tiny Bradshaw, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald in its early months. Largely as a result of the Ferguson brothers' initiatives, commercial activity thrived on Indiana Avenue in the late 1930s. However, in 1940 a clampdown by the authorities under Mayor Reginald H. Sullivan led to their businesses' licenses being revoked.

In 1941, the two brothers opened the Ferguson Brothers booking agency,

Trouble caught up to them in 1940. A rash of violence, perpetrated most notoriously in the Avenue club run by the Fergusons’ white rivals, brought unwanted attention. Though the black underworld had largely been safe from racism, the authorities punished only the black-owned Avenue clubs, revoking licenses to sell spirits. Denver sensed the right time to look beyond the Avenue for his livelihood, and in late 1941, he launched Ferguson Bros. Agency, which would quickly become the most powerful black-owned talent firm in the country.

Denver Darious Ferguson (1895-1957) and Sea Ferguson (1899-1974) were born in Brownsville, KY, the sons of Samuel H. and Mattie Whitney Ferguson. Denver was a journalist and established The Edmonson Star News. He was also a WWI veteran then moved to Indianapolis in 1919 and owned a printing company. Sea, a college graduate, followed his brother to Indianapolis and worked in his printing company. The brothers would leave the printing business, and around 1931 they began establishing entertainment businesses on Indiana Avenue: Trianon Ballroom, Royal Palm Gardens, the Cotton Club, and Sunset Terrace Ballroom. They also established Ferguson Brothers' Booking Agency and brought many big name African American entertainers to Indianapolis, and some lesser known names including Kentucky natives Jimmy Coe and Gene Pope. The Ferguson brothers also owned Ferguson Hotel. They are recognized for making Indianapolis a major stop on the African American entertainment circuit. Denver Ferguson was said to be quite a wealthy man up to WWII [source: "Denver Ferguson, pioneer businessman dies," Indianapolis Record, 05/18/1957, pp.1&7]. Sea Ferguson is said to have become a millionaire as a result of his real estate business. He was also an officer with the The National Negro Bowling Association (TNBA). Sea Ferguson is said to be the 3rd African American to build a bowling center; Ferguson's Fun Bowl opened in March 1941 at 750 N. West Street in Indianapolis, IN. For more see "Sea Ferguson's Fun Bowl," The African Diaspora Archaeology Network, March 2008 Newsletter, p.9 [online .pdf].

http://indiamond6.ulib.iupui.edu/cdm/ref/collection/IRecorder/id/30623

http://prestonlauterbach.com/book/characters/denver-ferguson/ Denver Ferguson

Born February 19, 1895, Brownsville, Kentucky

Died May 11, 1957, Indianapolis, Indiana

Circuit active: 1941-51

Al Capone’s ouster hardly spelled T-H-E E-N-D for the vice/music correlation in the black band biz.

Denver D. Ferguson moved to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1919. Most of the architecture in the city’s black section, along Indiana Avenue, could give you splinters. Over the next two decades, Denver would help transform the Avenue into a neon-glowing city within the city, where the top acts in black entertainment could be enjoyed any night of the week.

It began with a numbers racket. Denver set up shop for his legit trade, printing, soon after arriving. One of his jobs was to print policy slips for an out-of-state street lottery, the kind that was gaining major prominence in Harlem and the south side of Chicago. Denver introduced his own version of the game to the growing black population on the Avenue. Though he kept his printer’s smock on and his fingers inky, Denver and his brother Sea ascended to kingpin status.

Their cash surplus led, naturally, to two outlets: property ownership and the nightlife business. The Fergusons reigned supreme, and by the end of the 1930s, their vision for a glamorous black Indianapolis had come true, as posh nightclubs flickered up and down the Avenue, black businesses flourished on the strip, and new housing replaced some of the substandard conditions. Sea ran the Cotton Club on the south end of the Avenue and Denver operated Sunset Terrace at the Avenue’s northern terminus.

Trouble caught up to them in 1940. A rash of violence, perpetrated most notoriously in the Avenue club run by the Fergusons’ white rivals, brought unwanted attention. Though the black underworld had largely been safe from racism, the authorities punished only the black-owned Avenue clubs, revoking licenses to sell spirits. Denver sensed the right time to look beyond the Avenue for his livelihood, and in late 1941, he launched Ferguson Bros. Agency, which would quickly become the most powerful black-owned talent firm in the country.

Denver drew controversy like a cigarette butt does lipstick. It stayed all over him for much of his career. For the first time, The Chitlin’ Circuit details how this racketeer brought the chitlin’ circuit to its maximum operational power, running a dozen bandsDenver Ferguson in cycles throughout black America. He developed an intricate web of concert promoters and black nightclub owners, while also training barbers and bartenders to promote his shows in, as he explained, “non-descript places, where the tax man won’t be counting heads at the door,” much as he had cultivated numbers runners to make him rich on the streets of Indianapolis. The taxman eventually caught up to him, as did international scandal.

Denver Ferguson is an undeservedly obscure figure in American music history, the ultimate gambler, who finally gets his just star treatment in The Chitlin’ Circuit.

https://prestonlauterbach.com/2011/05/20/vice-financing-the-chitlin-circuit/ While the circuit relied on black media for publicity, it received much of its operating revenue through the vice industry.

Drinking in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Marion Post Wolcott. Library of Congress Circuit pioneer Walter Barnes got his start leading the band at Al Capone’s Cotton Club, pre-Depression, when Capone was one of several underworld supporters of swing.

The vice-chitlin’ circuit correlation went two ways with Denver Ferguson. Gambling both funded his chitlin’ circuit venture and influenced its conduct. Ferguson got rich operating a numbers racket in Indianapolis, and financed his talent agency, Ferguson Bros., with the proceeds. As the first real circuit mogul, running up to a dozen bands simultaneously throughout a network of under-kingpins across the map, Ferguson designed the circuit to function like his street lottery. He cultivated show promoters all over black America, who funneled the gate receipts of Ferguson’s band’s shows back to the boss. The numbers and circuit economy both worked on cumulative wealth.

As for the law, Denver developed a graft pay scale, correlating the amount of a police officer’s bribe to the officer’s rank. Elsewhere, protection payments and publicity-stunt raids kept the dice rolling.

Playing Skin, Sunbeam Mitchell’s game of choice, 1941. Marion Post Wolcott. Library of Congress Down in Houston, a Ferguson promoter named Don Robey ran a series of nightclubs that paid entertainers, but made their profits on liquor, cards, and dice. He became the most successful black record company owner, while exerting powerful influence behind the scenes to promote the small band blues that evolved into rock ‘n’ roll.

From Memphis, Tennessee, formidable nightclub owner Andrew “Sunbeam” Mitchell operated a multi-state goodtime empire, selling whiskey, women, and song from his Beale Street base throughout rural west Tennessee and down into Mississippi. Beginning in the late 1940s, he used emerging talents like Johnny Ace as his modern day medicine show pitchmen to draw crowds to buy his half-pints. Sunbeam himself was a championship card player, traveling around the South with fellow nightclub boss Harold “Hardface” Clanton, to play in Skin tournaments against other black playboys.

Complicit police? 1941. Marion Post. Library of Congress. While the music biz has often been compared to organized crime, or said to be akin to it, they were basically one and the same on the chitlin’ circuit.

The Chitlin’ Circuit explores this underreported dynamic, spotlighting the importance of the underworld to the black pop music world.

http://www.wonderingsound.com/spotlight/the-chitlin-circuit-celebrating-a-secret-history-of-american-music/ The Chitlin’ Circuit: Celebrating a Secret History of American Music John Morthland By John Morthland Contributor on 11.01.11 in Spotlights

Greatest Hits Jimmie Lunceford 2009 | Master Classics Records / The Orchard Buy Now For years, the Chitlin’ Circuit – the network of mostly-Southern, mostly-rural clubs where black artists performed from the 1930s into the ’60s – has been an elusive element in music history, often referred to but rarely examined. But with The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Memphis music fan and historian Preston Lauterbach brings it out into the open. Boy, does he bring it out into the open. Researched and written with tenacity, intensity and insight, The Chitlin’ Circuit celebrates a cast of characters – businessmen and musicians alike – whose endeavors constitute a secret history of American music, and without whom such better-known figures as B.B. King, Little Richard and James Brown would doubtless have had very different lives.

Two of the first were Walter Barnes of Chicago and Denver Ferguson of Indianapolis. The former was a rather undistinguished yet self-important bandleader and journalist whose touring dispatches for the weekly Chicago Defender established the notion of “the stroll” (main street) of the “Bronzeville” (black business district) neighborhood in Southern cities. If Barnes was able to make a living working those strolls until he died onstage in the infamous Natchez Fire of 1940, Kentucky native Ferguson institutionalized the strolls to create the beginnings of a circuit for black performers in the South. The industrious, self-disciplined Ferguson parlayed profits from his numbers operation into Indianapolis nightclubs owned by himself and his brother Sea, which led in 1941 to the establishment of the Ferguson Brothers Agency. They booked the many black acts who weren’t considered marketable to whites by the Syndicate agencies which controlled the likes of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday; FBA also handled the occasional black act, like Jimmie Lunceford, who was big enough to play white venues but who declined to play ball with the Syndicate. The Ferguson roster included territorial bands like Tiny Bradshaw’s, hard blues stars like Roosevelt Sykes with St. Louis Jimmy and names still largely foreign to this day such as King Kolax (whose bands spawned Gene Ammons, Earl Palmer, John Coltrane).

By sending acts like these on extended Southern tours, Ferguson created what was eventually dubbed the Chitlin’ Circuit, an extensive string of hole-in-the-wall joints where the music grew increasingly raucous and uninhibited to better complement the omnipresent sex, booze, drugs and gambling. The circuit was run mostly by African American criminals who mirrored the white mobsters running the larger live-music industry that shunned earthy black acts. They included Don Robey of Houston, proprietor of the Bronze Peacock Dinner Club, then Buffalo Booking Agency and, finally, Peacock and Duke Records and subsidiaries. (His evolution followed the path of the black music business as the emphasis shifted from performing to hit records.) During and after WWII, as big bands grew smaller and more closely resembled the rock ‘n’ roll groups to come, Ferguson sent Louis Jordan on his first major tour through Robey’s territory; Robey also developed Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and was instrumental in the early careers of B.B. King, T-Bone Walker and countless others. Lauterbach gives additional attention to key entrepreneurs like Sunbeam Mitchell and Bob Henry of Memphis and Clint Brantley of Macon, who essentially launched both Little Richard and James Brown.

In 1947, the powerhouse, gospel-steeped singer Roy Brown released “Good Rocking Tonight,” which became a Chitlin’ Circuit anthem – his ode to a Galveston whorehouse, it extolled “rockin’” less as just sex than as an entire lifestyle – especially after the even more thunderous Wynonie Harris cover became the bigger hit. Rhythm and blues, as the style was called, was a direct forerunner to rock ‘n’ roll, spawning everyone from boogie pianist Amos Milburn to Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, and the Chitlin’ Circuit continued on through the late ’60s and soul music. It was brought down by a complex variety of factors, including Civil Rights and integration, package tours, the opening of Northern venues to Southern acts, the Southern fraternity circuit and more. Yet its last vestiges continue today in the South, providing venues mostly for soul-blues acts like Chuck Roberson, Denise LaSalle, the late Marvin Sease and the rosters of labels like Malaco and Ecko.

In telling his tale, Lauterbach sometimes goes a bit overboard. His contention that the earliest rock ‘n’ roll was not a white imitation of R&B, but R&B itself, is an easy one to make, and he’s far from the only one to do so. But it’s an impossible one to sustain in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary – rockabilly, doo wop – from white Southerners as well as Northerners and Westerners. Still, that’s about the most serious criticism I can make, and there’s no doubt that R&B and the Chitlin’ Circuit had incalculable influence and an enormous direct role in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Lauterbach’s advocacy is delivered with passion, empathy and wit as he brings a secret history of American music to light and gives that history’s makers their just due. Finally.

http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/indiana-avenue-and-the-chitlin-circuit/Content?oid=2314457 Indiana Avenue and 'The Chitlin' Circuit' By Scott Shoger @scottshoger click to enlarge chitlin.jpg About a half-hour into my interview with Preston Lauterbach, I realized we hadn't really addressed the key thesis of his book, The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll— namely, that the chitlin' circuit, that concatenation of Southern clubs hospitable to African-American musicians, was an incubator for key innovations in American music, including jump blues in the '40s and rock 'n' roll in the '50s.

So, mea culpa; read the book to find out how Lauterbach lays out that argument, because we spent our time talking about the role Indianapolis plays in the story of the chitlin' circuit, and, in particular, the influence of one man, Denver Ferguson - gambling kingpin, talent promoter, proprietor of Indiana Avenue club Sunset Terrace, community benefactor, and, as Lauterbach puts it, "grandaddy of rock 'n' roll."

The Chitlin' Circuit, published Monday by Norton, is the first book by Lauterbach, a Memphis-based music journalist. Here's an excerpt from our phone interview, conducted Friday.

NUVO: You drew heavily on the Indianapolis Recorder archives to conjure up Indiana Avenue in '20s and '30s.

Lauterbach: I crave to be there, and by there I mean another time, another place that I just don't have physical access to as a dimensionally-bound human being. I like to find really electrifying resources, and reading the old Recorder put me right there, put me right on the Avenue. I could hear the music, I could smell the fried fish, had to dodge a few punches and watch out for switchblades. It was just a tremendous resource and not ashamed to tell the truth. The journalistic truth and the truth are two different things, and they were not afraid to tell the truth.

NUVO: Tell me about Denver and Sea Ferguson, who helped to establish the chitlin' circuit, but first started by making money off the numbers game.

Lauterbach: It all began with the numbers game, which Denver started and then brought Sea in as an early partner. By the mid-'20s, they were rolling, and, of course, the geography there on Indiana Avenue was very concentrated — all the black residences for the most part were in that district. So it was really intimate, tight area that Denver and Sea figured out how to make money off of, outside of normal, legitimate channels that wouldn't have been available to black entrepreneurs of that time. If I can say, I didn't intend and don't want for Denver and Sea to be portrayed as immoral. They were dealing with racial segregation, the system that was imposed on them, and because they were talented people, they chose to go outside of that system. It wasn't necessarily that robbery was their motive, because they turned the proceeds of their game into a basis for community development on a couple of levels. One, they built the Sunset Terrace up on the corner of Indiana and Blake, or Denver did; Sea had the Cotton Club, which was down at Vermont, Senate and Indiana. Those were the key showplaces on Indiana Avenue, which brought the top acts in black pop, all the way from the '30s: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald; on up through the transitional era of the '40s, when people like Louis Jordan were hot; on up to early rockers like Roy Brown in the late '40s and early '50s.

Their importance to this chitlin' circuit was this: Denver started the first national, far-reaching talent agency that was run by an African-American. It was on the books as of late 1941. He may have operated without legal paperwork before then; there wasn't a lot of evidence there was a ton of activity. But by 1941, he was the only black operator of a national talent agency. He had up to a dozen bands working for him that he was booking in a variety of venues all across the map. The way he worked his circuit, he'd lay out a sequence of southern towns — Jacksonville, Florida; Macon, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee — and he'd cycle acts one after another, bumping them through like train cars through those towns. It was quite an elegant system. It brought great exposure for these bands down south. It brought entertainment down south, where there weren't a ton of options. And it really stimulated the creative environment down there.

NUVO: The Sunset Terrace was a kind of rough place. You talk about how Duke Ellington only played the club once, refusing to come back after being struck by beer bottles.

Lauterbach: I love that story. It's interesting, too, because Duke was not a chitlin' circuit artist. He was part of this upper crust, a very thin upper crust of elite black jazz bands — himself, Calloway, Basie, a couple others. He still played some Southern dates and he still played some rough ballrooms like the Sunset, but in my research I started to see this division between the world Ellington worked in and the world Walter Barnes or Tiny Bradshaw worked in. I didn't know how I could really lay that out in the book without sounding analytical. And, of course, that story of Duke playing the Sunset and a brawl breaking out, bottles and liquor flying everywhere and staining his suit emerged, with him storming off and saying, "I'm never going to play this dump again." That illustrated the point nicely, I think. I got lucky.

