Interview w/ Joanne Fish - Her Handy documentary debuts in Shoals

 

Interview w/ Joanne Fish

Her Handy documentary debuts in Shoals

By Monica Collier - The Times Daily - July 2017

Joanne Fish made her way to a section of Alabama called the Shoals several years ago on one of her many fact-finding missions.  "It took roughly 10 years of her life," W.C. Handy Music Festival Chairwoman Tori Bailey asserted, "but Fish completed her documentary on W.C. Handy” this past November.  She titled it,  “Mr. Handy’s Blues." Now she is headed back to the Shoals to give locals the first peek at her polished gem during a music festival named in the native musician's honor. http://wchandymusicfestival.org/festival.htm

“She spent a lot of time, a lot of energy and her own resources on this film — it was a labor of love for her,” Bailey said of Fish. “For her to be able to come back and share that with the festival — we are so fortunate to have her.” 

There will be three free screenings of “Mr. Handy’s Blues” during the W.C. Handy Music Festival with the first being at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Alabama Music Hall of Fame on U.S. 72 in Tuscumbia. The hall of fame will also show the documentary at 1 p.m. Thursday.

The final showing will be at 10 a.m. Friday at the Florence-Lauderdale Tourism Visitor Center at McFarland Park in Florence.
 
“So many people who met Fish, while she was doing interviews for the documentary, are apparently as impressed with her as I am,” Bailey said. “They’re coming to support the screenings. Dr. Carlos Handy — W.C. Handy’s grandson — will be here. I also talked to Dr. (Willie) Ruff — he is coming. He has recently retired from Yale and is back in the area. Dr. Ruff, along with Dr. David Mussleman, are the two who created the (Handy) festival.”
 
Bailey calls the screenings dual events because not only will there be a question-and-answer session with Fish at each one, Carlos Handy will be present signing copies of W.C. Handy’s "Father of the Blues: An Autobiography."
 
Fish recently took time from touring with the documentary to answer a few questions by phone.
 
TimesDaily: You are not from the Shoals, correct?
 
Fish: That’s correct.
 
TimesDaily: You are not a musician, are you?
 
Fish: No.
 
TimesDaily: So, how in the world did you get interested in telling W.C. Handy’s story?
 
Fish: OK, well, I’ll make a long story short. I was in Florence, Alabama, in 2007 for the George Lindsey Film Festival. I had a film in that festival, it won second place in the documentary category. I really got a chance to explore the area then.  I had been there once before working for the Discovery Channel on a show just for a day. I had eaten at Ricatoni’s and I had been to the (University of North Alabama) campus, but I really hadn’t explored all around. Being at the film festival gave me that opportunity. The film I had in the festival was about Wanda Jackson, the queen of rockabilly. I’m interested in music. I used to work for CMT and the Nashville Network.
 
I went to the Handy home. I felt enlightened going through the Handy home. It was like the heavens opened up and gave me this gift of all this information and this wonderful story. The people there talked to me and gave me more information.
 
I went back three or four times during the course of the four or five days I was there.
 
After that, I went to a film festival in Texas. It was the last one for my film. I told my husband, I’m going to miss Wanda and the film. He said to me, what about Handy?
 
TimesDaily: Did you start work right away?
 
Fish: I told my husband, surely someone has done a documentary about him. I was positive there must be a great film out there. So I spent the next year or so trying to find that film that did not exist.
 
The following year, I met up with Dr. Carlos Handy (W.C. Handy’s grandson) at the Handy Music Festival in Florence. I told him what I wanted to do, and he said OK. So here were are.
 
TimesDaily: Yes, here we are roughly 10 years later. Did you realize you were signing up for a decade-long labor of love?
 
Fish: No. (She said laughing.)

TimesDaily: It has been that long, right?

Fish: Yes ma’am, it has been that long. It’s like when I signed up to run a marathon in the year 2000. If I had known what it was going to take to train for that marathon, I never would have done it.

