Subject: RE: Charley Patton wrote everything
From:
GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 21 Jul 20 - 11:14 PM
Basically the five or so songs that are obviously about events around him (e.g. "Mr. Purvis told Mr. Webb to let poor Charlie down" in "High Sheriff Blues") he wrote, and almost all the rest was folk material jumbled together in new orders with a few words changed (and occasionally taken off someone else's blues record rather than from folk material). Charlie mentioned to Son House that he didn't really care about lyrics, and that shows often, e.g. when he doesn't bother to make the sexual meaning in the pony stuff clear the way the version Johnny Shines learned did make it clear. He didn't care all that much about melodies either, judging from how often he reused the same ones. A friend said he spoke the same gruff way he sang, so he didn't have a choice there apparently.
Some of his material is very rich from an early folk blues perspective, such as "Green River Blues." Howlin' Wolf, Booker White, and a few others we care about idolized him. He's overrated relative to a Peg Leg Howell because of the whole Mississippi mythology situation, but he's very worthwhile to look into. The jumbling mentioned above was normal and accepted in folk blues. A fraction of folk blues musicians were interested in telling a coherent chronological story in a song, but the typical approach was like poetry: evoke a mood for a while, then evoke another mood for a while. And Patton -- except in the songs he wrote -- was even less coherent than most of those poetry-like folk blues musicians.
Much of this is what John Fahey figured out about Patton 50 years ago for his book on him. Attempts to undermine Fahey's points over the years (some of them based on misguided, distorted ideas of what _would_ supposedly make a folk blues musician born about 1890 "talented" or "artistic" or "important" or whatever) have been unconvincing. Singing "Green River Blues" on a street meant a lot to his audiences and rightly so, and it wasn't his job to remind us of Josh White or whoever instead.
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sj