NUVO: There's this balance in your book where, on the one hand, Indianapolis cops and politicians seemed to bear down on Indiana Avenue for politically- or racially-motivated reasons, but, on the other, they had not entirely unjustifiable reasons for moving when they did — for instance, by cracking down on gambling after a murder in a backroom casino at a nightclub.

Lauterbach: I think that's true, but I guess the point that I was trying to emphasize about morality and the choices that the Fergusons made in their lives was simply that there was not a whole lot of capital available for any sort of community development or improvement in black America, not just in Indy but across the map. The Fergusons made money how they could, and they weren't complete saints. But they made structural improvements to the Avenue, they stimulated business activity, they bought Little League uniforms, Sea set up a scholarship fund for business-inclined black students who didn't have the money to go to college. They filled this philanthropic and community-building gap through ill-gotten proceeds; in other words, gambling was illegal. The police? Sometimes they aided and abetted, sometimes they accepted bribes, and when one of them sang out about this very widely-known and –accepted practice that was a little too dirty for widespread public knowledge, that absolutely hurt the Indiana Avenue community, because it cut off financing.

NUVO: And can we talk a little more about his shrewdness with respect to managing and building the chitlin' circuit?

Lauterbach: He went deeper than anyone else. He collected phone books from all across America, but primarily in the Deep South. He would search these phone books for what he considered to be black code words. If there was a place called the Cotton Club, he could be assured that that was a little black bar or nightclub. He understood that, like Indiana Avenue, there were a hundred other segregated black enclaves across the country, densely populated areas of black people in cities and towns, and he knew the way they all worked. There was a kingpin figure, your barbershops, your barrooms, your social hubs. By understanding that, he made the social hubs in places that didn't have any entertainment into the central dispatch for his shows. He would train a barber in a small town in Tennessee to sell his tickets, to put his placards up, to find, whether it was a tobacco barn or an agricultural warehouse — any place to showcase a band — and would work them very much like he would work a numbers runner up on the Indiana Avenue area. That's what he did — he took what he called shadow promoters, people in small towns that were completely outside anything happening culturally, even in black America, and he made them the hubs for the chitlin' circuits. That was really his prime innovation, getting these small towns energized.

NUVO: And you tell the story of the downfall of Ferguson, including his relationship with a German war bride.

Lauterbach: That proved to be his undoing. He took up a correspondence with a German lady who ended up being a German war bride, a lady named Lilo Rentsch, who, along with a friend of hers, had written a letter to Ebony magazine saying they were looking for black husbands. What was funny about that, even though it ended up being Denver's undoing in an ultimately tragic episode, was how he and Lilo were pen-pals for the longest time, and they would write each other syrupy, breathless letters about how much they wanted to be together, and they're both totally misrepresenting themselves to each other, which is, of course, the essence of pen pal romance. Denver was, in his letters, 10 years younger, and Lilo, in her letters, was 100 pounds lighter. So, when they really met in New York when her boat came across, it was quite a shock to both of them, and this beautiful romance that they had concocted simply was not going to work in reality. It put Denver in quite a bind because, as an African-American man, he would get in a lot of trouble simply for traveling, whether by train or by a car, from New York to Indianapolis with a white woman. He would have been arrested and indicted under the Mann Act of transporting women across state boundaries for immoral purposes, which was more or less a code for making sure black guys don't carry white women around.

So, he had to marry her, and he did, and I don't know if they earnestly tried to make it work, but she did live with him for a while and they did not get along very well. And they divorced almost as soon as the ink on the marriage certificate dried. With the divorce and the receivership, she ended up taking control of the Sunset Terrace club. It was such a major blow, not only to Denver's pocketbook but to his psyche. This is what he had put his life's work and energy into. It was a jewel of the Avenue and a real monument to the vigor of the black community in Indianapolis. To have this woman come and take it from him — it broke him. He had a series of strokes, and he died within about four years of bringing his war bride over from Germany. She got his assets and ruined his health. I decided to include that in the story, even though it was not the most germane thing to chitlin' circuit activity, because it illustrates the danger for not only individual black people but black America in dealing across the color line.

NUVO: I wonder about your research into Ferguson. Has anyone else written on him with this amount of detail?

Lauterbach: When I started researching the chitlin' circuit, I didn't know how it had begun, and one thing led to another, which eventually led to an old Avenue musician named Sax Kari who had worked for Denver. He tipped me — he called Ferguson the inventor of the chitlin' circuit, and so I started going to Indianapolis to do research in putting the story together. Details about Ferguson's life started coming out through my research, so I actually put his whole life story together, but it had not existed in print anymore. His daughter is still there; she was very kind and very helpful. The first time I went to Indianapolis, I had heard about the Terrace from Sax. Being the nerd that I am, I went straight to the library and researched, and started putting together, 'OK, the club was located on Indiana Avenue, and then I looked at newspaper ads, and every other club was on Indiana Avenue. And wow, the Avenue was the place.' The next morning, I went to the Avenue, and you know what I saw! I was standing right where the Sunset Terrace was, across the street from Lockefield Gardens, pondering all of this. There was a little old dude sitting in a wheelchair at a bus stop, smoking cigarette. So I go up to him, and it turned out he was a really sweet guy named Joe Hester. He had been a partier, and partied at the Sunset Terrace. And he played the numbers game. He was a terrific source, as a typical Ferguson customer, someone into that life. That was interesting: trying to find out where this whole culture had vanished to, and then finding a piece of it there, still living.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p3_gNMUZMTsC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=%22denver+ferguson%22+indianapolis&source=bl&ots=d_zykX174b&sig=2lsw_p5TPC0xMrtEZnX9bjjw0sQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBmoVChMI9Pb_m-D0yAIVh34aCh2xxQxr#v=onepage&q=%22denver%20ferguson%22%20indianapolis&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0L8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=%22denver+ferguson%22+indianapolis&source=bl&ots=5UzeDEYLsl&sig=3sIL55_O566YMqNVsxt-WZ1dbAc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwATgKahUKEwjdpuSq4vTIAhXKdT4KHX4hA3g#v=onepage&q=%22denver%20ferguson%22%20indianapolis&f=false

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7b8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=%22denver+ferguson%22+indianapolis&source=bl&ots=NurMfFLyD9&sig=3mkfPciiAhtRwT6ALugA9jHsPRk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBDgUahUKEwjR3_bf4vTIAhWFOj4KHX4aBCw#v=onepage&q=%22denver%20ferguson%22%20indianapolis&f=false

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http://person.ancestry.co.uk/tree/77393926/person/42380905949/facts

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http://www.rockabilly.nl/references/messages/fabor_robison.htm FABOR ROBISON

Born 3 November 1911, Beebe, Arkansas Died September 1986, Minden, Louisiana

Fabor Robison was an influential (and controversial) independent record owner and talent scout in the 1950s. He played a crucial role in developing the early careers of Jim Reeves, Johnny Horton, the Browns, Mitchell Torok, Floyd Cramer, and others. After a tour in the army in World War II, where he had been a cook, Robison settled in California. There he worked for a time as a talent agent, with Johnny Horton and Les Anderson as his main clients. Robison started Abbott Records in 1951 (with funding from Sid Abbott, proprietor of Abbott Drugs), with the express purpose of recording Horton. The first ten releases on Abbott all featured Johnny Horton. Robison was unhappy with 4-Star's distribution of these records, so he considered peddling Horton's contract to a major label and Horton was signed to Mercury in mid-1952.

Robison also began working as a song hunter for American Music, travelling the country to find new talent and songs. He soon discovered a hotbed of young talent in Shreveport, Louisiana, home of the KWKH Louisiana Hayride. Not only did he find some of his best singers, but he also used the studios of KWKH and some of its staff musicians to make his records. These regular studio men included a young Floyd Cramer, steel guitarist Jimmy Day, and fiddlers Big Red and Little Red Hayes. Abbott released two # 1 country hits in 1953: "Mexican Joe" by Jim Reeves and "Caribbean" by Mitchell Torok.

The money was starting to pour in and Robison thought another label would be a wise investment. In October 1953, after having purchased full control of Abbott Records, Robison launched the Fabor label, on which he recorded important sides by the Browns and Ginny Wright. He soon expanded his recording activities to include his own studio in Southern California, where he used West Coast instrumental greats such as Speedy West and Roy Lanham. Like most independent record owners, Robison ultimately saw most of his biggest finds move onto major labels.

The Radio label was started in 1958 to handle the pop and rock & roll that now overshadowed country music. Some of Robison's Abbott and Fabor artists such as Bonnie Guitar, Ned Miller, Billy Barton and Johnny Russell appeared on the label, but mostly it was young hopefuls. While Robison had no hits with these youngsters, it showed his keen eye for talent as Bobby Lee Trammell, Dickie Podolor (as Ritchie Allen), Bonnie Guitar and Robert Luke Harshman (as Bobby Hart) would have long and significant careers in the music industry.

In 1959, Robison sold his music publishing and some masters to Jamie/Guyden Records. One correction (to my Mitchell Torok BTBWY piece of last week) is in order here : the version of Torok's "Caribbean" that made the pop charts in 1959 on Guyden was not a re-recording, but an alternate take from the 1953 Abbott sessions. Robison restarted Fabor in 1962 and scored a giant hit with Ned Miller's 1957 recording of "From A Jack To A King".

Then he sold all of Miller's catalog and his contract to Capitol in 1964. He produced Miller again in the late 1960s and then went to Brazil. ("When everything went sour, Robison would disappear for a while" writes Colin Escott in his Bear Family book on Johnny Horton.) In the 1970s or 1980s, he sold off whatever was left (together with some masters he had previously sold elsewhere) to the Shelby Singleton Corporation.

Further reading and recommended listening: CD: That'll Flat Git It, Vol. 8 : Rockabilly from the Vaults of Abbott/Fabor/Radio Records (Bear Family BCD 15936, released 1996).

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http://www.charlestonjazz.net/carolina-cotton-pickers/ Carolina Cotton Pickers The Carolina Cotton Pickers was the seminal touring band created in the 1920s from the roster of Jenkins Orphanage Band musicians. Some of the earliest musicians included Alonzo Mills, Walter Bash, John “Shadow” Wilson, Thaddeus Seabrook, Walter Hills, James “Buster” Anderson, William Blake, the Jenkins Orphanage Band music instructor and band director from 1920-1958, and Joseph Smalls. Later members included Clifton Smalls, Julian Dash, Julius Watson, and many others.The Carolina Cotton Pickers recorded Irving Berlin’s “Marie” and Bennie and Buster Moten’s “Western (Moten) Swing” on several albums — The Territory Bands: 1935-37, (2001, Jazz Band), The Real Kansas City (1925, Columbia/Legacy), and Kansas City of the 20s, 30s, 40s (1996, Columbia).

http://www.redhotjazz.com/carolina.html Hal Denman's Carolina Cotton Pickers were one of the more popular bands in Indiana in the 1920s, but they didn't record until 1931. Denman was from North Carolina and had been leading a band called the Carolina Cotton Pickers before joining a band called The Pirate Entertainers in 1923. When he moved to Indiana in 1924 he still had some old Carolina Cotton Pickers stationery laying around so he revived the band name. The band broke up sometime around 1932.

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Jacques Demêtre is the pen-name of Dimitri Vicheney (born Dimitri Wyschnegradsky, February 16, 1924), a French historian of blues music who was one of the first Europeans to recognise and support Chicago blues.

He was born in Paris, the son of Russian-born experimental composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky.

http://bluesagain.com/p_interviews/jacque%20demetre%20part1.html Interview JACQUES DEMETRE Le matin Français du blues

Jacques Demetre has already crossed the eighth decade, but it has kept the memory of a punter. It was probably the first European to have discovered John Lee Hooker and others, at a time when his colleagues thought that the blues had passed away in the 30s and was only the charity of jazz. Demetre has resituated blues in the European century, with clear thinking, modern, without a trace of folklore!

Blues Again: Before the blues, you were interested in jazz ... Jacques Demetre: I started listening orchestras sketches, as they said in Text zone: the 30s and 40s Ray Ventura, Raymond Legrand or Jo Bouillon. One of these was a reflection of the times. I also listened to the songs of Charles Trenet or Johnny Hess. Hess sang and played the piano very well. Django Reinhardt liked being accompanied by him. My father was a classical composer, and himself a great pianist. His works did not displease me but clung not me. In fact, I became interested in jazz during the German Occupation. When there was still a line, until 1942, American jazz, black or white, was forbidden to the north, in the actual area of ​​occupancy, but not in the southern area, not occupied. There, it was more relaxed, there was some freedom. Hugues Panassié, discoverer of jazz, officiated on Radio Vichy, he was programming is the black American jazz. However Radio Paris was under tight control of the Germans, the English or American jazz there was totally prohibited.

However we could hear jazz during the Occupation? The discs were very rare, of course. The Germans raflaient the raw material for their war effort. I lived in Paris, near the Motte Piquet. A neighborhood store receiving discs 11 of each month. The discs were rationed like potatoes! A trader announced: Friday, shipment of apples-to-earth. And, as well, in the next shop: Soon disk arrival. I read the announcement, I show up the morning of the appointed day and I already see twenty young queuing outside the shop, as if they were apples-to-earth! Well, I take the lead. They left us in five by five, the shop could not hold a lot more people. I hoped to find records of Django Reinhardt. The first customers were buying the best. I was almost the last, there was nothing interesting to take, so I'm caught up on the disc of a band quite shabby, that of Guy Luypaerts: he resumed the title of Django Reinhardt 'Clouds'. The discs were sold around 32 francs, but good records of the Swing brand, we found them to 80 francs at the flea market in Saint-Ouen. When I raised enough pocket money, I was spinning flea to skim disk stands. It was the French jazz records a good level. The French inspired many of the great orchestras, including Count Basie. Still, I keep good memories of that time ... musically, of course!

You were zazou? Ha, ha, ha! Not at all ! Yet it was the time, actually. I sent !

The jazz was not considered a subversive music by the occupant? Text zone: Not really. Jazz was not prohibited as Charles Delaunay (Jazz Hot boss) was burn discs and organized concerts. The French jazz even knew a strange flowering at the time. Delaunay, who led the Swing brand, recorded a lot of good records, including the fabulous Django Reinhardt. The only restriction: the titles should not be included in English. All the time records have French titles. "St. Louis Blues" was recorded under the title 'Sadness of St. Louis'. 'Some Of These Days', a classic jazz was recorded by Aimé Barelli under the title 'Baby Love'. You know, we could even hear the black American musicians during the Occupation. They had remained in Paris and, curiously, were not persecuted. The great trumpeter Harry Cooper was one of those. He was performing at La Cigale, Rochechouart Boulevard. West Indian musicians could be heard as the alto sax-Robert Mavounzy, clip Lirvat named Albert, a drummer named Sam Castandet. They started playing Caribbean music, but were very well suited to jazz and had recorded a number of good came hard disks. I remember another drummer who himself was Cameroon, Freddy Jumbo. There was Leo Chauliac, a French pianist. In addition to its benefits for Charles Trenet, Chauliac played a very good jazz in the style of Count Basie, Fats Waller. One evening in 1943, it occurs at the Salle Gaveau. I go. I go, and what do I see? German officers mixed with French audiences. Half the room was made up of German officers, who were not the last to applaud. Amazing! Delaunay had founded a great set, The Jazz Paris, led by sax-tenor first force: Alix Combelle. Before the war, Combelle recorded with Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, and had attended all black American musicians who came to Paris in the 30s During the Occupation, he had saved a lot of very catchy discs, which swing ! After the Liberation, Alix Combelle will be illustrated on some discs Lionel Hampton.