Fish: Her Gaze Can Daze

I won’t say I spent every minute of the past 10 years working on this. But I was constantly thinking about it and writing grants. First, I had to find the experts to make sure I had the right information. The research and grant-writing took a long time. Also, just making connections and meeting people and trying to figure it all out took time. I’d say that was the first five years.

TimesDaily: You had to put in the legwork before you could get to the fun part?
 
Fish: Yeah, exactly. The past five years has been the shooting and putting it together.

Documentaries typically take a long time. It’s just a long process. People aren’t funding them every day.
 
TimesDaily: When I watched the trailer — www.youtube.com/watch?v=nct9tu5usWo — I wondered if you found yourself going down a rabbit hole. The documentary is about more than the music Mr. Handy created. It’s about him being a groundbreaker in many ways, correct?
 
Fish: Yes. Yes.
 
It is a rabbit hole. That’s a really good way to describe it. You can’t understand Handy unless you understand the entire Civil War and what happened after that …
 
Then, you have to understand why Florence was such a unique place. It was the fertile ground that gave Handy a lot of the tools and confidence to go forward.
 
TimesDaily: Was that uncommon for a small southern town in the late 1800s?
 
Fish: As far as I can tell, it was very unique. Also, his decisions after that — in the face of a Great Depression in 1894 and then Jim Crow – are unique.
 
When you go to the Handy home, what comes through is the overlay of all of that. This guy has a very optimistic story. This is about a person who was successful against all odds. He was able to make his journey to the top.
 
TimesDaily: You mentioned the Handy home. Did you work closely with several people in the Shoals?
 
Fish: Oh yes. It all started with Barbara Broach at the Kennedy-Douglass Center. I met her, and she had to be the first one to say yes and that she would help me. She put me in touch with Carlos Handy. She told me he was the member of the Handy family that I needed to talk to. That really started it all.
 
Then, I was given access to the Handy home. They have boxes and boxes of photographs in a closet over there. Mary Nicely was my main partner in crime in Florence. I shouldn’t say crime … (laughing), but we spent so many hours going through those boxes after hours and scanning things. We got to be good friends. I respect her and love her so much.
 
TimesDaily: So you found Florence welcoming and supportive of “Mr. Handy’s Blues” being made?

Fish: Yes! It was so easy. I didn’t have to convince anyone. I am so grateful that Barbara saw me — without knowing me — and said, “OK, you want to do this? Then that’s great.” The only thing she asked was that I made sure people knew Handy was from Florence, Alabama, and not Memphis, Tennessee.

TimesDaily: Not only did you have the blessing of the Handy family, was Carlos Handy part of the project?

Fish: Yes. I couldn’t have done it without Carlos. He gave me the permission. I have permission from the Handy home and I have releases from all the people who interviewed with me, but I had to have the blessing from the family. I think he (Carlos Handy) felt like I did — people should know about W.C. Handy, and we should preserve his legacy. A film is a good way to do that.

I don’t think he (Carlos Handy) thought it was going to take this long, either … (laughing), but he has hung in there. He trusted me. He had patience and faith that we would get this done.

TimesDaily: You interviewed several contemporary artists who have been influenced by W.C. Handy. Did you find that those artists welcomed the film as an outlet to show their appreciation?

Fish: Yeah — and I do appreciate them coming forward. I mean, Taj Mahal and Bobby Rush are huge — not just in blues but in the history and story of music. They are well known around the world.

In fact, Bobby Rush heard about the film and came to us. That meant a lot to me. I wouldn’t have known that W.C. Handy was his idol and how much Handy had influenced him if he hadn’t reached out to me.

TimesDaily: Has “Mr. Handy’s Blues” been well received at the initial screenings?

Fish: Yes, very much so. We had what I called a “St. Louis Celebration of W.C. Handy” a couple of weeks ago. It was a private event, not a festival, for the people of St. Louis who participated and supported the film. I also went there early on to meet people. Wow. Over the years, I’ve gotten so much support. We had the screening in a big movie theater. The mayor proclaimed it “W.C. Handy Day.” It set the tone so beautifully. Handy was only there for a minute, but it was kind of like his crossroads. And, of course, there’s the song “St. Louis Blues.”
 