Text zone: What attracted you to this music? The swing precisely this rhythmic vibration that is never mechanical, indefinable. And melodic contours that were played by these musicians, especially in the orchestral blues. Here, I had twenty years and I discovered jazz during the Occupation. Comes 1944 and the Liberation. This tendency is growing, I then discovered records of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, still quite rare elsewhere. The discs were always sold in dropper. Gradually, I became aware that a movement exists. I devour articles Hugh Panassié, Andre Hodeir in Jazz Hot. I discovered in the text the meaning of what I heard, it is putting in order in my brain. I kept a good knowledge of jazz movement until 1948 about ... until the appearance of so-called bebop. I also read books Panassié. Subsequently Hugues Panassié has lost it, shouting at everyone, insulting me in his articles because I had started working for Delaunay, with whom he had quarreled. But before we get there, Panassié had visited the United States in 1938, especially in Harlem. What he has accomplished is huge! With the help of Milton Mezz Mezzrow, he rediscovered musicians like Tommy Ladnier. He recorded Sidney Bechet or Frank Newton for the Swing brand. At the time Panassié Delaunay and working hand in hand. To go back even further in time, a French musicologist had gone to the United States a century ago. His name was Julien Tiersot there listening to Negro spirituals, sermons in churches, he reported in a book dedicated to the music of Indians and blacks: 'The Music of the Indigenous Peoples of North America '. It was a real pioneer in this field.

You attended the cellars of Saint-Germain at the Liberation? Text zone: Not really. I absolutely allergic to tobacco, and with all the smoke they breathed in clubs ... For me to go down in one of those caves and I stay, really had the orchestra on stage was good! I went several times in a club called The Lorient, where Claude Luter occurred. I recognize that, until then, the French jazz, Django apart, had been content to learn from orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford. Nothing was known of New Orleans. The merit of Claude Luter was reconstituted to have a band really New Orleans, trumpet, clarinet, trombone. Ordinarily, French orchestras consisted of saxes, brass. Very few clarinet quintet except the Hot Club of France led by Django, which included clarinetist Hubert Rostaing.

By the way, what do you reproach to bebop? Everything bothered me there. The improvisational style, how to play, arrangements ... as if something was not right. So come the Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clark. What now? Should we give up jazz? And then, miracle! Some drives coming to market like that, fragmented. I had already given me a disc of Bessie Smith (Columbia), but I found his style still a little outdated. All of a sudden revelation! Vogue house begins to release records of Big Bill Broonzy (he came to France in 1951), Muddy Waters and others blues greats like Champion Jack Dupree and John Lee Hooker. Panassié launched an anthology of blues on 'The Voice of the Master "(RCA Victor), he released a disc of Big Bill Broonzy, pre-war period. I also remember a disk Leroy Carr. These discs intrigued me, I wanted to know what they conceal, what was upstream of jazz, where it had its source, how it was born. I always liked orchestral blues but here I found pieces of original blues much, much more beautiful, much more captivating than standard as 'The Man I Love'.

An example of orchestral blues you to enjoy ... Some works of Duke Ellington as 'Creole Love Call', 'Black And Tan Fantasy'. But to return to the period of the Occupation, Delaunay thus edited his records for the Swing brand. Every year a festival was organized disk 78s 30 cm in Paris. French musicians still improvise on the blues, it was what they found the most unifying to implement. On this occasion, I noticed that the harmonies of the orchestral blues were more interested than those of Cole Porter or Gershwin, such as jazz musicians practiced. It is in this soil that I finally discovered the true blues singers that I just mentioned. I was struck by the atmosphere of their songs, then the gospel records, Mahalia Jackson and training as the Spirits Of Memphis. But with John Lee Hooker, I encountered something even more original, more addictive. I remember a fast track which was entitled 'Hoogie Boogie'. Just riffs, and he who was hammering the ground with his heel ... Because the early 50s, Jazz Selection (Vogue house) had published a few 78s of Hooker for jazz lovers. Ten years later, at the initiative of Kurt Mohr, Odeon had agreed with Vee-Jay to publish the LP 33-laps I Am John Lee Hooker, who received the grand prize of the Académie du Jazz. Hooker was not a great guitar virtuoso, he could not fight against Lonnie Johnson, but he had a telluric force that captivated me more. It was both very urban and very attached to the roots, we felt the breath go in Africa, and it has not aged.

So someone published discs of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, France, at the time? As I have said, we owe it to Vogue and his Jazz Selection label. But in addition to Big Bill Broonzy, there was also in their catalog Lonnie Johnson and Dupree Champion, or blues shouters as Wynonie Harris and Eddie Vinson. Vogue intended this collection to jazz lovers. They were short runs. Vogue was then ruled by Caba (Kabakian). Before launching his label, Caba had occupied a small brand, AFCDJ, that is to say, the French Association of collectors of jazz records. He cut inside old records. Old ... They were fifteen years old at the time! Of these, old blues, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton ... well Caba did things with Vogue. When a disc edited, it omitted any reference on the label. You see here? 'Aristocrat' ... He even points out the matrix number. For its part the Odeon label, which signed a contract with Vee-Jay, released an LP 33-laps of John Lee Hooker in 1961. The famous cover illustrated by an old stove. Odeon had published this disc under the auspices of Kurt Mohr. The record has received the Grand Prix of the Académie du Jazz. He helped bring John Lee Hooker with us, a year before the two concerts at the Olympia. Besides, I already knew by the disc all the artists of the first American Folk Blues Festival in 1962. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, them I had even met in London in 1958.

Kurt Mohr is a legendary name in Jazz Hot, but also in Rock & Folk ... It is a Swiss discographer who lived in Paris, a jazz lover fell into the blues. He sewed programs and Vogue catalogs. He then left the house for work at Vogue Odeon. Meanwhile, he also worked in the jazz department of Latin Music, a record store in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Latin as the Latin Quarter. Kurt has written articles for Jazz Hot and interviewed many musicians. He specialized in discographic interviews. He cooked the jazz and blues musicians on the sessions personnel. Sammy Price came in 1956, during a tour for the Jeunesses Musicales de France. We had met him. Kurt was literally thrown on the musicians who accompanied him, including Herbert clarinetist Lobby. He bombarded them with questions: On such a disc, holding the trumpet I see him taking notes Who played trumpet?.? Who played trumpet? These musicians recroisèrent his way a few years later. They had forgotten the name of Kurt Mohr called 'Who played trumpet'! In any case, a strong friendship between Kurt and I stood on those occasions.

Text zone: Why, suddenly, Vogue began to disseminate blues records? I think Caba sincerely loved this music, if yes, what would have pushed to edit blues records? He loved the old jazz and blues. I think he wanted to popularize this music in France. He was also associated with Charles Delaunay, so it was initially a strong jazz motivation in this initiative. The blues was considered a form of jazz, as his antechamber. Gradually Caba Delaunay and realized it was not an anteroom but a huge apartment, as important as jazz.

You yourself have published bootlegs ... That's to say? That's ancient history, others have as well but all this quasi-homeopathic way compared to current production. Anyway, thanks to these small prints and other discs that Vogue published, the His Master's Voice, Columbia, etc., everything fell into place for the emergence of a relatively coherent and comprehensive overview of the history of the blues. It must be understood that it had no information on the blues. We proceed in small steps, over water. Nobody had thought of writing a comprehensive book on the history of this music. One spoke only through the perspective of jazz. We knew that there was Bessie Smith and, before it, Ma Rainey, or some boogie pianists were shown in the 30, 40. There was also the singer-guitarist Teddy Bunn in the song ' If You See me Comin , with Mezzrow and Ladnier, recorded in New York in 1938 by Panassié.

While the Jazz already had its historians ... Admittedly it deserves to Panassié: he gave jazz a coherent vision, he put many things in place, he reconstructed the history of jazz a little like reconstituted skeleton of a prehistoric animal. This is what was missing in the blues. Sammy Price gave me a picture of Memphis Slim in 1956, I did not know him, so I got interested. We piled the bones of the mammoth but no one knew exactly locate. I have tried to reconstruct his rationally skeleton. Why Muddy Waters? That preceded it? What relationship between Lonnie Johnson and Muddy Waters? No, not the same style. Well, Lonnie Johnson, whence it comes, that one? I felt a sense in the migration of African Americans, I guessed a branch went up along the Mississippi and ended in Chicago. So I leaned on the sociology of the African American population. The jazz world was quite mixed, white musicians had managed to crawl through, but the blues typically remained black. So, history was sticking with the migration of the black population. Kurt Mohr, one could not know music that interested in the history of his people and the life of musicians, let alone for blues whose repertoire closely reflects the daily lives of people. It's the sound of their life, and that's what I was trying to explain to readers of Jazz Hot.

In the 50s, in France, the blues was a typical Parisian phenomenon? I think so. It was in Paris that met the blues musicians. In 1950, Alan Lomax worked for the Museum of Man. It was already a recognized folklorist. I met him at the record store François Postif. I often spent. One day, I am: Hey, Alan Lomax and Big Bill Broonzy come home tonight Heaven on earth.! I am well acquainted with Lomax. He was himself guitarist. He and Big Bill embarked on duets of guitars, Lomax interviewed Big Bill simultaneously. It had impressed me. I knew the records that Lomax had made to the Library of Congress. I was also given me these discs, especially that of Muddy Waters. They were published under the label 'Library of Congress'. They may not be sold in the shops, but they were found at least locally ... to the Library of Congress. It was enough to make the request, they sent them by mail. Belgium was another breeding ground for blues. Serge Barrel headed rhythm'n'blues magazine Panorama. Rather Panassié trend elsewhere, with Yannick Bruynoghe and Georges Adins. Tonneau had proposed me to write R & B Panorama, and I did. He became a friend. Then others took its place in the field of music: Jacques Perin Jean Gilles Buzelin or firecracker.

Was the blues still a little publicized before the first American Folk Blues Festival (1962)? The TV was still in its infancy. Radios turns a little phenomenon. Sometimes I was invited by André Clergeat Lucien Malson, Franck Ténot or Filipacchi to present some discs. It happened to be at the Maison de la Radio, or on Europe 1. I believe that no other antennas. Europe 1, I canned execrable memory. Filipacchi invited me to one of his shows. Among the records I had brought, there was an Elmore James, direct import. I found a US chain, a Ray Avery in Los Angeles who was selling records by mail. He sent me listings that made me drool! In France, Elmore James was edited either in 78s or in 45s. I owned an Elmore James, American label. In short, I was struck by the strength and swing those records. So here I am at Filipacchi. Before passing the title of Elmore James, I warned: In the middle of the song, there's a guitar solo, it's a top The disc rotates, Elmore James sings, the guitar solo begins ..! . Suddenly the sound down and hear an advertisement for a bar of soap, enough gratin, eclipsing the solo! When sound came back, Elmore James had already resumed singing.

Christian Casoni - March and April 2007 To follow: "The happiness of being right."

http://valghent.com/dimitri-vicheney-hard-time-blues-1927-1960/

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V1K3AwAAQBAJ&pg=PA242&lpg=PA242&dq=%22jacques+demetre%22+1924&source=bl&ots=gKFsYed39F&sig=Ub8DcHB4OGOzKBQIpiRHxWRw6g8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJlL6KutTOAhWLA8AKHSGBB3EQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=%22jacques%20demetre%22%201924&f=false

https://www.discogs.com/artist/1118407-Jacques-Dem%C3%AAtre

http://valghent.com/jacques-demetre-discovering-a-blues-historian-in-the-family/ Dec 28, 2013 | Post by: valerieghent 2 Comments Jacques Demêtre: discovering a blues historian in the family Dimitri-Vicheney-Georgia-White-CD-web Jacques Demêtre, in Paris (2011) Jacques Demêtre is one of France’s noted historians of American blues and gospel music.

For decades he wrote a column for the French magazine, Jazz Hot. In addition, Jacques wrote liner notes for blues and gospel releases, photographed blues musicians and wrote for the French soul/blues magazine Soul Bag, the Belgian-based Rhythm & Blues Panorama and the UK’s Blues Unlimited. And that’s not counting his many other talents.

Until 2010, I had no idea that Jacques and I were cousins!

In 1959, pursuing his deep love for American Blues music, Jacques came to the US, visiting Chicago, Detroit and New York City. He anVoyage-au-Pays-du-Bluesd travel companion Marcel Chauvard hung out with blues musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Tampa Red and dozens of other blues artists. They stayed with Jack Dupree and Sonny Price in NYC. Dimitri’s writings about this visit were first published in a series of six articles in Jazz Hot, and then 35 years later in the bi-lingual (French-English) book Voyage au Pays du Blues/Land of the Blues (Clarb/Soul Bag, 1994). The book is now out of print, yet I keep hoping it will be reissued! All the photos in it were taken by Jacques (or Marcel) and the musicians featured in it are a who’s who of the blues.

I met Jacques for the first time in 2010, in the midst of what seemed to be a series of magical events. You see, for decades I had been looking for long-lost family on my mother’s side. After my mother died in 2006, I sadly let go of the search, believing all possibilities were now closed. As with many surprises in life, just as I let go of my last hopes, one of my long-lost cousins found me….and there it all began.

My cousin relayed to me I should speak with the historian of our family, Jacques Demêtre, as soon as possible. I called Jacques the same day – he clearly remembered my grandmother and was delighted to talk. As we spoke, I was enthralled. A dream I’d hoped for – and then let go of during one of the saddest points of my life – was finally coming true. Just hearing Jacques’ voice was remarkable, he has a resonant, powerful and deep voice. We spoke for the most part in French, switching to English when my vocabulary and conjugations faltered (which was often). Yet most incredible, and to this day still amazes me, was learning how much we shared and had in common – even though until that day we hadn’t known of one another’s existence!

Jacques-Demetre-web Jacques Demêtre (bluesagain.com) I was astonished to learn of Jacques’ vast knowledge and immediate recall of blues and gospel musicians, singers, albums, singles and collections. In fact, as I learned later on, his vintage 78 records (which he began collecting as imports during WWII) have been turned into a dozen multi-CD blues and gospel compilations in France, with a new compilation due out in spring 2014. Jacques was was equally astonished to learn I am a musician, composer and singer, have played with Ashford & Simpson for decades and that much of my own music is deeply rooted in the blues.

As we spoke in that initial phone call, the surprises kept coming. Jacques mentioned his own father was composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky and that Jacques knew of my father for his electronic and classical music compositions. So now we had experimental composer fathers in common, too. In addition there was a mysterious painting, which it turned out, Jacques held the key to understanding after 40 years (that’s another story).

To top it all off, that very spring (2010) Nick Ashford was planning to launch a night called “Nuttin but the Blues” at Ashford & Simpson’s Sugar Bar on Tuesdays, news which made Jacques exclaim with joy, as a sign that the blues was still alive in New York City. The stories and questions went on and on. “I must come to Paris to meet you!” I said with a tremendous smile. Jacques replied, “You should come soon, because I am 86 years old.”

I bought my air ticket that week for a trip to Paris with a single purpose: to meet Jacques and two more cousins, and at long last to rejoin members of my lost-lost family.

There is so much to say about Jacques and his incredible life, history, family, writings and interviews…. to be continued!

Jazz Hot

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[2] Léo Chauliac Données clés Nom de naissance Léon Louis Marius Chauliac Naissance 6 février 1913 Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône) Décès 27 octobre 1977 (à 64 ans) Paris Activité principale Compositeur Style Chanson française Activités annexes Chef d'orchestre Pianiste Années d'activité 1938-1977 Collaborations Django Reinhardt Charles Trenet Éditeurs Paul Beuscher Raoul Breton Francis Salabert Formation Conservatoire à rayonnement régional de Marseille Élèves Claude Bolling Œuvres principales La Romance de Paris Que reste-t-il de nos amours ? Douce France modifier

Léo Chauliac, de son vrai nom Léon Chauliac, est un pianiste, compositeur et chef d'orchestre français né le 6 février 1913 à Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône) et mort le 27 octobre 1977 à Paris.

Pianiste de jazz dans les années 30, Léo Chauliac fut le pianiste accompagnateur de Charles Trenet de 1941 à 1943 dont il lui composera de nombreuses chansons populaires. Il côtoie et joue avec les plus grands musiciens de l’époque : Hubert Rostaing, Aimé Barelli, Alix Combelle ou Henri Crolla. Un temps chef de l’orchestre du célèbre restaurant Le Maxim’s, il sera le compagnon pour quelques disques d’André Claveau ou Jacqueline Danno. Mais c’est surtout avec Jean-Claude Pascal qu’il tissera un long parcours musical dans les années 60, orchestrateur entre autres de Nous les amoureux, Prix de l’Eurovision en 1961. Il est aussi l’auteur de quelques disques instrumentaux dont l’un dédié à la musique des Beatles. Il a aussi enseigné le piano à Claude Bolling.

Biographie Né en 1913 à Marseille, Léo Chauliac commence ses études de piano au Conservatoire de Marseille où il obtient un premier Prix au bout de deux ans. Puis, il vient à Paris où il travaille avec José Iturbi et surtout sa sœur Amparito Iturbi et suit les cours du Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique. Il est admis le 15 novembre 1930 dans la classe de piano de Santiago Riera qu'il suivra jusqu'en 1935. Il a obtenu en 1931 la 2ème Médaille de solfège, en 1932 le 2ème accessit de piano et en 1933, le 1er accessit de piano.

Il se met au jazz et joue alors dans un club parisien, Le Fétiche. En 1934-1935, il est pianiste dans l'orchestre Grégor et ses Grégoriens. Il fait ensuite des tournées avec des orchestres commerciaux comme celui d'Eddie Foy. Avec ce dernier, il se produit, fin 1936, au Bœuf sur le toit. Il joue en 1937 au Swing Time au sein de l'orchestre d'André Ekyan.

En 1938, il fait la connaissance de Charles Trenet et travaille avec lui jusqu'en 1943 comme pianiste accompagnateur et il compose des chansons. En 1939, il participe à l'élaboration de la mélodie de La Mer, mais, absent le jour de la présentation aux éditions Raoul Breton, c'est Albert Lasry, pianiste des éditions qui cosignera avec Charles Trenet la musique de ce futur succès international. Parmi les chansons écrites par Léo Chauliac, notamment pour Charles Trenet : Marie Marie, Tout ça c'est pour moi, Douce France et Que reste-t-il de nos amours ?. En février 1941, il fait partie du Quintette du Hot Club de France qui accompagne Charles Trenet lors d'un enregistrement.

En novembre 1944 il enregistre Django's Music au sein de la grande formation de Django Reinhardt et de celle de Noël Chiboust.

A la Libération, Léo Chauliac fait partie de l'orchestre du Schubert avec André Ekyan, Emmanuel Soudieux, Pierre Fouad et Henri Crolla. Il figure également dans la formation d'Alix Combelle. Il sera aussi, en 1945, le professeur de Claude Bolling. Dans les années 40, il donne des concerts de jazz à Gaveau et à l'école normale de musique, notamment avec Emmanuel Soudieux et Pierre Fouad. Il se produit en trio en 1946 Chez Carrère et au Palm Beach à Cannes.

En 1949, il dirige un orchestre d'une dizaine de musiciens se produisant sur la Côte d'Azur. À l'époque, Boris Vian le situait au même niveau que Bernard Peiffer et Jack Dieval et au-dessus d'André Persiany et Claude Bolling.

Il joue en 1954 avec son grand orchestre au Maxim’s. Au cours du 3ème Salon International du Jazz qui a lieu du 1er au 7 juin 1954 à la Salle Pleyel, il interprète aux grandes orgues en première audition, La messe gitane de Django Reinhardt.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/576552-L%C3%A9o-Chauliac

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Travis "Moonchild" Haddix (born November 26, 1938) is an American blues guitarist, singer and songwriter.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/travis-haddix-mn0000015312/biography

Artist Biography by Jim O'Neal Winners Never Quit Blues guitarist Travis Haddix was born on November 26, 1938. A native of Walnut, MS, Haddix was inspired in his early years by B.B. King's broadcasts on WDIA out of Memphis. In Cleveland, OH, where he has lived since 1959, Haddix developed into a fine modern bluesman and songwriter with an original and soulful touch. While he had been developing his chops in front of rowdy audiences at juke joints and blues festivals throughout the '70s, he didn't begin his recording career in earnest until he signed with the Ichiban label in 1988. His stylish and poppy albums Wrong Side Out (1988), Winners Never Quit (1991), and What I Know Right Now (1992), were, incredibly, released while Haddix continued his job as a postal worker in Ohio. As his popularity continued to grow, he began traveling to Europe several times a year and won numerous blues awards in both Europe and the States. Haddix resumed recording in 1994 with Big Ole Goodun' and also began to develop his interest in other areas of the entertainment business including the formation of his own publishing company and his own record label Wann-Sonn Records. In 2002, Haddix even became an author, releasing Caught in the Middle, a book of his musical memoirs. A quote Travis Haddix uses to close out many of his performances sums up his positive philosophical attitude: "I am the best that I can be, and since no one else can be me, there's none better."

http://www.clevelandblues.org/index.php/cbs-events/hall-of-fame/hall-of-fame-2010/travis-moonchild-haddix Travis "Moonchild" Haddix

travis-haddixTravis "Moonchild" Haddix was born November 26, 1938 in Hatchie Bottom, Missisippi to a family of sharecroppers. When he was 9, his family moved to Walnut, Mississippi, a "big city with a bank, a post office, a Western Auto store, and a cotton gin." Travis was taught guitar by his father, Chalmus "Rooster" Haddix, a Delta Blues style player. Travis was also inspired by B.B. King as a youth. He attended the local "colored" high school in Walnut, where he starred in basketball.

The Haddix household was ten strong, with five boys and five girls. All the boys were musicians. Travis graduated high school in 1957, and his family moved to Milwaukee a year later, where Travis played in several bands, including one with his brother Al, who for a while played with Brother Jack Mcduff. Travis attended Marquette College in Racine,Wisconsin, where he again played basketball. He finished his degree years later at Cuyahoga Community College.

He was drafted into the Army in 1961, and became a missile track radar operator stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, Fort Bliss, Texas, and Pforthiem, Germany. Playing in the service club at Pforthiem helped Travis avoid guard and KP duty. Travis was discharged from the service in 1963, and came to Cleveland, where he took a job at Severance Shopping Center as an electrician. He played with the band Chuck and the Tremblers at several clubs on Euclid Avenue, including Tito's, The Red Carpet Lounge, The Music Box, and the Birdland Ballroom. He also played with Ernest and DL Rocco, and occasionally sat in with Eddie Baccus and Duke Jenkins.

Travis started his own band, The Now Sound, in the late '70s, but in 1985 his band bolted for a chance to play with Johnny Taylor. The nickname "Moonchild" stuck after Travis recorded a song of the same name. The Travis Haddix Band followed, and included Marvin Young, Eli Thomas, Scanlon "Scatman" Sharp, Tyrone Pierce, and the late Frank "Silk" Smith. They appeared often at the Plush Entertainment Center on Miles Avenue, and opened for many touring acts: Clarence Carter, Artie "Blues Boy" White, Johnny Taylor, Bobby Blue Bland, Latimore, Denise LaSalle, Joe Simon, Tyrone Davis and Little Milton. The band's first recording for Ichiban Records, "Wrong Side Out", was released in 1988. They did five albums for Ichiban, some with Gary "BB" Coleman.

It was around this time that Travis' songs began to get noticed by other artists such as Jimmy Dawkins, Son Seals, and Michael Burks. "Begging Business", "Bag Lady", and "Everything is Everything" are among his songs that have been recorded by others. "Everything is Everything" is featured in the film April's Fool.

In 1989 Travis started Wann-Sonn Records, named for his daughters Wanda and Sonya, and he made fourteen records for his label. In 1990 Travis started touring in Europe, and he has played clubs, concerts, and festivals in 22 different countries while keeping Cleveland as his home base. His recordings and performances have received glowing reviews in publications such as Living Blues Magazine and Big City Blues, and he has been honored with numerous awards: Best Male Blues Artist, Best New Blues Artist, and in 2007 he won the Gay Rose Productions Keeping the Blues Alive Award. With insightful and sometimes humorous lyrics, and a horn-driven sound reminiscent of the Stax-Volt era, Travis Haddix remains a powerful force in the blues, and he is a true Cleveland musical icon.

http://www.travishaddix.net/home.htm

Travis Haddix began playing the piano at the age of seven in his home town of Walnut, Mississippi, located thirty miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. The turning point in his musical learning experience came when he was eight, when the legendary B.B. King came to Memphis and began playing daily at the studios of WDIA. Travis was awed by King;s guitar virtuosity and he hung around the radio station every day to learn all he could. Soon, Travis' piano playing fell by the wayside and was replaced by the guitar, which he plays on stage and in the studio.

Years later, the Haddix family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where Travis, now a budding star, continued to refine his craft by singing and playing throughout the North. The original "Moonchild", he earned the nickname from his beaming presence on stage and his always broad smile and energetic, sexy performances, In 1959, Travis moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he joined the D.L. Rocco Band and achieved regional notoriety that led to a prominent spot with the Little Johnnie Taylor group. Travis also contributed material to five albums by Artie "Bluesboy" White. His material is also covered by Artie “blues boy” White, Dickie Williams, Jimmy Dawkins, Michael Burks, Charles Wilson, the late Son Seals, and Lee Shot Williams.

Haddix has received rave reviews in Living Blues Magazine, Blues Revue, Real Blues, Big City, Jefferson and Audience Magazine, and he has toured Europe since 1992. His style evokes the sounds of the great Stax-Volt days, when the likes of Sam & Dave ruled the urban blues roost. His fifth release on Ichiban Records is A Big Ole Goodun', featuring the Travis Haddix band (together since 1988). He proves, once again, that he is a fixture in the modern blues industry with songs like. "Make Me Say Please" , "From Bad to Worse", and the made-for-jukebox single, "(She Called Me) Knucklehead".

Travis received 4 awards in 1999. Best Male Blues Artist, Best New Blues Artist, Best Blues Entertainer and Contemporary Blues Artist Of The Year. In 1989 he founded Haddix publishing Company and Wann-Sonn Records, and recorded ten CDs under his own label. in 2007 travis won the Gay Rose Production Keeping the Blues Alive Award.

Next time you have a chance, check out the movie April's Fool which features Travis' hit song, Everything Is Everything.

In 2007, Travis' single, "Dick for Dinner" from "Mean Ole Yesterday" was nominated Best Blues Song by the Blues Critic Awards 2007 Readers Poll-Comtemporary Blues. Travis was in great company; the prize was awarded to Omar Kent Dykes & Jimmie Vaughan.

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Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck was a Canadian rock band, formed in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1967.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gVxtTKQpYQ John Patrick Caldwell (vocals, harmonica) Roger Law (guitar) Charles Faulkner (bass) Hugh Lockhead (drums) Donnie McDougall (guitar, vocals) Les Law (guitar, replaced Roger)

West Coast quintet Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck was formed in 1967 -- not as a group of musicians but as a collective consisting of Kathy Kay from Boston who was the original Mother Tucker, John Patrick Caldwell as The Yellow Duck (aka Raphael Red The Village Idiot), Bob O'Connor (aka Dogan Pink Foot/Sheldon O'Dogan), and Michael Goldman (aka Garnet Crystalman).

The only working musician at the time was O'Connor who got a job working with Hughie Lockhead and Charlie Faulkner in a group called Medusa. When Bob O'Connor left the group - Lockhead and Faulkner join Caldwell to form the band actual musical group Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck.

By 1968 they were signed to London Records and had little success with their first single, "I", but did have minor success with "One Ring Jane" in 1969. Later that year they would form their own Duck Records distributed by Capitol Records where they released several more singles through 1970. Roger Law would eventually be replaced by his brother Les and the band managed to tour with the likes of Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Cream, and The Yardbirds. Alas, fame eluded them and they split up in 1971.

Donnie McDougall would go on to join The Guess Who in 1972 and recorded several albums with them. He wound up a truck driver living in White Rock, BC. In the mid-90's he would revive his career as member of The Best Of The Guess Who -- a touring tribute to his former band and eventually joined the reformed Guess Who in 2000; Caldwell left the music business; Roger Law died in a car accident; Faulkner joined the Wild Root Orchestra before leaving music to become a handyman only to return in recent years with the Kelowna, BC band Dog Skin Suit.

http://pnwbands.com/mothertucker.html Mother Tucker's Yellow Duck Vancouver, British Columbia 1967 - 1971

Members John Patrick Caldwell ~ Vocals, Harp Charles Faulkner ~ Bass Les Law ~ Guitar Roger Law ~ Guitar Hugh Lockhead ~ Drums Donnie McDougall ~ Guitar, Vocals

http://therisingstorm.net/mother-tuckers-yellow-duck-home-grown-stuff/ MOTHER TUCKERS YELLOW DUCK “HOME GROWN STUFF” 1969 Folk,Psych Home Grown Stuff

Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck were a folk rock group from Vancouver, British Columbia formed in 1968. Commercial success eluded them although they managed to release two fine albums that melded blues, country, folk, hard rock and psychedelia seamlessly. The group had a few interesting non-LP 45s as well, “I” being the best of these forgotten releases.

Most psych fans prefer their highly regarded Home Grown Stuff album from 1969 (Capitol). Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck has a strong SF influence, at times sounding like Kak or more accurately, the late 60s Youngbloods. “Someone Think,” the album’s best song, features plenty of fuzz guitar distortion and a superb psych styled guitar solo. This cut is mandatory listening and a true classic of underground psychedelia. “One Ring Jane,” which isn’t far off in terms of quality, was released on 45 and is another excellent psych jam with lots of chaotic electric guitar soloing. Much of this record is folk-rock best exemplified by bouncy, uptempo numbers like the “Times Are Changing” and “Blue Dye.” Other gems are the sparkling country rock track “One Glass For Wine” and the folk psych cut “Elevated Platform.”

Admittedly this album has three or four dud tracks but is still notable for it’s strong songs (it’s highs are pretty high) and fluid SF style guitar work – it’s a firm favorite among late 60s Canadian/American psych rock collectors. Their second album, Starting a New Day, is more of a country rock record but a good one that’s perhaps more consistent than the great Home Grown Stuff album.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/mother-tuckers-yellow-duck-mn0001786301 Artist Biography by Richie Unterberger A decent if not especially noteworthy Canadian psychedelic band who recorded for Capitol, probably around the late '60s; the sleeve indicates that they recorded at a Vancouver studio, making it reasonably likely that they were from British Columbia. They wrote their own material, and were extremely influenced by the San Francisco sound, with fluid guitars, harmonies, and an occasional country-folk bounce. The best track by far of their Home Grown Stuff LP was "Someone Think," which alternated between beautifully wistful psychedelia and mind-melting distorted guitar solos.

http://www.45cat.com/artist/mother-tuckers-yellow-duck

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Freddy Powers (October 13, 1931 – June 21, 2016) was an American country music songwriter.

http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/outlaw-country-jazz-singer-freddy-powers-has-passed-away/ June 21, 2016 Outlaw Country Jazz Singer Freddy Powers Has Passed Away Trigger News 15 Comments

freddy-powers-1

“Anybody that don’t like Freddy Powers, I put ’em under immediate suspicion.” –Merle Haggard

One of the most creatively-rambunctious artists in the history of country music, a well-respected and prolific songwriter, and maybe most importantly, one of the best friends artists like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard ever had, has passed away. Freddy Powers, known for so many contributions, but known best as an aficionado of country jazz passed away on Tuesday, June 21st. Powers had been battling Parkinson’s disease for many years.