There were all kinds of people who attended — young, old, black, white, musicians and non-musicians. I was most surprised by the reaction from the younger people. They know about Handy. They had not even made the connection with the St. Louis Blues hockey team to the song. It’s precious, really. Their eyes lit up and they were happy to know the information.

TimesDaily: Have you thought at all about how special it is for you to be screening the documentary during the W.C. Handy Music Festival?

Fish: I have dreamed about this. I have played out that scenario in my head many times. I do want to mention that we were lucky to have Professor Willie Ruff in the film. He has told me that he will be attending one of the screenings. Interviewing him was such a great experience. He really makes the film because he actually shook the hand of W.C. Handy. That was a key interview.

When I first spoke with Tori (Bailey), who heads the festival, the museum was a place I suggested. I left it up to her, of course, but that came to my mind right away. It’s just amazing how it has all worked out. I’m very excited.

Fred McDowell: The Alan Lomax Recordings

Track List

1, "Shake 'Em on Down"
2, "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"
3, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"
4. "Fred McDowell's Blues"
5, "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus"
6, "Drop Down Mama"
7, "Going Down to the River"
8, "Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down"
9, "When the Train Comes Along"
10, "When You Get Home Please Write Me a Few of Your Lines"
11, "Worried Mind Blues"
12, "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

In 1959, when he traveled through the American South on his "Southern Journey" field-recording trip, Alan Lomax made no plans to visit the Mississippi Delta. He had spent considerable time there some years earlier, in 1941 and 1942, when he and a team of researchers from Nashville's Fisk University had undertaken an extensive sociological study of Coahoma County in the heart of the Delta, with Lomax directing the musical investigations on behalf of the Library of Congress. That had resulted in the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Honeyboy Edwards; a trip to Robert Johnson's mother's house brought the news that "Little Robert" was dead, but Lomax was able to meet Johnson's mentor, Son House, who made for Alan his first recordings since House's slender pre-war output for the Paramount label. It was a hugely successful expedition to what Alan later called "the land where the blues began." But signs of a shifting in taste, among players and listeners alike, were evident even then: records of jump blues and big-city jazz beginning to fill up the "Seebird" (Seeburg) jukeboxes; talk of migration north to Chicago among the more talented of the Delta musicians, Muddy Waters foremost among them; and the increasing electrification of the combos that stayed behind to play in the small-town clubs and country jukes.

It was during the Coahoma County study that Lomax first visited the Mississippi Hill Country, the uplands to the east and northeast of the Delta. While doing research in Clarksdale, Alan had met a blind street singer and harp-blower named Turner Junior Johnson, who advised him to seek out Blind Sid Hemphill, the musical patriarch of the Hill Country. Lomax found Sid at his home in Senatobia, Tate County, and went on to record from him and his band some of the old-time black country dance music played on banjos, fiddles, fifes, drums, and quills that had survived in the hills, away from the social and economic changes roiling the Delta, and relatively isolated from the urbanized black music filling the airwaves and the jukeboxes.

Nearly twenty years later, in 1959, Lomax returned to the Hill Country instead of the Delta, hoping to find some of the raggy old dance tunes still holding on. He wasn't optimistic, worrying that he'd find, as he had on many other occasions, "that the best people had passed away or withered and their communities had gone to pieces." But not only were Hemphill and his friends and family still going strong in Tate County, Lomax discovered in neighboring Panola the string duet of the elderly Pratcher brothers, with their repertoire born of the minstrel and medicine-show eras, as well as the fife-and-drum music of the Youngs, Ed and his brother Lonnie. What he didn't expect to find, however, came by Lonnie's porch one evening: a diminutive farmer in overalls, carrying a guitar. He was Lonnie Young's neighbor, and had just finished his day picking cotton. His name was Fred McDowell. Alan's travelling partner and assistant, the English folksinger Shirley Collins, recounts that at first they resented the younger man's intrusion, but when Fred started to play, they realized they were in the presence of a master musician.

"Alan Lomax recorded me for the first time. I remember he was at the Pratcher brothers' house doing some recording, and somebody sent for me and said I should bring my guitar along. I did come by and played a little for Lomax, and he asked could he come to my house on Saturday night to record, and I said sure. So come that Saturday night, the house is full of people come to hear me recording and wanting to record, too. But right away Lomax said, 'I'm not interested in nobody but Fred.'" (Quoted in Bruce Cook, "Listen to the Blues", 1973.)

In the '20s and '30s, A&R men from commercial record companies scoured the southern states in search of talent for their "race" and "hillbilly" catalogs. They set up temporary studios in hotels, warehouses, and vacant storefronts and took out advertisements in local papers inviting people to come out, audition, and maybe even make a record. This turned up hundreds of artists who might well have otherwise remained unknown, but Fred McDowell was not among them. At the time Fred was in his teens and had just begun playing guitar, picking out the notes one string at a time on borrowed instruments, to songs he heard locally and on records by artists like Tommy Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Alan Lomax, too, had missed Fred, during his earlier trip through Panola and Tate counties in 1941, right about the time McDowell moved down from Memphis. He had yet to appear on the local picnic circuit; Hill Country tastes were still largely tuned to the sound of the Hemphill string band. Besides, although Fred had been playing weekend parties throughout the Memphis countryside for a decade or more, it was his move to Mississippi and his exposure to a new community of gifted musicians that expedited his musical development. Nearly twenty years later, however, a talent as big Fred's in a community as small as Como could not stay buried for long. It was inevitable that the two strangers making their way around town with a 26-pound, two-track reel-to-reel tape machine and talking of making records would run into it.

Fred McDowell was born around 1905 in Rossville, Tennessee, just a few miles north of the Mississippi border and another fifty from Como. From an early age he farmed cotton, peas, and corn with his family. Music was all around him. In Rossville, he remembered, "there wasn't hardly any seen who couldn't play guitar." Two of the better players he recalled were Raymond Payne and Vandy McKenna, neither of whom ever recorded. Fred watched them and picked up what he could. The first song he learned to play was "Big Fat Mama Blues" ("Big fat mama with the meat shakin' on your bones") from a 1928 record by Mississippi blues-man Tommy Johnson. "I learned it on one string, then two, note by note," Fred explained to a student years later. "Man, I about worried that first string to death trying to play that song." By his own account, Fred was a disciplined autodidact, which no doubt explains why his sound was so in-tensely individual.

"I never could hardly learn no music by somebody trying to show me. Like, I hear you play tonight, well, next week sometime it would come to me what you was playing. I'd get the sound of it in my head. Then I'd do it my way from what I remembered."

Fred's uncle Gene Shields played slide guitar with a filed-down piece of rib bone from a cow. "I was a little bitty boy when I heard him do that and after I learned how to play, I made me one and tried it too. Started off playing with a pocket knife." Eventually, he would settle on a glass bottleneck (preferably from a Gordon's Gin bottle), which provided the most clarity and volume.

McDowell moved west from Rossville to Memphis in 1926 and took a series of labor jobs beginning at the Buckeye Oil Mill. He had begun experimenting with the slide guitar style that he had seen his uncle playing, and that he would eventually make uniquely his own. Two years later, while working in Mississippi, he heard Charley Patton at a juke joint in Cleveland, and set to adapting some of his songs. Weekends found him sitting in at Saturday night parties, fish fries, and country picnics where the music was all about working for six days and shaking it for two. Yet he did not own his own guitar until 1940, about the time that he moved to Mississippi.

In the Hill Country, Fred joined his sister, Fanny Davis, who had relocated to Como after their mother died in Rossville. There he met his wife, Annie Mae, a Como native. Soon he was traveling throughout the region for work, which brought with it exposure to a variety of music. Sid Hemphill, the Pratcher brothers, Ed and Lonnie Young all playing something quite other than blues grounded his musical community around Como and Senatobia, while a blues guitar player and singer named Eli Green emerged as a valued teacher and frequent traveling companion throughout the Delta. "When You Get Home Write Me a Few of Your Lines" (Side B, Track 4) is a song Fred learned from Green, and one of the most impressive in his repertoire.

In addition to the old-time country dance music made by the Pratchers, the Youngs, and Blind Sid, the Hill Country was and continues to be fertile ground for African American congregational music. Singers like Viola James, James Shorter, Fred's sister Fanny, and his wife, Annie Mae, were all highly regarded performers in churches like Hunter's Chapel in Como, Independence Church in Tyro, Free Springs Methodist in Harmontown, and Greater Harvest Missionary Baptist in Senatobia. Always catholic in his repertoire, McDowell was as adept performing or accompanying sacred material as he was blues as he told a Sing Out! interviewer in 1969, "I play most anything I hear anybody else sing." Fred showed no evidence of internal discord over combining the sacred and the profane in his repertoire, a struggle that famously tormented his fellow Mississippian Son House, Here McDowell seamlessly follows his sister's plaintive rendition of "When the Train Comes Along" with a hot-blooded "When You Get Home." A 1964 LP of Fred's, entitled (speciously) "My Home Is in the Delta," devotes its first side to blues and its second side to spirituals and hymns sung with Annie Mae, among them "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning" and "Amazing Grace."

The goal of Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip of 1959 and 1960 was to demonstrate the diversity of vernacular expression still thriving in the American South, from the old-time banjo breakdowns of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the ring shouts of the Georgia Sea Islands. In the Hill Country, the spectrum extended from the picnic proto-blues of the Pratchers, representative of an older, fading collective tradition, to the music made by Fred McDowell, an integration of various traditional, vernacular, and popular influences into an artistry all his own. Some of the prison singers Lomax met at Parchman Farm had similarly synthetic repertoires, as did country gospel songwriter and arranger E.C. Ball of Rugby, Virginia, and Arkansas cotton-country bluesman Forrest City Joe, But Fred embodied this synthesis most succinctly, and his interpretative and compositional abilities only deepened during his era of international success.

The Atlantic and Prestige releases of the "Southern Journey" material brought McDowell's music to an increasingly blues-hungry public turned on by the efforts of impresarios like John Hammond and the Newport Folk Festival. The versatility and depth of Fred's repertoire made him one of the most popular blues-men of the era. He quickly and nimbly adopted the electric guitar, though not at the expense of his distinctive chops, and he was sensitive to differences in audiences' tastes. (Before a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1964, he wrote Arhoolie Records' Chris Strachwitz, asking, "Should I bring an electric guitar or a plain one?") A few years later, he explained in "Sing Out!," "I'm using the electric guitar for the sound: it sounds louder, and then it plays easier, too. But my style's the same."

Influencing as it did McDowell's landsmen and musical heirs R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, that style put the blues of the Mississippi Hill Country on the map, counter-poising the heavily chorded, song-based Delta blues with a droning, "groove"-based approach that has often been compared to the music of West African griots. Alan Lomax wrote in 1993 that Fred was "quite the equal of Son House and Muddy Waters but, musically speaking, their granddaddy."

"I look at it this way," Fred told "Sing Out!," "If you've got a gift, you do that, you don't know what may turn up in your favor." It was a gift that sent him around the world to perform, and it was represented on more than a dozen al-bums between 1960 and 1972, when McDowell died in Memphis. A year earlier the Rolling Stones had covered his "You Got to Move" on their Sticky Fingers album. The Stones "made much of him," Lomax later remarked. They "wined and dined him, and bought him a silver-lame suit, which he wore home to Como and was buried in, for he died soon after, much reduced by the life that fame and fortune had too late introduced him to."

But at least Fred McDowell had received the introduction, beginning that early fall evening on Lonnie Young's porch, when, hearing his recordings played back to him, "He stomped up and down on the porch, whooping and laughing and hugging his wife," as Lomax remembered. "He knew he had been heard and his fortune had been made." Fred's sister Fanny patted Alan. "Lord have mercy," she exclaimed. "Lord have mercy!"

FRED

MCDOWELL

THE ALAN LOMAX RECORDINGS

Track List

1,   "Shake 'Em on Down"

2,   "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"

3,   "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

4. "Fred McDowell's Blues"

5,   "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus"

6,   "Drop Down Mama"

7,   "Going Down to the River"

8,   "Wished I Was in Heaven Sitting Down"

9,   "When the Train Comes Along"

10,   "When You Get Home Please Write Me a Few of Your Lines"

11,   "Worried Mind Blues"

12,   "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"

(Instrumental Reprise)

The Deepest Blues and a Hit of Acid Rock Make a Sweet Music Festival in Memphis (1966-1969)

The [Memphis Country] Blues Festival [was] an occasion unto itself, quite unlike any other. The aging troubadours of the first truly American music converge to unfold the eternal story once again. Their audience, happily disregarding the erosions the years have wrought upon these performers, hears what it needs to hear—especially the echoes of an earlier, rougher, more joyous, simpler era. (Choose your own fantasy of the American South during this century's opening decades.) Two of the most important blues festivals in recent memory were the Memphis [Country] Blues Festival and the [1969] Ann Arbor Blues Festival...Stanley Booth's article on the memorable Memphis festival gets inside that event to the meaning of the blues, while Bert Stratton tells what it's like to be 19, totally inexperienced as a promoter/festival organizer, and suddenly to find a full-scale blues festival growing out of your daydreams. 

Even the Birds Were Blue

By Stanley Booth - Rolling Stone - April 10, 1970 

At about five o'clock in the afternoon on the second day of the Memphis Country Blues Festival, the old blues artists Fred McDowell and Johnny Woods were huddled together on folding chairs at the front of the stage at the Overton Park Shell, just getting into "Shake 'Em On Down," when a gang of men began moving a long series of big black amplifier crates from one side of the rear stage to the other. Hearing the clatter, Woods stopped playing harmonica and cast a worried glance backwards over his shoulder.  "I thought it was a big ole train a-comin'," he said. The crates were stamped WINTER, because they contained the many amplifiers of Johnny Winter, the Columbia Recording Company's $300,000 cross-eyed albino Texas electric blues bonus baby, and I mention them because they will serve adequately as a symbol of what nearly killed the Memphis Country Blues Festival in its fourth year.

To understand the Blues Festival, you must know that Fred McDowell, the best living Mississippi bluesman, has been for most of his life a sharecropper, sometimes making a year's profit (after paying his bowman for rent and equipment) of as much as $30; and that Furry Lewis, who is virtually all that remains of Beale Street, worked for the City of Memphis 43 years, collecting garbage, sweeping the streets, and then retired without a pension. No matter how they could play and sing, they were still just a couple of [black men in the South]. They and others like them had been recorded on labels like Bluebird and Vocalion in the early days of race records; then, with the Depression and the WWII recording ban, they were forgotten. Through the days of the first electric blues bands, the Sun Records era of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, the late Fifties rhythm-and-blues, and the rock revival of the Sixties, the old men whose music provided the foundation for it all were ignored. When they were not ignored, they were exploited.

Just about the only people who ever really cared for the old Delta bluesmen were a few vintage Southern beatniks. Although struggling for their own survival, they recognized a spiritual tie and responsibility and saw to it that the old men worked whenever possible. Charlie Brown, poet, hermit, actor, snake trapper, entrepreneur, was probably the first to hire the old men for public appearances, at the Bitter Lemon and O So coffee houses in Memphis in the early sixties.

A Biography of Charley Patton (Part 1)

A Biography of Charley Patton (Part 1)

David Evans won a Grammy award in 2003 for “Best Album Notes” for the following essay in Revenant 212, Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.

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 girlfriends. 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