Born October 13th, 1931 in Duncan, Oklahoma, he moved to the small town of Seminole, Texas when he was six. It was there his family band would play Dixieland jazz tunes for locals, and Powers got his start in the music business. Eventually Powers would go on to receive some of the highest songwriting recognitions in country music, including the Triple Play award from the CMA for writing three #1 songs in a year. But in between, Freddy Powers would live a life that was like something out of a Hollywood script.

After a short stint in the Marines, Freddy Powers fell in with noted instrumentalist Paul Buskirk, and began fusing country music with jazz. Before Willie Nelson became famous for writing songs for others, Powers cut a Willie Nelson tune called “Heartaches of a Fool” all the way back in 1955, and Willie even played bass in Freddy’s band for a while. Freddy Powers became known for his strange style of country that included a tuba player to give it that Dixieland flair, and made appearances on The Tonight Show and other high profile gigs with the outfit.

The 60’s saw Freddy Powers taking residency in Las Vegas at the Riviera Casino during Sin City’s mafia era, where he cavorted with many of the town’s most notorious gangsters of the time. His Dixieland band, blazing banjo, and hilarious stage wit made him one of the most famous entertainers of his time in Vegas, where Freddy stayed until the mid 70’s when the Outlaw movement in country was turning everything upside down. It was Powers’ participation as a producer on Willie Nelson’s record Somewhere Over The Rainbow in 1981 that put him on Merle Haggard’s map, and that’s when his country music career really took off.

merle-haggard-freddy-powersThe Freddy Powers / Merle Haggard friendship is the stuff of legend all to itself. The story goes that in 1981, Merle Haggard asked Freddy to move onto a houseboat beside him on Lake Shasta in northern California. Merle wanted to know more about jazz, and Freddy wanted to study more about country music. If you want to know how and where the horns and other jazz influences crept into Merle’s music later in his career, it was his friendship with Freddy. Both men had just gone through divorces, and for the good part of a decade, the Freddy / Merle days and nights were reportedly filled with wild parties and trips across Lake Shasta in a open air homemade plane the pair made together. The two even built their own houseboats.

Also during this time, a lot of music was made between Freddy Powers and Merle Haggard. Powers became a mainstay in Merle’s backing band, and he wrote half the songs on Merle’s album It’s All in the Game from 1984. Merle and Powers also co-wrote the song “I Always Get Lucky With You,” which became a mega hit for George Jones, and Freddy also wrote material for Ray Charles. All of this success led to Freddy finally being able to release his own opus as a frontman, The Country Jazz Singer. There was also an appearance on Austin City Limits, and soon Freddy Powers was a legend in Outlaw country circles and beyond.

Freddy Powers moved back to Texas in 1994, and continued to collaborate with his friends as a songwriter, player, and producer. When he broke his hand in 2004, it resulted in a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease of which Powers suffered from for the rest of his life. It took away his ability to play music, but he continued to produce and collaborate, including participating on Mary Sarah’s 2014 record Bridges, and he also worked with the Austin-based band Stop The Truck. “Just lost my second father today,” Mary Sarah said on Tuesday. “He believed in me when no one else would.”

Freddy formed the Freddy Powers Parkinson Organization which helped raised funds for research into the disease, and many benefits and other functions were held in Freddy’s honor throughout the years.

Freddy Powers’ health continued to fail him, but his spirit never did, nor did his friends and collaborators who kept his influence on country music alive in their songs and albums. If you knew Freddy Powers, he was the funniest man you knew, even as he fought off the deteriorating affects of Parksinson’s. Though not as well-known as many of the artists Freddy Powers went on to influence and inspire, country music would not be as fun, off-kilter, and the jazz influences wouldn’t be as strong if it weren’t for Freddy Powers.

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Freddy Powers has a memoir called “Spree of 83” with contributions by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard scheduled to be released via Waldorf Books in February 2017.

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http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/drummer-michael-stuart-ware-of-the-sons-of-adam-love-talks-about?xg_source=activity

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Pat O'Day

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Cynthia Leonie Schloss (April 12, 1948 – February 25, 1999) was a Jamaican singer.

She was born in Kingston, the third of six children, and attended Ardenne High School.

http://www.nlj.gov.jm/REGGAE%20EXHIBITION/cynthis_schloss.htm CYNTHIA SCHLOSS (1948 - 1999) Veteran female singer, Cynthia Schloss, is generally referred to as Jamaica’s songbird. She was the third of six children and attended the Trench Town Elementary and Ardenne High School. Schloss got her big break at the Merritone Amateur Talent Exposure in 1971, where she won the finals singing First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. She then became a regular at shows and on the hotel circuit. Later, she ventured into recordings and made a memorable impact with songs such as Surround Me with Love, As If I Didn’t Know, You Look like Love and Love Me Forever which sold over 100,000 copies.

Schloss is well known to the newer generation for her regular performances at oldies shows such as the Heineken Startime series. Schloss died in the arms of her husband and veteran musician, Winston ‘Merritone’ Blake, on February 25, 1999.

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"Do What You Gotta Do" is a song written by Jimmy Webb. First recorded by Johnny Rivers in 1967, later versions have been released by many artists including Nina Simone, Bobby Vee, and The Four Tops.

http://secondhandsongs.com/work/20035/all

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Willie James "Billy" Gayles (October 19, 1931 – April 8, 1993) was an American R&B singer and drummer, best known for his recordings with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm in the 1950s and early 1960s.

He was born in Sikeston, Missouri, and as a teenager moved to Cairo, Illinois. He became involved in the local blues scene there as a drummer, and toured with Robert Nighthawk and Earl Hooker, before settling in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1951. There, he associated with, and then joined, Ike Turner's band, usually known as the Kings of Rhythm, as a featured vocalist and drummer. He made his first recordings with Turner's band in Memphis, Tennessee in 1953, and the following year recorded "Night Howler", credited to Billy Gale [sic] and his Orchestra and issued on the Flair label..

https://www.bear-family.com/lexikon/detail/groupid/7/id/7522 Billy Gayles Ike Turner had an incredible feel for the discovery of vocalists - and we're not just talking of the hot young singer, he called Tina. Billy Gayles was the front man of Ike's Kings of Rhythm mid-50s, as they were the best R & B band in St. Louis. Their records the years 1956-57 for the Federal sub-label of King Records included with Ike's crazy whammy bar tremolo electric guitar solos on his Stratocaster, Gayle 'full, loud vocal cords and the rocking, blaster-driven monitoring of the Kings to the Wildest what was the biggest to offer the genre. Gayle was born in Sikeston, Missouri, was born on October 19, 1931 He grew up in poor circumstances, became blind as a child for six years and had the same work in the field, as he regained his eyesight with twelve. His mother moved with him to Cairo, Illinois, and the local blues scene seduced the boy. The guitar wizard Earl Hooker Gayle bought a Schlagzeugset- at this time he also played with another slide guitar ace, Robert Nighthawk. As Hooker south to Clarksdale, Mississippi, migrated, Billy went with. There he met some of the master musicians of the Kings of Rhythm - Raymond Hill, Jackie Brenston, Clayton Love, Johnny O'Neal, Dennis Binder - and then joined the band of Ike. Billy 'The Kid' Emerson gave Gayle's 1953 session for Sun Records, but in which nothing came out. When Billy Gale with Ike's band in Clarksdale, he recorded his debut single Night Howler for the sub-label flair of Modern Records. Then, wrote Turner in Federal: Ralph Bass directed the production, the Kings of Rhythm (Hill, Brenston and Eddie Jones to the saxophones, pianist Fred Sample, Jesse Knight Jr. on bass and Eugene Washington instead of Billy on drums) rocked the King -own studio in Cincinnati to its foundations! Gayle smashed on March 12, 1956 I'm Tore Up, as if his hair caught fire. It was a regional hit, but somehow missed the national charts. On the plate Federal wrote his name correctly. Three other Federal singles, leaving even fewer traces in the charts, although the thunderous Do Right Baby and Sad As A Man Can Be delivered his roaring vocal chords and some of the wildest guitar solos in Ike's entire career. Turner's use of 'Wummerhakens', the tremolo arm on his Strat, was something completely new. 'I knew nothing about the guitar and I thought that was why he was there,' said Turner died in 2007. 'The lever was for a tremolo since, and I used it to throb, to make you cry (guitar)!' Gayle sat down at the drums, as the Kings of Rhythm in Chicago at Cobra Records landeten- Billy and Ike sang a duet, Walking Down The Aisle, one half of the last publication of the label before it was sealed in 1959. Apart from a single '61-single for the obscure Shock label, in Washington, DC recorded with Ike's band, Gayle made ​​no more records with the Kings of Rhythm. He left Ike in 1963 and returned to St. Louis, where he had hardly made ​​its appearance. In 1982 he played on an LP by guitarist Larry Davis for Rooster Blues drums. On April 8, 1993, he died in St. Louis of cancer. Bill Dahl

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-w-uGwm_LhcC&pg=PA362&lpg=PA362&dq=%22Billy+Gayles%22+1993&source=bl&ots=tThg3Hzt27&sig=RyZTlDpjNfg003ZdFERpI5KfIeI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKjrTXvPPLAhWLXBoKHTfXABkQ6AEIPDAJ#v=onepage&q=%22Billy%20Gayles%22%201993&f=false

https://www.discogs.com/artist/901099-Billy-Gayles

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DykffzkFALoC&pg=PA201&lpg=PA201&dq=%22Billy+Gayles%22+1993&source=bl&ots=6ywWPCxj-U&sig=dLpe_gurqhts5FIyvf1MCkb1DlY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKjrTXvPPLAhWLXBoKHTfXABkQ6AEITjAN#v=onepage&q=%22Billy%20Gayles%22%201993&f=false

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Donald Ross Pfrimmer (September 25, 1937 – December 7, 2015) was an American country music songwriter.

http://www.cmt.com/news/1760999/hit-songwriter-don-pfrimmer-dead-at-78/ Hit Songwriter Don Pfrimmer Dead at 78 Songs Recorded by Ronnie Milsap, Lonestar, Tim McGraw, Diamond Rio by edward morris 12/9/2015

Songwriter Don Pfrimmer, whose hits ranged from Mickey Gilley’s” raucous “The Power of Positive Drinkin’” to Lonestar’s homey “My Front Porch Looking In,” died Monday (Dec. 7) of leukemia at the age of 78.

A native of Montana, Donald Ross Pfrimmer moved to Nashville in 1973. Over the ensuing years — and in league with a legion of gifted co-writers — he turned out a steady stream of skyscraping chart singles.

Pfrimmer’s versatility was evident in the range of acts that succeeded with his songs. Among these were George Jones (“You and Me and Time”), Ronnie Milsap (“She Keeps the Home Fires Burning,” “My Heart”), Diamond Rio (“Meet in the Middle”) and Tim McGraw (“All I Want Is a Life”).

Also Tammy Wynette (“Let’s Call It a Day Today”), Steve Wariner (“By Now”), Jim & Jesse (“North Wind”), Chris Cagle (“My Love Goes On and On”), Sylvia (“The Matador,” “Drifter”), Doug Stone (“Come In Out of the Pain”), Wayne Newton (“Our Wedding Band”), Jo Dee Messina (“Always Have, Always Will”) and Darin & Brooke Aldridge (“Lonely Ends Where Love Begins”).

In addition to the above, Pfrimmer co-wrote Lonestar’s No. 1 single, “Mr. Mom,” which held that position for two weeks in 2004.

In 1975, Pfrimmer collaborated with Gene Autry and Dave Burgess in writing the novelty tune “Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey.”

Unlike the equally mythic “Rudolph,” “Frosty” and “Little Drummer Boy,” Nestor never gained seasonal traction. It was, however, recorded by Hank Snow and Marty Robbins and turned into animated TV special in 1977, with voices by Roger Miller and Brenda Vaccaro.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=344506 Donald (Don) Ross Pfrimmer

Nashville, TN

passed away quietly at his home in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday, December 7, 2015. He was 78 years old.

Don was born in Great Falls, Montana, on September 25, 1937 as the eighth and youngest son of Robert Bell Pfrimmer and Lillian Green Pfrimmer. He spent his childhood in Whitefish, Montana, on the western side of the Rockies near the Canadian border, hunting, fishing, swimming, skiing, and generally getting into mischief.

Don was preceded in death by his parents and his siblings, Patricia, Jack, Glen, Sylvia, Bruce and Mickey. He is survived by his loving wife of 39 years, Gail, two children, Michael Blade and Tinsley (Dan) Morrison, four grandchildren, Lizzy Blade, Jake Blade, Tom Morrison and Lilly Morrison, and his brother Charles Pfrimmer.

Don was "the Fonz" before anyone knew who the Fonz was. In high school, he wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle and was known to participate in the odd street fight. He also was a prize-winning Golden Gloves boxer. But beneath the leather jacket, was the heart of an artist. Don's beautiful singing voice landed him many lead roles in high school musicals.

Don was a veteran of the United States Army from which he received an honorable discharge after injuring his back in a surfing accident. During his time in the service, he won multiple marksmanship awards.

Don graduated from the University of Montana in 1965, with an English major and Art minor. After college, he spent many years in Alaska where he taught school to Native Inuit children, guided hunting and fishing expeditions, trapped arctic fox, and spent time commercial fishing out of Kodiak Island. Don had a great love of the outdoors, and was an expert hunter and fisherman—despite claims to the contrary by his brothers and children.

Don was a renaissance man. While he could hunt, fish and rabble rouse with the best of them, he could also paint, sing, sculpt, draw, and write poetry. Woodworking was a big hobby and he made beautiful homemade furniture in his basement shop.

It was this artistic side that led Don to think he could make a living writing music. In the early 1970's, Don moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. Like many before him, his career didn't immediately take off, but by 1978 he had a top ten, The Power of Positive Drinking by Mickey Gilley. Don had a top ten hit almost every year in the 80s and 90s, and 2000s including "She Keeps the Home Fires Burning," "Meet in the Middle," "The Front Porch Lookin' In," "My Heart," "All I Want Is a Life," and "Love Without Mercy." In all, ten of them went to number 1. "Mr. Mom," by Lonestar in 2004 was his most recent #1 hit.

Beyond top 40s and number 1s, Don was a beloved mentor to many other songwriters. He was well known for his big heart. The fact that he has so many friends in such a tough town is a testament to his willingness to help anyone with a guitar and a dream.

In 2015, Don was nominated for the Country Music Songwriters Hall of Fame, and while he didn't get in this year, his family believes his body of work may still get him in some day.

In the last year's of his life, Don wrote screenplays for movies and a book. The book centers on a boy in Alaska, a spot that always held a special place in his heart.

Read more: Songwriter Don Pfrimmer 1937-2015 - Sitcoms Online Message Boards - Forums http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=344506#ixzz44Bmugabh

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Christopher Lloyd Darrow (born July 30, 1944) is an American multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. In the late 1960s and 1970s he was a member of Kaleidoscope and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as Linda Ronstadt's band, and has released several albums as a solo artist and band leader.

Born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, he moved with his family to Southern California in childhood. After leaving high school, he formed a bluegrass band, the Dry City Scat Band, with David Lindley, Richard Greene, Steve Cahill and Pete Madlem.

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/chris-darrow-mn0000108096/biography Artist Biography by Tom Kealey Chris Darrow was born on July 30, 1944, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to a military dad who soon afterward moved his family to Southern California, where Darrow still makes his home. He began learning to play anything he could get his hands on that had strings, and over the course of the next 30-plus years, became one of the most sought-after multi-instrumentalists in professional music. Shortly after high school graduation, Darrow put together a bluegrass band called the Dry City Scat Band with David Lindley, Steve Cahill, Richard Greene, and Pete Madlem. Within a couple of years, the Scat Band would become one of the hottest bluegrass ensembles in Southern California. During the summer of 1964, the Scat Band got a gig at Disneyland, which was steady work, and Darrow was able to support his new bride. During this period, signs were starting to appear indicating imminent changes in the hearts of some of the purest bluegrass musicians. Bandmate Richard Greene introduced Darrow to a friend of his who played in the Chad Mitchell Trio and who had just returned from England raving about the British music scene. Darrow had never before seen anyone with Beatle boots and long hair. The gentleman happened to be future Byrds founder Roger McGuinn. Later that summer, the Scat Band was replaced by the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and mandolinist Chris Hillman, a hardcore bluegrass purist who quietly and sheepishly said to Darrow, "I joined a rock & roll band. I need the money. They're called the Byrds."

In the latter part of the '60s, Darrow had his first major breakthrough by putting a band together, called Kaleidoscope, with David Lindley, Solomon Feldthouse, and Max Buda. American folk, Middle Eastern, country & western, and blues, which would have seemed an unlikely combination of musical flavors, proved to mix very well and ultimately became successful. Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page was quoted as saying that, "Kaleidoscope was his favorite band of all time." Kaleidoscope went on to release several albums in the late '60s with no hit singles, but with a large cult following that is still growing.

In late 1967, Darrow was asked to join the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as a fiddle player/singer replacing predecessors Jackson Browne, who left to embark upon a solo career, and Bruce Kunkel, who left the band because of philosophical differences. As it turned out, the Dirt Band abruptly adopted a more electric sound anyway, which is what Kunkel had been campaigning for, but was resigned to defeat. In the meantime, Darrow's presence gave the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band some glory by virtue of their performance in the smash musical comedy flick Paint Your Wagon. The Dirt Band's short-lived and waning success would soon cause a breakup, but it would later reorganize with different personnel. Darrow, on the other hand, who has more sides to him than a mirror ball, hung out his shingle attracting a great number of new opportunities.

One of these opportunities was in the form of an intermittent working relationship with Linda Ronstadt that came as the result of an introduction by a primate. Former Monkee Michael Nesmith produced a couple of singles for a band called the Corvettes, founded by Darrow and former Dirt Band mate Jeff Hanna. The Corvettes would soon become Ronstadt's backup band. She had heard about them through Nesmith, who was the writer of her hit song "Different Drum." Darrow stayed with Ronstadt's band off and on for a number of years, witnessing a personnel change whereby Bernie Leadon came in to replace Hanna, who had decided to make his exit and re-form the Dirt Band.

Chris DarrowDarrow was offered a recording contract by United Artists Records in 1972. He recorded the albums Chris Darrow, followed up by Under My Own Disguise the following year. "Whipping Boy," from the former, received critical acclaim and is still viewed as an attractive "cover" prospect. Over the years, he has continued to be called upon by other artists who wanted his multifaceted musical influence on their albums. Artists such as James Taylor, Sonny & Cher, Gene Vincent, Helen Reddy, and John Fahey are only a few examples. Fretless In the mid-'90s, Darrow started recording for the Taxim label of Germany. In 2000, the label released a two-CD set, called Coyote: Straight from the Heart. It includes a 40-minute instrumental suite and 20 original songs. Taxim also released Fretless, Southern California Drive, Los Chumps with Max Buda, and Mojave, a Darrow-produced album featuring members of Emmylou Harris's band, Lone Justice, and the Byrds. In early 2001, BGO Records in England released Darrow's second and third albums, Chris Darrow and Under My Own Disguise, as a two-for-one package. Everybody Slides, Vol. 2 All of Kaleidoscope's early records have been re-released on Demon Records in England and Sony/Legacy in the U.S. Darrow's fabulous slide guitar work is featured on a compilation album called Everybody Slides, Vol. 2. The album features cuts by such slide greats as Lowell George, John Hammond, David Lindley, and Rory Block. It is on Sky Ranch Records in France with Virgin distribution, as well as Rykodisc in the United States. Darrow also appears on two Takoma Records compilations, Takoma Slide and Takoma Eclectic Sampler, Vol. 2. Other sides of this mirror ball (metaphorically speaking) lay in business and photography. Darrow planned to publish a book containing photographs he has taken over the last few decades, many of which appear on album covers. By his own admission, he said he decided to take his photojournalism to a professional level after he learned that the man with whom his wife ran off was a photographer.

In retrospect, during the late '60s and through the '70s, there seemed to be a delicate balance of relationships that would influence the evolution of country rock music (as it would come to be known) for the remainder of the 20th century and beyond. Chris Darrow was right in the middle of all of this and played an integral part of the formation and ultimate success of more than just a handful of his contemporaries. In 2013, his 1972 self-titled debut was re-released by Drag City with great fanfare; the original album was appended with a handful of bonus tracks.

http://www.chrisdarrow.com/bio.html Long before recording as a solo artist in the 1970s, multi-instrumentalist Chris Darrow was a well-known musician and trusted sideman in Los Angeles’ tightly knit music scene. In 2009, Los Feliz CA-based Everloving Records is honored to reissue two classic Chris Darrow solo albums, 1973’s Chris Darrow and 1974’s Under My Own Disguise. Both titles were originally released via the United Artists label. Proficient on guitar, bass, fiddle, violin, banjo, Dobro, lap steel and mandolin, Chris Darrow never actively sought employment as a musician, but the work always managed to find him. Even if you have never heard his name before, Darrow’s fingerprints remain in conspicuous corners of the public consciousness. His early career was spent playing in bluegrass combo The Dry City Scat Band with David Lindley, and fronting electric rock group The Floggs. With Lindley, he co-founded revered psych outfit Kaleidoscope -- hailed by Jimmy Page as his “favorite band of all time.” A stint with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band led to the formation of The Corvettes, which later resulted in long-term touring relationships with Linda Ronstadt and John Stewart. He contributed to pivotal session gigs with Leonard Cohen, James Taylor and Hoyt Axton and crossed paths with Sly Stone, Sonny and Cher, Gram Parsons, Gene Vincent, Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa and even Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner. Raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Claremont, CA (located 30 miles east of Downtown L.A.) Chris Darrow, came of age with the sounds of Ritchie Valens and the Everly Brothers on the radio. He was encouraged to explore his musical curiosities at a small, family-run instrument shop called The Claremont Folk Music Center, where he purchased his first guitar at age 13. “The Folk Music Center was a godsend to a kid like me who wanted to play guitar and learn about folk music,” marvels Darrow, who at age 64, still resides in Claremont. “You could take an instrument home and play it while you were paying it off.” (Ben Harper, grandson of shop owners Charles and Dot Chase, would later record a cover of Darrow’s “Whipping Boy” as the lead single for his major label debut.) At Pitzer College, Chris spent two years assisting respected folklorist Guy Carawan, who was teaching American Folk Life Studies. Carawan is responsible for introducing the world to iconic protest anthem “We Shall Overcome.” With Kaleidoscope, Chris Darrow and bandmates David Lindley, Solomon Feldthouse and Max Buda, pioneered an adventurous blend of Middle Eastern, country, folk, blues and psychedelia that introduced Western ears to the intriguing instrumentation of the Turkish oud and caz. The genre-defying sound of Kaleidoscope’s 1967 debut Side Trips, recorded on some of the first eight-track recording machines in America, anticipated the World Beat movement by decades. The eclectic nature of their music allowed them the opportunity to perform with a wide spectrum of artists including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Taj Mahal, The Byrds, Ike and Tina Turner, Bo Diddley, Steppenwolf, The Grateful Dead, The Impressions and Procul Harum. Kaleidoscope even gigged outside of the Monterey Pop Festival, playing to the Hells Angels. Citing creative differences, Chris Darrow quit Kaleidoscope shortly after completion of the band’s sophomore effort Beacon From Mars. Soon after his departure, he got a call from his former bandmates who were in a bind. Stuart Brottman, the musician set to take over Darrow’s duties in Kaleidoscope, was not yet available for their December 1967 residency in New York City. They asked Chris to come with them. Booked for a week of gigs at Steve Paul’s chic midtown Manhattan club The Scene, Kaleidoscope had their gear stolen almost as soon as they arrived in town. With loaner gear borrowed from fellow West Coaster Frank Zappa who was in town recording with The Mothers of Invention. The band opened for Nico (whom Darrow had previously met in L.A.), who was accompanied only by her Hammond B3 organ. “There were very few West Coast groups that had played in the East yet, and we ‘long haired hippies’ were the antithesis of the New York vibe at the time,” says Darrow while reflecting on that particularly pivotal night. “Warhol and his minions showed up, The Cyrcle was there, the Chambers Brothers, Leonard Cohen and a pre-Blood Sweat and Tears David Clayton-Thomas were all hanging out.” After Kaleidoscope’s set, Cohen approached the band about playing on his forthcoming album. They agreed to the gig and he next day Darrow, Lindley and Buda sat in Cohen’s apartment learning to play compositions that would become debut masterwork Songs of Leonard Cohen. “Boy you guys really saved me when I did my first album in New York,” says Leonard Cohen when he meets Chris Darrow face to face for the first time in 34 years. Cohen has come down the hill from nearby Mt. Baldy Zen Retreat and the two are sitting in Yianni’s Greek Café in Darrow’s hometown of Claremont CA. Lending his bass playing skills to those sessions, Darrow appears on album tracks “So Long Marianne” and “Teachers.” The Kaleidoscope/Cohen collaborations that didn’t make Songs’ final cut were later resurrected for use in Robert Altman’s film McCabe and Mrs. Miller, including alternate versions of “Sisters of Mercy” and “The Stranger Song.” After seeing them perform in New York City, Chris Darrow took up the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s offer to join forces, and Chris returned to Los Angeles as an official member of the group. Chris recorded two albums with the Dirt Band including Rare Junk, and appeared in the Clint Eastwood musical Paint Your Wagon. In 1969, Darrow and the Dirt Band’s Jeff Hanna broke off and started their own group called The Corvettes, releasing two singles for the Dot label, produced by Mike Nesmith. At the same time Linda Ronstadt, a regular at the Ash Grove and Troubadour, was in immediate need of a backing band. The hard driving country sound of The Corvettes was a perfect match for the young singer’s voice. While backing Ronstadt, they asked to keep their own identity and performed a song or two per set at The Corvettes. Hanna eventually returned to his full time gig in the Dirt Band, and was replaced by (future Eagle) Bernie Leadon. While playing with Ronstadt in New York, Chris Darrow spotted Peter Asher checking into the band’s hotel. It was 1969 and Asher was fresh from his gig at Apple Records (where he had given a young James Taylor his first record deal), about to take on the position as Director of A&R for MGM Records. In addition to performing in Ronstadt’s band, Darrow had also done occasional work as her road manager. Seizing the opportunity in front of him, Darrow extended an invite to Asher to come see their show at The Bitter End. Asher would go on to produce hit records for Linda Ronstadt for the next twenty years. Asher had also extended the offer to produce The Corvettes for MGM, but by the end of the band’s stay in New York, Bernie Leadon had been recruited into the Flying Burrito Brothers and John Ware and John London became part of Mike Nesmith’s First National Band. Though an MGM deal for the Corvettes never transpired, Asher later called on Darrow to provide fiddle and violin on James Taylor’s wildly popular second album Sweet Baby James. Chris soon signed to Fantasy Records as a solo artist and released his first LP Artist Proof in 1972. He moved over to the United Artists label for his next two releases, Chris Darrow and Under My Own Disguise. Recorded in England and California with members of Fairport Convention, arranger and harpsichordist Dolly Collins, pedal steel genius B.J. Cole (Scott Walker, Elton John) and a host of others, these two albums pair Darrow’s raw California twang and taste for experimentation with the crisp English production of the emerging UK folk-rock scene. “I chose to go to England to record my second solo album Chris Darrow. I had recorded a real American album with Artist Proof. To move to the next rung, I felt that it was necessary to expand and search out new territories. In the early seventies there was a movement around the world to return to the roots. Groups like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span were exploring the English tradition, and there were movements in France and Ireland pushing for the return of indigenous traditions. These people were like minds to me and I sought to meld the various traditions on a pan-world level.”

While these records have remained largely obscure, more than 35 years later, the music sounds incredibly modern. Chris Darrow was ahead of the mark on many fronts, and with these reissued titles the rest of the world may finally catch up to

http://prabook.org/web/person-view.html?profileId=382947 Christopher Lloyd Darrow, musician. Background Darrow, Christopher Lloyd was born on July 30, 1944 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Son of Paul Gardner Darrow and Nadine Joyce Gunderson. Education Associate of Arts, Mount Sac, Pomona, California, 1964; Bachelor, Claremont College, 1966. Career Recording artist Kaleidoscope, 1965-1967. Works Recording artist on more than 100 albums, including: Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 1967-1969, Corvettes, 1969, Linda Ronstadt, 1969-1975, James Taylor "Sweet Baby James", 1970, John Stewart, 1969-1972, Hoyt Axton, 1969-1972, Straight From the Heart/Coyote Taxim Records, Germany, 1997, Harem Girl, 1998. Photographer in entertainment field. Married Donna Marie Haren, June 27, 1964. 1 child, Steven Christopher. child: Steven Christopher Darrow mother: Nadine Joyce Gunderson spouse: Donna Marie Haren father: Paul Gardner 1964 Mount Sac 1966 Claremont College 1965 - 1967 Recording artist, Kaleidoscope

http://www.discogs.com/artist/350509-Chris-Darrow

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Bobby Wood (born Robert William Woodman, January 25, 1941) is an American keyboard player, session musician and songwriter.

He was born into a musical family at Mitchell Switch, a farming community near New Albany, Mississippi. His grandfather taught shape note singing, and his father, Leslie Wood, hosted gospel music programs on radio station WELO in Tupelo. Bobby Wood learned to play the organ and played with his family in a musical group, before moving to Memphis in 1960. There, he was befriended and mentored by Stan Kesler, an engineer and producer at Sun Records. Kesler wrote and arranged "If I'm a Fool for Lovin' You", which Wood recorded; issued as a single on Joy Records, the record rose to number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1964. However, when touring in support of the record, Wood was injuredin a road accident and hospitalized, effectively ending his career as a solo performer.

He returned to session work at Sun, before rival producer Chips Moman chose him

Born January 25, 1941 Genre Country Also Known As Robert William Woodman

Artist Biography by Steve Kurutz A former member of one of the most successful studio groups ever, the 827 Thomas Street Band, keyboardist Bobby Wood has been influential in both Memphis and Nashville, playing on some of the most vital soul and country records ever released, as well as writing several number one country hits.

Heavily influenced by Jerry Lee Lewis early on in his career, Wood moved to Memphis in 1960 in hopes of becoming an actor (acting? In Memphis?). In any case, the young keyboardist was befriended by Sun Records engineer Stan Kesler who fostered Wood's talent, eventually helping him release the 1964 hit "If I'm a Fool for Lovin' You" on Joy Records. It was while touring in support of "Fool" that Wood was injured in a car crash that laid him up for over half-a-year, effectively ending his career as a solo performer. Yet in retrospect, the setback turned out to be a positive one as Wood began devoting more time to studio work. When he was one of a half-dozen top players chosen by producer Chips Moman to form the American Studios House Band, Wood embarked on not only one of the most creative periods of his life, but of the music industry as well. Between 1967 and 1971, American Studios was responsible for 120 hits. Among the artists Wood backed were Elvis Presley, Dusty Springfield, Herbie Mann, Wilson Pickett, and the Sweet Inspirations.

After Moman relocated to Atlanta, Wood made the move to Nashville and started playing country sessions. Because of his exceptional talent and track record with American Studios, Woods soon found himself in the list of Nashville's "A" musicians, playing on sessions by Kris Kristofferson, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette. In the early '70s, Wood also began writing and penned the hit "Still Thinkin' About You" for Billy Craddock in 1974. Since then he has written, or co-written, several hits including "What's Your Name, What's Your Number," "Talkin' In Your Sleep," and "Half the Way." In 1989, through mutual friend Allen Reynolds, Wood and Garth Brooks met and formed a musical partnership. Wood has played keyboards on all of Brooks' releases and, in turn, the singer has recorded one of Wood's compositions to date.

http://www.elvisinfonet.com/spotlight_fromelvistogarth.html 'From Elvis To Garth'

Bobby Wood - & The Memphis Boys

- An EIN Spotlight by Pamela Mays Decker -

Extraordinarily the 40th anniversary of Elvis' pivotal recordings at American Studios sessions has essentially passed without so much as a whimper.

EIN contributor Pamela Mays Decker turns a much-needed spotlight on Bobby Wood, keyboardist and a musical inspiration behind these important Memphis sessions.

The Memphis Boys, as the studio group, with their natural abilities and dedication cranked out some great sounds which resulted in 122 hits emerging from the studio – a feat yet unmatched.

Mississippi farm boy, Gospel aficionado, solo artist, songwriter, collaborator with Nashville A-list stars, member of the most successful studio group in history – and very soon, published author. Throughout his remarkable life, Memphis Boys keyboardist Bobby Wood has worn many hats in the music world. Fortunately for fans, he will soon release a book in which he candidly discusses his faith, family, frailties and his phenomenal career spanning six decades that has found him working with a range of prominent stars "from Elvis to Garth" and just about everyone in between.

But what lay ahead was far beyond anything he could have ever visualized in his wildest dreams or asked for in his humblest prayers. As Wood is quick to share, "The Lord has really blessed me." And to music fans, those blessings wrap our world in an array of sounds that stir our very souls and deeply touch our hearts. The devastation that would have easily turned a man of weaker character toward a life wracked with torturous self-pity and brooding echoes of "what might have been" was indeed conversely the genesis of a new phase of success for the very grounded and resolute Bobby Wood. The stability of studio session work better suited his needs, so he became Sun’s staff piano player. But it would be his motorcycle riding buddy from another Memphis studio who would soon offer the opportunity not only to make records, but also to set records.

Wood met ace guitarist, Rockabilly veteran and soon to be iconic producer Lincoln "Chips" Moman, a Georgia transplant to the Bluff City, in 1962 while he was still manning the board across town at Stax Studios. After an acrimonious split from Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton over their failure to properly credit and fairly compensate him for his role in the studio’s successes, Moman embarked with Don Crews on a venture that would attract some of the industry’s most prominent and beloved performers as well as turn raw talent into hot international acts.

The unrivaled success of American Studios was a phenomenal combination of Moman’s uncanny abilities as a sharp, plainspoken producer, the poignant product of his assembly of talented, expressive songwriters… and the seamless sounds of the rhythm section comprised of a half-dozen Southern music men who moved the earth in a way the region hadn’t experienced since the New Madrid Fault Line temblors that caused the Mississippi River to flow backward some 155 years earlier.

In addition to Wood on keyboards, the Memphis Boys were rounded out by Reggie Young on lead guitar, Bobby Emmons on organ and keyboards, Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech on bass and Gene Chrisman on drums.

With the utter ease of an autonomic bodily function, this talented smattering of country boys spewed forth the funky, signature Memphis mixture of Soul and Country – a sound as rich and gritty as the delta soil beneath their feet and as murky, rhythmic and rollicking as the muddy river that snaked southward at the edge of town just blocks away.

(Above:Bobby Wood, Mike Leech, Tommy Cogbill, Gene Chrisman, Elvis, Bobby Emmons, Reggie Young, Ed Kollis & composer Dan Penn.) Together, their natural abilities and dedication to cranking out some great sounds resulted in 122 hits emerging from the studio at Chelsea and Thomas from 1967 to 1971 – a feat yet unmatched. To this day, the strong bond of brotherhood they forged more than 43 years ago remains unyielding.

Of all the successful artists fortunate to have been backed by the Memphis Boys over the years – including Dusty Springfield, Neil Diamond, Wilson Pickett, The Box Tops, B.J. Thomas, the Sweet Inspirations, Dionne Warwick, Paul Revere and The Raiders, Merrilee Rush, Sandy Posey, Billy Swan, Joe Tex, Herbie Mann, James and Bobby Purify and countless others (gracing four separate charts in the process) – they are most proud of their role in helping usher Elvis back to chart-topping prominence during their January-February 1969 collaboration that served as his creative rebirth.

But that wasn’t Bobby Wood’s first meeting with Elvis. Around the time "That’s All Right Mama" was released, the Wood family was recording demos at Sun. Sam Phillips introduced the Union County boy to the young man from Lee County – who no one could have possibly fathomed at the time was about to change music history and turn popular culture on its ear. A few years later, Elvis invited him and the future Mrs. Wood to one of his infamous overnight excursions at the fairgrounds.

Beyond the obvious connection in their rural upbringing in neighboring counties, Wood and Presley felt a kinship. They shared a deep Christian faith, love of spiritual music and they were both intimately acquainted with hard work and hard times. Elvis often spoke in somber tones of how his mother kept him on the straight-and-narrow. His loss left an abyss of loneliness – and Wood knew he was reaching out, seeking a deeper friendship from his fellow Mississippian. In his forthcoming book, he relates many touching stories about their initial meeting, subsequent friendship and his recollections of several personal experiences with Elvis’ generosity – many of which he has never before shared publicly.

Many fans have read about the tremendous honor Wood received when Elvis recorded the song that had been such a hit for Wood. He recalls, "He brought Vernon with him (to American) one evening, and Elvis said, ‘Daddy, I'd like you to meet somebody here.’ He brought him over to shake my hand and he said, ‘Do you know who this guy is?’ Vernon said, ‘No, I'm not sure.’ So Elvis asked him, ‘What's your favorite record?’ Vernon said, "If I'm a Fool." Elvis told him, ‘Well, this is the guy who sang it.’ And his dad just said, ‘Whoa!’" On February 20, 1969, after a long night of recording with standouts such as "It Keeps Right On a Hurtin’" and "Any Day Now," he and Wood were sitting at the piano, talking about spirituality and music around 4:30 a.m. Everyone else in the studio was tired and there were few remaining numbers on their song list. It was then that Elvis recorded "If I’m a Fool (For Loving You)" – and even played the piano – because it was his father’s favorite song.

Wood observes that one other entertainer with whom he has worked for the past 20 years shares the same generous spirit Elvis displayed. "Garth Brooks is like that," he said. "He’d give you the shirt off his back. If he knows people are hurting, he’d do anything for them. He’s a lot like Elvis in that respect." In his memoir, he draws interesting parallels between the wellsprings of talent both those superstars were blessed with. From his unique – and to some, quite enviable perspective, he delightfully shares numerous heart-warming personal recollections of his work with so many beloved acts. As he is quick to self-effacingly demur, it is a position he is lucky to have. From a fan’s viewpoint however, one could argue that conversely, they were the lucky ones to have worked with a man like Bobby Wood.

Many times, Elvis told Wood that he was his favorite piano player, and he even asked him on several occasions to join him on tour. He felt conflicted. His friendship with Elvis was important, but he also had a very busy studio recording schedule that he felt he needed to concentrate on. While Elvis fans surely would have enjoyed Wood onstage during Elvis’ blockbuster concerts, music lovers at large would have missed out on the pure magic that Wood helped make on the many records since the late 1960’s/early 1970’s that speak for themselves. (Right;Elvis and Bobby Wood at American Studio)

American Studios wasn’t the only time he worked with Elvis. In addition to the two successful albums and four hit singles generated from those early 1969 sessions, his work with Elvis is featured on other releases. The album "Elvis Now" was released in January 1972, but actually featured some songs from the American sessions. He worked with Elvis again in Memphis during his July and December 1973 sessions at STAX Studios, and the results appear on "Raised On Rock" (released in October 1973) and "Good Times" (released in March 1974).

A devastating event that occurred across town on a hotel balcony at 450 Mulberry Street on April 4, 1968 not only stunned the world, but it also dealt a stultifying blow to R&B music as it had been played within the studios of Muscle Shoals, Alabama and in Memphis up until then. Beyond that point, the feeling was different – with a thick, stifling tension hanging in the air like a negative vibe.

For decades, the impoverished and working-class throughout the rural agrarian South labored side by side in fields, sharing the same oppressive lot whether they were of Scots-Irish, Native American, African or other descent. The work was backbreaking… the living was hard… and toiling shoulder-to-shoulder, skin color was of little to no significance. No one had either the time or the condition to pass judgment. Under the hot sun’s glare, laborers sang to pass the time and ease their burdened bodies and souls. As Wood recounts, "There was great singing in those cotton fields. Everybody worked hard."

Bonds of friendship were shared – as was the sorrow, pain, joy and exaltation of their shared God. By stark contrast, the media images viewed by the rest of the world did not show this side of Southern living, but instead shaped long-standing, narrow perceptions that all white Southerners were seething racists. Those heavily circulated images did not accurately or fairly reflect the unity that was pervasive in so many areas.

It was from that sense of hardscrabble concomitance that emerged the shapings of mid-century popular music through the melding of traditionally "white" music and traditionally "black" music. In the 1950’s and 1960’s studios of Muscle Shoals and Memphis, Caucasians and African Americans worked as equal players, just as they had done together in the fields under the boiling Southern sun. The resulting sounds reflected the tightly intermeshed culture, faith and sense of unity that existed between so many of all races. (Further adding to that musical menagerie – a veritable Mulligan stew of cultures, it was an atheist Jew from New York City named Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records who would be instrumental in the wide distribution of this sound to the masses during this time.) These facts may very well fly in the face of some long-held perceptions of life in the American South. But those who lived it know it well.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination deeply affected African American artists – and the devastating crescendo of tension that ensued in Memphis and resonated everywhere beyond drove a wedge among the racially diverse R&B champions who had together worked harmoniously for so long. There was no way to turn back the clock. The brotherhood… the mixing and melding… was permanently altered. It is profoundly ironic that the soul that Wood proudly reflects "was born in Memphis" was altered permanently by the shattering events in Memphis in spring 1968. It wasn’t very long until all the American Studios players made a reluctant, heart-wrenching mass exodus from Memphis to begin the next stage of their careers in another Tennessee city some 210 miles due east.

Nashville, Memphis-Style

In the early 1970s, Wood was invited to Nashville by Elvis’ Blue Moon Boys guitarist Scotty Moore as well as by all-around Music City mogul Buddy Killen. Then, he invited fellow American Studios alum Johnny Christopher (who wrote "Mama Liked The Roses" and co-wrote "Always On My Mind") to join him. Before long, the Memphis Boys were doing their thing in Nashville – and often on projects with their American Studios producer Chips Moman – for stars such as Willie Nelson, B.J. Thomas, Johnny Cash, Ronnie Milsap, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joe Royal, Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette and a parade of Country and Pop luminaries while they still cut sides with the occasional R&B star. While their careers resumed in middle Tennessee, there is no doubt they had taken their Memphis-born magic with them as another stream of #1 and Top 20 hits poured from their efforts.

It was during this time Wood put pen to paper to begin songwriting, which he said was inspired by another American Studios brother-in-arms, R&B master Dan Penn (see photo above). In 1974, Billy "Crash" Craddock covered his "Still Thinkin' About You," taking it to #4 on the Country charts. Since then, he has written or co-written many tunes such as Andrea True Connection’s 1978 Top 10 Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play hit, "What's Your Name, What's Your Number" (co-written with Roger Cook), Crystal Gayle’s Top 20 Pop and Country hits "Talkin' In Your Sleep" and "Half the Way" and Ronnie Milsap’s 20th #1 Country and Adult Contemporary chart hit "He Got You" (co-written with Ralph Murphy) among many others.

By the end of the 1980’s, a mutual friend introduced Wood to Garth Brooks, and thus emerged yet another longstanding musical partnership and close friendship. Wood has played keyboards on all of Brooks’ recordings – and in February 1998, the Country megastar and his future wife Trisha Yearwood won a Best Country Collaboration with Vocals Grammy for their #1 hit duet, "In Another's Eyes," co-written by Brooks, Bobby Wood and John Peppard. The song, from Brooks’ RIAA-certified Diamond album "Sevens" (as well as Yearwood’s #1 album "Songbook: A Collection of Hits") also received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Song. When the Memphis Boys were one of six inaugural groups inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2007, Brooks introduced them with his deferential observation, "There's very few records an artist makes, but there are a hell of a lot of records musicians make." Making his mark in Memphis and continuing with 36 years of success in Nashville, the Gospel-bred Bobby Wood has played on some of the most vital R&B, Pop and Country records ever released – even making a foray into Disco and Jazz. Looking back on a lifetime of music, this north Mississippi boy remains a genuine soul, ever close to his spiritual roots that have guided him on a fascinating ride through music history. He may have Nashville dirt beneath him, but the heart of a musical Memphian beats inside him.

And this gentle spirit is quick to express his appreciation of the fans – sharing that as the 40th anniversary of those landmark sessions with Elvis have come and gone, the group has often reflected upon their time in the studio with him. Approaching five decades after they first came together, they not only remain very busy as highly sought-after working studio musicians, but most importantly, the Memphis Boys remain true friends; a clan of musical brothers, of sorts. Of the many accolades showered upon Wood and the entire crew from that funky studio at 827 Thomas Street, it is their strong, deep bond of true friendship that is no doubt their greatest gift and proudest accomplishment.

Long content with his role of helping some of music’s biggest stars sound great, this gracious, humble man steps forward with plenty to say about his trials, triumphs and the grace that has long guided his path. Bobby Wood’s forthcoming book will surely be an eagerly anticipated must-read not only for Elvis fans, but certainly for ardent fans of all music the world over – and anyone who seeks to be inspired. A survivor in the truest sense, Wood is a walking miracle whose gifts and contributions go so much deeper than his musical talents. The words of this man who overcame great suffering to achieve even greater success truly touch and uplift the spirit.

The expected release of Wood’s memoir (the title yet to be announced, but definitely subtitled "From Elvis to Garth") is slated for later this year, with no firm date as of yet. As more news develops, updates will follow.

Psalms 150:4: "Praise him with the tambourine and choir! Praise him with stringed instruments and the organ!"

http://www.discogs.com/artist/293222-Bobby-Wood?filter_anv=1&anv=Bobby+Woods

http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/bobby_wood

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William S. Harvey (d. 1992) was an American designer, responsible for the design of many of Elektra Records' album covers in the 1960s and 1970s including those by Love, The Doors, The Stooges,

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bill-harvey-mn0002157360/biography Artist Biography by Richie Unterberger Though he was not a musician and not closely involved with recording music in the studio or the direction of artists' musical careers, Bill Harvey made notable contributions to the music business as the art director of Elektra Records. Elektra was possibly the most respected independent folk and (starting in the mid-'60s) rock label during much of the time Harvey worked for the company, between the early '50s and the early '70s. A large part of its reputation was due to the quality of its presentation, of which the design, photography, and lettering on the LP sleeves were crucial. Harvey (sometimes identified as William Harvey on sleeve credits) was instrumental to the high, distinctive standards Elektra set in those regards. Elektra releases could be identified by their lettering and logos by many fans even before they saw the label's name, and Harvey was to a large degree responsible for that.

Harvey did his first Elektra cover for Hally Wood's obscure 1953 10" LP O Lovely Appearance of Death. By the standards of the day, when the LP itself was still a pretty new concept, Harvey's artwork was considerably above the norm for album sleeves. The script he used to write the lettering of "Elektra" on that Wood LP would continue to be used on the label's releases for about a decade. This was in keeping with the concept Jac Holzman was developing of ensuring consistent, quality trademarks to Elektra's graphics as part of his goal to project a recognizable label identity to the public. In fact, Holzman got angry with Harvey for doing work for another label shortly afterward, and then solved the problem in a logical manner to everyone's satisfaction by hiring Harvey as an Elektra employee.

Among Harvey's noted achievements were the design of the guitar player that was used as Elektra's logo through the mid-'60s, the butterfly logo that replaced it, the logo for Elektra's Nonesuch imprint, and the special lettering that was used for Love's band name on all of their releases (and for the band in general). He also had the concept for the famous cover of the Doors' second album, Strange Days, with its midgets and circus figures. Regardless of whether the photos or the artwork on Elektra's sleeves were Harvey's, they were always presented with taste, often boasting striking images, such as the Doors on the first album, Tim Buckley's Goodbye and Hello with the bottlecap in his eye, Fred Neil standing at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, and Love posed around a mysterious stone structure on their first album. Harvey died in the early '90s. https://albumcoverhalloffame.wordpress.com/achof-artist-biographies-g-i/ William S. (“Bill”) Harvey – Notable examples of album art – Love – Love and Forever Changes; The Doors – The Doors, Waiting for The Sun, Strange Days, Soft Parade and Best of…; MC5 – Kick Out the Jams; The Stooges – Stooges; Tim Buckley – Happy/Sad and Lorca

(d. 1992) William S. Harvey served as both office manager and art director – working alongside label founder Jac Holzman – for Elektra Records from 1953 through 1973 (the label was sold to Warner Communications, with Holzman leaving in 1972 for a senior position at Warner). In his role of art director – beginning with the label’s 10th release – he was responsible for the design of most of Elektra’s (and sister label Nonesuch’s) album covers, logos and other related packaging designs (on a related note, the first nine record covers were done by Maurice Sendak, later of Where The Wild Things Are book fame).

Harvey established the label’s reputation in the industry as a design icon, taking as much care in the record’s package design sensibility as in the quality of the music delivered inside. Working with staff photographer Joel Brodsky for a number of years, the pair teamed to helped define the public imagery of pop culture icons such as The Doors (and Jim Morrison), Love and The Stooges.

Keeping it all in the family, William S. Harvey’s son, Bill Harvey, is also a talented graphic designer with music industry clients. In 2010, to commemorate the celebration of the 60th anniversary of Elektra Records, he produced a limited-edition poster featuring the label’s well-known logo and butterfly mascot.

More information available at – http://www.answers.com/topic/bill-harvey-miscellaneous-artist

http://www.discogs.com/artist/681789-William-S-Harvey

http://www.bsnpubs.com/elektra/elektrastory.html

http://www.arsc-audio.org/conference/2006/pdf/abstracts-for-website.pdf Elektra Records and the Development of Album Cover Art (1951-1970) Cary Ginell, Origin Jazz Library, Thousand Oaks, California When 19-year-old Jac Holzman founded Elektra Records in 1950, the 33 1/3 rpm record album was still in its infancy. By the time he sold the label to Warner Communications twenty years later, the LP had completely transformed the music industry. This twenty-year period marked an amazing cultural transformation in the United States, with music as its motivating force. Beginning with a series of groundbreaking 10” LPs, Holzman began utilizing the covers of his albums to assist in marketing the eclectic folk and ethnic music he was recording. In Holzman’s viewpoint, “compelling covers were essential to capture the eye of the browser and convey the drama of the music to people forced to buy on faith. Elektra graphics were a key part of our identity.” As the 1950s progressed, Elektra’s album covers became much more than a marketing tool; they became works of art and the focus of a new part of the music industry. Elektra’s art director Bill Harvey created the label’s visual identity, using stark line drawings, high quality photography, whimsical ideas, abstract art, and even sex to help sell the albums. Whether the music was folk, blues, ethnic, or psychedelic, Holzman and Harvey blazed a trail that would lead to the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” and the revolutionizing of album art. This presentation explores the history of Elektra, showing Elektra covers and hearing Jac Holzman’s analyses of key LPs in the series.

https://albumcoverhalloffame.wordpress.com/achof-artist-biographies-g-i/ William S. (“Bill”) Harvey – Notable examples of album art – Love – Love and Forever Changes; The Doors – The Doors, Waiting for The Sun, Strange Days, Soft Parade and Best of…; MC5 – Kick Out the Jams; The Stooges – Stooges; Tim Buckley – Happy/Sad and Lorca

(d. 1992) William S. Harvey served as both office manager and art director – working alongside label founder Jac Holzman – for Elektra Records from 1953 through 1973 (the label was sold to Warner Communications, with Holzman leaving in 1972 for a senior position at Warner). In his role of art director – beginning with the label’s 10th release – he was responsible for the design of most of Elektra’s (and sister label Nonesuch’s) album covers, logos and other related packaging designs (on a related note, the first nine record covers were done by Maurice Sendak, later of Where The Wild Things Are book fame). Harvey established the label’s reputation in the industry as a design icon, taking as much care in the record’s package design sensibility as in the quality of the music delivered inside. Working with staff photographer Joel Brodsky for a number of years, the pair teamed to helped define the public imagery of pop culture icons such as The Doors (and Jim Morrison), Love and The Stooges. Keeping it all in the family, William S. Harvey’s son, Bill Harvey, is also a talented graphic designer with music industry clients. In 2010, to commemorate the celebration of the 60th anniversary of Elektra Records, he produced a limited-edition poster featuring the label’s well-known logo and butterfly mascot. More information available at – http://www.answers.com/topic/bill-harvey-miscellaneous-artist

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LwkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=%22bill+harvey%22+artist+elektra&source=bl&ots=kwf0a5nGBC&sig=IfIQ4Ay9k3IQxbzbqVMe9k64PNI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjzk8jT98nKAhVCPj4KHZwRAkw4ChDoAQgqMAY#v=onepage&q=%22bill%20harvey%22%20artist%20elektra&f=false

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Raymond Charles Burton (born 1945) is an Australian musician and songwriter, who co-wrote Helen Reddy's 1972 hit song "I Am Woman".

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19760523&id=Hv5jAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iuYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3296,8009591&hl=en

http://www.rayburtonmusic.com/history.html

Ray Burton The Man who wrote “I AM WOMAN” Lifetime Honorary Member of the International Songwriters Association

http://www.facebook.com/Rayburtonmusic http://www.rayburtonmusic.com http://talentspotlightmagazine.net/2012/03/interview-with-ray-burton-by-jessica-gilbert/ http://www.myspace.com/rayburtonmusic http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/blu-azz/id339684736 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayburton

Hit songs – that’s what it’s all about and it doesn’t happen by chance. Ray’s musical education began at age 3, both parents were in the business. By 14 Ray and his guitar were on the road in his first band. By 18 he had his first no.1 hit oddly enough in snow clad Switzerland and even more confusing it was a surf song called ‘Reef-Ride’. Then came another evolution in his learning curve - singing lead tenor as the youngest member of The Delltones, an iconic Australian vocal group. After two years perfecting harmonies with "The Delltones", and with a passion for great melodies, he joined a high profile Sydney group called "The Executives" as a lead singer and guitarist. That’s when Ray’s songwriting skills started to dominate. The band needed songs, Ray wrote them, three of them hitting the top 10 charts - ‘Christopher Robin’, ‘Summerhill Road’, ‘So I’m Down, So I’m Out’. International No1. ‘I AM WOMAN’ – co-written with Helen Reddy, has gone Platinum so many times Ray has lost count. Making it in the USA. A few months after arriving in the US, Paramount Records had Ray in their New York studios writing more chart makers - ‘World Of Fantasy’, ‘Dream For A Love’, ‘Astral Plane Ride’ – recorded and performed by Burton and Cunico on the Paramount Strive, Seek, Find album that was voted no.1 best album of the month toppling Sly and The Family Stone. Australia. Back from the USA Ray was the founding member of a Melbourne based band called Ayers Rock. Three of his original songs written at that time include ‘Rock And Roll Fight’, ‘Sorrowful Eyes’, ‘Morning Magic’ ‘Lady of the Morning’ under Mushroom Publishing Australia – all the songs made the top 10 charts. A few years later, after time-out on his Northern NSW property came the opportunity to write and record a solo album, it featured two strong hits … ‘Too Hard To Handle’ and ‘Paddington Green’ – recorded and performed by Ray Burton with his crème-de-la-crème band Crossfire, on the Warner Bros. Dreamers and Nightflyers album. All of the above made the top 10 charts plus Literally dozens more in the top 50 both in Australia and the USA. Movie Credits: Warner Bros Rabbit Run staring James Caan, two songs ‘Hey Man’ and ‘You’re Going To Love Me’; Airport 75, song ‘Best Friend’ performed by Helen Reddy; My Best Friend’s Wedding starring Julia Roberts. Short films: Lilian – theme song ‘Lilian’. Theatre: Of note - worked with the renowned Sam Shepard on the entire score for ‘Melodrama Play’ a musical staged in Sydney. Advertising clients: include Coca-Cola, Revlon, P&O, and of late – in the US the Burger King Ad – “I Am Man”. The Craft: Songwriting is about connecting a whole bunch of loose ends - creativity, emotions, musicianship, self discipline, passion, foresight, reading current trends, a dash of luck and a liberal sprinkling of magic. Being on the road, singing and writing for his supper his entire professional life, some five decades, Ray knows what it takes to keep them coming back for more. From huge gigs (80,000 capacity) Sydney Stadium, Horden Pavillion, Festival Hall to V.I.P. clubs – The Gaslight in New York to LA’s hot spots, you name it Ray’s played it. He’s played with, and supported, the best of them… Billy Joel (recorded two tracks on his ‘Cold Spring Harbour’ album); The Small Faces, The Who, Paul Jones from the Manfred Mann Group, The Spencer Davis Group, AMERICA, Procul Harem, QUEEN, Little River Band, Joan Armatrading, Jimmy Webb the legendary American songwriter and Dave Mason who was the bass player/singer in Steve Winwood’s late 1960's English band “Traffic”. Ray did all of this before going solo. In Australia and the USA Ray has performed on countless TV and radio shows. Over the years he’s gained a wealth of hands on fundamental experience that he draws on constantly. Ray’s repertoire spans the genres of classic rock, roots, blues, contemporary country, and recently writing the song, then inspiring a 40 strong talented young choir to perform in the Rhythm & Blues Gospel category in the hotly contested ‘South Pacific Song Contest’. Ray won and beat a host of international contestants. Does Ray Burton ever hit the OFF button? Well No not really, currently he has over 60 ‘ready-to-go’ songs in his song writing catalogue and is constantly working on new material and looking for great new talent to sing them. Much of his current catalogue was written when he elected to take a well earned breather from the hectic pace of touring and performing. He chose to live by the principles of permaculture, embracing an alternative lifestyle in organic bliss high up on Tomewin Mountain - a sub tropical paradise with a view 50+ kilometers out to sea located in Northern New South Wales Australia. This is where family life and raising two children became his priority but his music never stopped. In his home studio he continued to obey his passion for songwriting building a catalogue of yet to be heard or published works. As a mentor for the inaugural Australian Songwriters Conference www.australiansongwritersconference.com.au, Ray’s priority was to share his visions, foresight and first hand experiences in the music world with up and coming singer/songwriters. Ray currently has a new CD available titled “Blu-Azz”. See websites for more information.

Rayza Scissors & Strings

Ray Burton The Man who wrote “I AM WOMAN” Qualified Haircutter Lifetime Honorary Member of the International Songwriters Association

"What do you want to be when you grow up Ray?" I only ever had one answer to that question ... "cut hair, sing and play guitar". So I did. Not too many days out of school I was apprenticed by a Sydney Hairdressing/Barber shop where by day I mastered the "cut ‘n’ style" and by night I mastered the "strings and songs in the Sydney music scene". With just six months of the four year hairdressing apprenticeship left to go, along came the offer of a young person’s lifetime - a national tour on the road with a bunch of the best international musicians of the time ... and I would be earning about four or five times the money my hair cutting day job was paying. How does an ambitious teenager say "no thanks" to an offer like that? You can't, and you just don't. You take the opportunity and go for it!

I kissed my folks goodbye and I have to admit it was just as tough leaving my other salon work family behind. I was leaving after almost four years, every day with some of the most skilled European hairdressers and hair cutters in Sydney at that time. Italians, Dutch, French, English you name it, there were a lot of nationalities represented along with all of us Australians. What else could a hairdressing apprentice want? There were both Guys and Girls who taught me to wield a razor, snap and snip my scissors with a style and an ease that put a smile on countless client’s faces.

Great style kept us high on the list of favourite Sydney hairdressers. How lucky was I to work with my hero's, guys who taught me how to sharpen a cut-throat razor so precisely that it was almost impossible to make a mistake while styling the most demanding customers' hair? For relaxation I perfected sharpening my own scissors, working through all the different grits and sharpening stones while also writing songs in my mind and working to get the angle just right on both the scissors and the words and music of my original songs.

When I jumped on the band bus I had my guitar in one hand ... and my hairdressing kit in the other. Truth is, my passion for hair cutting never waned but the bright lights and promise of fame and fortune is very seductive to a young singer/songwriter/musician. Well, both fame and fortune came my way. While living for many years in the USA, chiefly in LA and NY, I wrote the biggest international song by any Australian - This song was "I Am Woman" written for another Australian singer residing in the USA, Helen Reddy.

You might want to check out my regular website at www.rayburtonmusic.com to learn more about my music history. I wrote "I AM WOMAN" for/with Helen Reddy Wrote "YOU'RE GONNA LOVE ME", a theme for the Warner Brothers movie "RABBIT RUN". Other movies include "AIRPORT 75", "MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING (1997 with Julia Roberts)", "HIGH SCHOOL HIGH (1996)", "TRICK" (1999). I have performed in several successful recording and touring bands plus I am internationally recognized with many high end musical achievements in my credits. I began my music career at just 14 touring as a member of THE TELSTARS, then on to THE DELLTONES, THE EXECUTIVES, and then founded AYERS ROCK the legendary Australian Rock/Jazz/Fusion band. I've toured with artists and bands such as BILLY JOEL, THE SMALL FACES, THE WHO, PAUL JONES from the MANFRED MANN GROUP, SPENCER DAVIS GROUP, AMERICA, QUEEN, PROCUL HAREM, LITTLE RIVER BAND, HELEN REDDY, PJ PROBY, JOAN ARMATRADING, JIMMY WEBB and so many others that I can't even think of them all right now, but you've got the picture right? I have definitely traveled and been around.

I cut an album of my all my own songs for Paramount Records in the USA titled STRIVE, SEEK & FIND and it was voted on release as the best album on the American National FM radio charts. Back in Australia after 9 years in the US I recorded a solo album for WARNER BROS entitled Dreamers & Nightflyers using the famous Australian band lineup of CROSSFIRE. This album remains one of the most respected musical albums of the time in Australia producing two national hit songs TOO HARD TO HANDLE and PADDINGTON GREEN. I have also clocked up many years of advertising experience including writing and recording successful Radio and TV Jingles/Commercials for large companies such as COCA COLA, REVLON COSMETICS, P&O LINES plus many more. From my project studio I have also produced and arranged music for TV shows. I mentor other aspiring musicians and songwriters as well. Have I been busy? You bet!

I have to admit I have had the time of my life and my music has kept me in the music arena for decades, singing, writing, playing and for a while now, mentoring many young songwriters who have since become my friends. As an elder, I am proud to be contributing to their futures.

So why go back to hairdressing? Well, why not! I love it, always have loved cutting hair and I always will. It's a creative career and I'm a creative art-spirit, so how do you turn that inner feeling off? You can't, It’s part of who you are. Gratefully I was accepted back into hairdressing college where I did my refresher course with great enthusiasm. The course brought me up-to-date with the latest salon cutting techniques, current styles that change by the day, including new hygiene rules such as the use of disposable razors (for shaving not razor hair cutting).

Here I am today fully qualified with all the appropriate government documents to verify my hair cutting skills. My professional teachers gave me top marks for cutting excellence, dealing with clients regardless of how demanding they may be, speed and accuracy and overall workplace hygiene and efficiency. So, here I am today, eager to get to work cutting and styling hair.

http://www.facebook.com/Rayburtonmusic http://www.rayburtonmusic.com http://talentspotlightmagazine.net/2012/03/interview-with-ray-burton-by-jessica-gilbert/ http://www.myspace.com/rayburtonmusic http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/blu-azz/id339684736 http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayburton