When the Train Left the Station
Chapter 6: Dockery’s Farm
“You asking’ me for my all-time favorite singer? That was Charlie Patton.” —Howlin’ Wolf
Restored service station, Dockery’s Farm
People talk all the time about the romance of the blues. It’s a vicarious daydream, to say the least: hopping freight trains, drinking moonshine whiskey, dancing away all those hot Saturday nights, getting up hung-over the next morning and maybe hearing some old-time religion at the plantation chapel; then, inevitably, the bell ringing before dawn on Monday morning, starting yet another hard week working away for “the man,” all the while bemoaning your fate and worrying that some guy is messing with your woman (commonly referred to as “kicking in another man’s stall”). What else was a poor boy to do except sing the blues? Having said all that, I’m pretty sure of one thing: this all sounds better than actually living it.
There are certainly other fantasias that, in all probability, attract more people than the blues, and have more exciting physical remnants to recreate a proper atmospheric milieu. Tolkien experts can go to England and see superb countryside and real-life castles; it doesn’t take much imagination to see a few hobbits here and there. Star War freaks can go to Cape Canaveral or, strangely, the remote offshore island of Skellig Michael in Ireland to revisit with Luke Skywalker in The Force Awakens. Blues enthusiasts have the songs, but to be honest, not much else except enormous vistas of drab and empty fields.
Dockery’s Farm, however, is an A-List attraction on the blues trail, there is no question about that. It’s easy to find, as is everything in the flat, sometimes grid-like layout of the Mississippi Delta. If you’re driving north from Greenwood towards Clarksdale, you head west after sixteen miles or so onto Route 8, and in a few minutes you’ll come to the Dockery Service Station. This immaculately restored general store, full of bright red Coca-Cola signs and two pumps (Lion Gas) probably should be in the Smithsonian as an ode to rural Southern life. What it does not do is remind me of Dorothea Lange’s undeniably authentic photograph of pretty much the same thing, taken in 1939. Down the road from this place is Dockery’s Farm, which is impossible to miss.
Dockery’s is named after its founder, William O. (“Will”) Dockery. His name, and that of his son and successor, Joe Rice, with their dates, are boldly painted on one of the remaining farm buildings. It stands in the very center of the once vibrant working complex, which included a cotton gin, a commissary building (only the foundation of that survives), and many other sheds and outbuildings. The whole place is manicured clean, and was deserted when we came by. It does not give a visitor the impression that he or she is walking around through a “dark feudal community,” even though that’s what Dockery’s was. If you venture farther in from the road, you come to a bridge over the Sunflower River that led to the day-laborers’ quarters, all now overgrown ruins. Along the way, when you press a button, you’ll hear a scratchy performance of a blues song, performed by the man who put this place on a larger map than ever Will Dockery did, the inimitable Charlie Patton.
There are certainly other fantasias that, in all probability, attract more people than the blues, and have more exciting physical remnants to recreate a proper atmospheric milieu. Tolkien experts can go to England and see superb countryside and real-life castles; it doesn’t take much imagination to see a few hobbits here and there. Star War freaks can go to Cape Canaveral or, strangely, the remote offshore island of Skellig Michael in Ireland to revisit with Luke Skywalker in The Force Awakens. Blues enthusiasts have the songs, but to be honest, not much else except enormous vistas of drab and empty fields.
Dockery’s Farm, however, is an A-List attraction on the blues trail, there is no question about that. It’s easy to find, as is everything in the flat, sometimes grid-like layout of the Mississippi Delta. If you’re driving north from Greenwood towards Clarksdale, you head west after sixteen miles or so onto Route 8, and in a few minutes you’ll come to the Dockery Service Station. This immaculately restored general store, full of bright red Coca-Cola signs and two pumps (Lion Gas) probably should be in the Smithsonian as an ode to rural Southern life. What it does not do is remind me of Dorothea Lange’s undeniably authentic photograph of pretty much the same thing, taken in 1939. Down the road from this place is Dockery’s Farm, which is impossible to miss.
Dockery’s is named after its founder, William O. (“Will”) Dockery. His name, and that of his son and successor, Joe Rice, with their dates, are boldly painted on one of the remaining farm buildings. It stands in the very center of the once vibrant working complex, which included a cotton gin, a commissary building (only the foundation of that survives), and many other sheds and outbuildings. The whole place is manicured clean, and was deserted when we came by. It does not give a visitor the impression that he or she is walking around through a “dark feudal community,” even though that’s what Dockery’s was. If you venture farther in from the road, you come to a bridge over the Sunflower River that led to the day-laborers’ quarters, all now overgrown ruins. Along the way, when you press a button, you’ll hear a scratchy performance of a blues song, performed by the man who put this place on a larger map than ever Will Dockery did, the inimitable Charlie Patton.
Gas pumps and general store, by Dorothea Lange, 1936
Among enthusiasts who know a lot more about the blues than I do, this guy is the king. A superb guitarist, distinctive vocalist, spellbinding entertainer, and thorough-going scoundrel, he is the embodiment of blues mythology. If anyone “lived the life,” Patton did, and unlike a Robert Johnson, he left a considerable body of recorded work behind, some fifty-four songs, and a more authentic trail of reminiscences from friends and acquaintances, having lived (as just one explanation) more than sixteen years longer than Johnson. How he managed to do that is difficult to explain, given the rough and tumble times he lived through. They are probably best expressed in a tune called “Sloppy Drunk Blues,” whose major theme is pretty straightforward: “I’d rather be sloppy drunk than anything I know.”
Charlie Patton lived in and around Dockery for some thirty intermittent years, and probably longer than that on a come-and-go basis. It was the center of his nomadic lifestyle, one that he often left, whether voluntarily or not, but where he usually turned up again a few weeks or months or even years later, rather like a bad penny. His domiciles were generally scattered round the place, depending on his woman of the moment. At one time he lived “on” the farm, but fifteen miles from its center, which gives some idea as to the extent of Will Dockery’s holdings (some forty square miles).
Some writers have called Dockery’s the birthplace of the blues, not only because of the Patton association, but the long list of other blues artists who lived here or were known to have passed through, people like Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Brown, Roebuck “Pops” Staples (the gospel and R&B great). The main attraction, however, is Patton.
His parents and their children moved here for work when he was perhaps only three years old (his exact date of birth remains hotly debated). His father was an entrepreneurial man who also knew how to read, and later in life he owned land of his own and ran a country store. But their early years on Dockery’s were all about manual labor, and Charlie, like his siblings, must have spent his share of time either in the fields or sweating it out in some aspect of farm chores. The bigger the family, the better: it meant more hands on the job. One thing’s for sure, Charlie didn’t like it. He was more interested in loafing about and learning how to play guitar. It is said that his father attempted to discourage his musical inclinations by beating it out of him but again, there is no certain proof of this.
Nor do we know, beyond generalities, who the boy turned to when it came to picking up the finer points of guitar playing. There were one or two musicians on the plantation whose names we have, and they may have had some influence. And who knows how many drifters and hobos wandered through the place, especially after Dockery laid tracks and built a train depot on his property to ship cotton bales to Rosedale, on the Mississippi. As W. C. Handy noted, hobos with guitars were a common sight in the Delta (he called them “footloose bards”). We may presume, I think, that Charlie was in most ways self-taught. He was so original and one-of-a kind whom others would seek to copy, that it makes sense to think of him as being at the head of the line who needed only a jump start to get going. One cannot say too much more of anything about his childhood than that, however unsatisfactory this seems.
Charlie Patton came of age at a pivotal point in the Delta’s development, the moment when thousands of acres were being transformed from primeval swampland into some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, so rich in potential that one real estate speculator compared it to the Nile Delta of Egypt (another called it the equivalent to Saudi Arabia with its untold millions of gallons of oil). The contrast between the entrepreneurial zeal and attendant profits that a Will Dockery forced from the land, using labor like Charlie Patton’s, and the never-ending financial quagmire that engulfed nearly all the Negroes on his place, represent the two extremes of a unique Delta history that are the origins, I believe, of the blues.
Will Dockery
Dockery, born in 1865, was twenty-five years old when he saddled a horse and went exploring east of a crossroads known as Cleveland (five shops and several saloons) along the meandering Sunflower River. He was a man of ambition, seeking his fortune with a modest nest egg of $1,000 from an aunt. A college graduate (Ole Miss) with some business experience keeping books and running a commissary, Dockery knew something about agriculture as well, his family’s business. As he entered what was, in fact, a wilderness, he kept his mind focused on the one outstanding impression that he noted right away: “the land was as rich as cream.” The problem was getting at it.
The Delta landscape he explored was essentially an alluvial swamp, most of it in perpetual forest shade. He spent his days crossing streams, losing leggings, watching out for snakes, camping in the open, his company a flood of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. His first purchase of a few hundred acres would be followed, over time, by another 10,000. Lumber companies had been the first exploiters on the scene. Virgin land could be bought for next to nothing, Dockery noting that he had seen multi-acre lots being swapped for a cow or, in another instance, for a Winchester rifle. Moving camps of axe-wielding woodsmen took their pick of choice varieties (Memphis would soon become one of the major lumber capitals in the country). One Mary Hamilton, whose diaries, exceptionally well written, are invaluable guides through this period, describes in detail the life she and her husband led hacking their way into the Mississippi interior, leaving behind Missouri and Arkansas forests that had already been mown through. Crossing the Mississippi River by boat in 1897, Hamilton was amazed at what greeted her eyes. “Standing on the boat and looking at the bank, I could see everything but a road. Timber of all kinds stood so close together as almost to shut out all daylight; tall cane, blackberry vines, and a tangled mass of all kinds of vines wove around and all over it.” Moving east, they crossed the Sunflower River (“I think I was the first white woman … coming into this country to live,” she noted), sleeping in shanty huts and camps before building more substantial abodes. “Standing at my house it looked like the Garden of Eden I imagined. How I did love it.” She seemed unaware of the contrast implied in her next sentence, “all the woods full of animals and birds, and full of workmen too. We could hear them chopping and sawing and trees falling.” Hamilton had the pioneer spirit. In order to create something, most allurements of the Garden of Eden had to go.
Charlie Patton lived in and around Dockery for some thirty intermittent years, and probably longer than that on a come-and-go basis. It was the center of his nomadic lifestyle, one that he often left, whether voluntarily or not, but where he usually turned up again a few weeks or months or even years later, rather like a bad penny. His domiciles were generally scattered round the place, depending on his woman of the moment. At one time he lived “on” the farm, but fifteen miles from its center, which gives some idea as to the extent of Will Dockery’s holdings (some forty square miles).
Some writers have called Dockery’s the birthplace of the blues, not only because of the Patton association, but the long list of other blues artists who lived here or were known to have passed through, people like Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Brown, Roebuck “Pops” Staples (the gospel and R&B great). The main attraction, however, is Patton.
His parents and their children moved here for work when he was perhaps only three years old (his exact date of birth remains hotly debated). His father was an entrepreneurial man who also knew how to read, and later in life he owned land of his own and ran a country store. But their early years on Dockery’s were all about manual labor, and Charlie, like his siblings, must have spent his share of time either in the fields or sweating it out in some aspect of farm chores. The bigger the family, the better: it meant more hands on the job. One thing’s for sure, Charlie didn’t like it. He was more interested in loafing about and learning how to play guitar. It is said that his father attempted to discourage his musical inclinations by beating it out of him but again, there is no certain proof of this.
Nor do we know, beyond generalities, who the boy turned to when it came to picking up the finer points of guitar playing. There were one or two musicians on the plantation whose names we have, and they may have had some influence. And who knows how many drifters and hobos wandered through the place, especially after Dockery laid tracks and built a train depot on his property to ship cotton bales to Rosedale, on the Mississippi. As W. C. Handy noted, hobos with guitars were a common sight in the Delta (he called them “footloose bards”). We may presume, I think, that Charlie was in most ways self-taught. He was so original and one-of-a kind whom others would seek to copy, that it makes sense to think of him as being at the head of the line who needed only a jump start to get going. One cannot say too much more of anything about his childhood than that, however unsatisfactory this seems.
Charlie Patton came of age at a pivotal point in the Delta’s development, the moment when thousands of acres were being transformed from primeval swampland into some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, so rich in potential that one real estate speculator compared it to the Nile Delta of Egypt (another called it the equivalent to Saudi Arabia with its untold millions of gallons of oil). The contrast between the entrepreneurial zeal and attendant profits that a Will Dockery forced from the land, using labor like Charlie Patton’s, and the never-ending financial quagmire that engulfed nearly all the Negroes on his place, represent the two extremes of a unique Delta history that are the origins, I believe, of the blues.
Will Dockery
Dockery, born in 1865, was twenty-five years old when he saddled a horse and went exploring east of a crossroads known as Cleveland (five shops and several saloons) along the meandering Sunflower River. He was a man of ambition, seeking his fortune with a modest nest egg of $1,000 from an aunt. A college graduate (Ole Miss) with some business experience keeping books and running a commissary, Dockery knew something about agriculture as well, his family’s business. As he entered what was, in fact, a wilderness, he kept his mind focused on the one outstanding impression that he noted right away: “the land was as rich as cream.” The problem was getting at it.
The Delta landscape he explored was essentially an alluvial swamp, most of it in perpetual forest shade. He spent his days crossing streams, losing leggings, watching out for snakes, camping in the open, his company a flood of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. His first purchase of a few hundred acres would be followed, over time, by another 10,000. Lumber companies had been the first exploiters on the scene. Virgin land could be bought for next to nothing, Dockery noting that he had seen multi-acre lots being swapped for a cow or, in another instance, for a Winchester rifle. Moving camps of axe-wielding woodsmen took their pick of choice varieties (Memphis would soon become one of the major lumber capitals in the country). One Mary Hamilton, whose diaries, exceptionally well written, are invaluable guides through this period, describes in detail the life she and her husband led hacking their way into the Mississippi interior, leaving behind Missouri and Arkansas forests that had already been mown through. Crossing the Mississippi River by boat in 1897, Hamilton was amazed at what greeted her eyes. “Standing on the boat and looking at the bank, I could see everything but a road. Timber of all kinds stood so close together as almost to shut out all daylight; tall cane, blackberry vines, and a tangled mass of all kinds of vines wove around and all over it.” Moving east, they crossed the Sunflower River (“I think I was the first white woman … coming into this country to live,” she noted), sleeping in shanty huts and camps before building more substantial abodes. “Standing at my house it looked like the Garden of Eden I imagined. How I did love it.” She seemed unaware of the contrast implied in her next sentence, “all the woods full of animals and birds, and full of workmen too. We could hear them chopping and sawing and trees falling.” Hamilton had the pioneer spirit. In order to create something, most allurements of the Garden of Eden had to go.
Dockery’s Farm, sanitized version, 2014
More capital-heavy investors followed, mostly railroad interests who purchased woodlots for $5 an acre, clearcut the whole swath, hauled out the trees by rail, then sold the land for 10 cents per acre to anyone foolish enough to buy it.[1] This was the classic get-rich-quick scheme of things so typical of the Industrial Age. Dockery’s plan was a bit more far minded. He too harvested lumber from his properties, but the main goal was to plant cotton.
A Will Dockery was desperate for men willing to work. Clearing his farm was a backbreaking and expensive venture. The portions of Dockery’s wilderness that were not under water when he first saw it were covered with cane bush and undergrowth that often stood over fifteen feet high. Land had to be drained, trees cut, stumps pulled out, and cotton seeds put to ground as quickly as possible. In his haste, many trees were left in situ, slashed of bark around their girth, dead branches later strapped around their trunks “like a tepee,” then set on fire and burned to the ground. The work was non-stop. At night, it is said, Dockery’s was a murky cauldron of fire and smoke. When Dockery’s land was finally cleared, it wasn’t always a smooth transition to farm work. As one man put it, “Times was so tough we couldn’t cut it with a knife, man. Plowing four mules … hitting them stumps and that plow kicking you all in the stomach.” It was difficult work for years and years.
Dockery was a no-nonsense kind of man, and his investment of time and labor in this seemingly unpropitious location proved almost immediately successful, coinciding as it did with an incredible surge in cotton prices. In the fifteen-year span beginning in 1898, cotton prices rocketed, rising 121 percent after a quarter century of stagnation, with annual production in the United States increasing from its pre-Civil War average of 5,386,000 bales to 13,500,000 by 1920. Importers in Britain and on the Continent, desperate to satisfy worldwide demand, despaired that there might not be a sufficient supply of raw material. They feared a “cotton famine,” much as they had after 1865 when the thought of freed Negroes fleeing the farm caused equal uncertainty. Dockery, in a business sense, was in the right place at the right time, and he moved aggressively to increase his holdings and to invest in infrastructure.
At his own expense he built a two-storey railroad depot to attract the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, who were building a one-track narrow gauge line intended to connect far-flung plantations like his with both their main Memphis route and the river port of Rosedale. Before useable roads were built, trains were the only efficient way of getting lumber and raw cotton quickly to market, the era of steamboats slowly dying away. This little branch line came to be known as the Pea Vine, given its meandering route, sluggish pace, and multitude of flag stops where anyone waving a hankie could stop the train and climb on board. As the only practical way of getting anywhere, it stood as a metaphor for moving on, and became a mainstay of blues imagery. Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” is typical (“I’m goin’ up the country, Mama, in a few more days”). David Cohn, a well-connected and affluent white born in Greenville, Mississippi, 1894 and the author of God Shakes Creation, wrote nostalgically of lines like the Pea Vine.
The bell of the locomotive clanged. The dinky train chugged past the sawmill, the whine of the saws in my ears as they ripped through the stout hearts of oak logs, the pungent sweetish aroma of green lumber in my nostrils, and in my mind the words of the haunting Negro song:
Ain’t but the one train on the track,
Gwing straight to heaven
An’ it ain’t coming back.
In this booming though isolated environment (no gravel roads until 1915, electricity unavailable until the late 1920s), Charlie Patton lived his youth. Again, details are sparse, but he clearly found his niche in the field of entertaining others, not so much as a plantation minstrel playing for the master (Will Dockery had no interest in music), but in something decidedly more lowlife. He played in the “slave quarters,” his audience consisted of illiterate field hands like himself in the combustible atmosphere of “house parties” and plantation “frolics” — Pops Staples called them “breakdowns” — “screaming and hollering” as he sang in one of his more popular tunes. In this insular world, he became something akin to a superstar.
Charlie
“What he can’t do with a guitar ain’t worth mentioning.”
Promotional blurb, Paramount Records, 1929
Charlie Patton was a slightly built string bean of a man. Unlike most blacks, he had a light complexion and smooth curly hair, which made some people think he was a half-breed. More likely he may have had Indian blood mixed in somewhere, from the Choctaw peoples who originally lived in the Delta. Others suspect some white element which, given the sexual crimes perpetuated against Afro-American women suggested by lore and word of mouth anecdote, is certainly possible (this stereotypically lurid notion is often ridiculed by Southern white intelligensia, one of whom noted the usual canard regarding plantation-style degeneracy: “Father is a slobbering drunkard; Mother, an ineffectual dreamer living in the past; Sister, an apprentice nymphomaniac; Junior a reckless youth having a love affair with a Negro girl (his father’s daughter and therefore his half-sister) in the bottoms below the white-columned house crumbling to ruins. In the attic live two crazy aunts. On the moonlight nights they dress themselves in the finery of their ancestors, steal out on the mangy lawn, and do a wild ballet.”[2]
During Patton’s prime, Dockery’s was running full steam ahead. Something like 400 families were spread about the plantation, some 2,000 people, usually sharecropping from ten to fifteen acres each. Their shotgun houses, hardly more than shacks, had no running water, no electricity, were stifling in the summer and often frigid in winter. Some had a rickety shed nearby, perhaps with a cow and pigs as tenants, plus a vegetable garden. Our outhouse, as one remembered, “was about twenty feet in back of the house at the edge of our watermelon patch. I mention this because the melons always seemed to be bigger.” Will Dockery’s son, Joe Rice, claimed that his family never bilked these men come settling time, usually a day or two before Christmas when each farmer squared his account with the boss man, and perhaps he’s being truthful. The Dockery family, whether through interviews they gave or as a the result of the positive spin that the current foundation which maintains the central complex churns out, has enjoyed a reputation of benevolent paternalism. The Dockerys were no tyrants, and the saying goes that an ambitious man “had a better chance of breaking even” there than at most plantations in the area, which can probably be filed under the heading of “faint praise.”[3]
Certainly on many plantations, exploitation remained the rule. A memoir written by John Oliver Hodges about growing up near Clarksdale in the 1950s repeated the familiar lament. “No matter how hard we worked, we always seemed to come out in the hole” and thus dependent on a cash advance to get going the next year, always a prescription for more debt. As he wrote, quoting an old rhymed saying,
Five’s a figger,
Always for the white man,
But none for the nigger.
On the plus side, however, by all accounts Will Dockery was not an ostentatious or vainglorious man. Though his family was native to Mississippi, and his father a Confederate colonel wounded in the war, he did not drag these connotations throughout his own life as some sort of emblematic totem. He refused to call himself a “planter,” or Dockery a “plantation.” Instead, his stationery carried the words “Merchant & Farmer,” a not very subtle rebuke to many of his neighbors, who considered themselves landed aristocracy. “Farmer” to many of them meant white trash working a few barren acres in the hilly uplands that border the Delta to the east and south. David Cohen, born in Greenville, wrote a chapter of memoirs recalling his childhood which emphasized this distinction, constantly reduced to the level of cliché in both the minds of many of his friends and in the pages of cheap fiction. The planter, he said, was never a farmer. “The planter occasionally died in a duel; the farmer of lockjaw got by stepping on a rusty nail.” Will Dockery loved the outdoors, tracking game, fishing, and riding, but he never dressed himself up in a hunt cap, scarlet jacket, white breeches and leather boots to chase foxes, as William Faulkner did.
A Will Dockery was desperate for men willing to work. Clearing his farm was a backbreaking and expensive venture. The portions of Dockery’s wilderness that were not under water when he first saw it were covered with cane bush and undergrowth that often stood over fifteen feet high. Land had to be drained, trees cut, stumps pulled out, and cotton seeds put to ground as quickly as possible. In his haste, many trees were left in situ, slashed of bark around their girth, dead branches later strapped around their trunks “like a tepee,” then set on fire and burned to the ground. The work was non-stop. At night, it is said, Dockery’s was a murky cauldron of fire and smoke. When Dockery’s land was finally cleared, it wasn’t always a smooth transition to farm work. As one man put it, “Times was so tough we couldn’t cut it with a knife, man. Plowing four mules … hitting them stumps and that plow kicking you all in the stomach.” It was difficult work for years and years.
Dockery was a no-nonsense kind of man, and his investment of time and labor in this seemingly unpropitious location proved almost immediately successful, coinciding as it did with an incredible surge in cotton prices. In the fifteen-year span beginning in 1898, cotton prices rocketed, rising 121 percent after a quarter century of stagnation, with annual production in the United States increasing from its pre-Civil War average of 5,386,000 bales to 13,500,000 by 1920. Importers in Britain and on the Continent, desperate to satisfy worldwide demand, despaired that there might not be a sufficient supply of raw material. They feared a “cotton famine,” much as they had after 1865 when the thought of freed Negroes fleeing the farm caused equal uncertainty. Dockery, in a business sense, was in the right place at the right time, and he moved aggressively to increase his holdings and to invest in infrastructure.
At his own expense he built a two-storey railroad depot to attract the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, who were building a one-track narrow gauge line intended to connect far-flung plantations like his with both their main Memphis route and the river port of Rosedale. Before useable roads were built, trains were the only efficient way of getting lumber and raw cotton quickly to market, the era of steamboats slowly dying away. This little branch line came to be known as the Pea Vine, given its meandering route, sluggish pace, and multitude of flag stops where anyone waving a hankie could stop the train and climb on board. As the only practical way of getting anywhere, it stood as a metaphor for moving on, and became a mainstay of blues imagery. Charlie Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” is typical (“I’m goin’ up the country, Mama, in a few more days”). David Cohn, a well-connected and affluent white born in Greenville, Mississippi, 1894 and the author of God Shakes Creation, wrote nostalgically of lines like the Pea Vine.
The bell of the locomotive clanged. The dinky train chugged past the sawmill, the whine of the saws in my ears as they ripped through the stout hearts of oak logs, the pungent sweetish aroma of green lumber in my nostrils, and in my mind the words of the haunting Negro song:
Ain’t but the one train on the track,
Gwing straight to heaven
An’ it ain’t coming back.
In this booming though isolated environment (no gravel roads until 1915, electricity unavailable until the late 1920s), Charlie Patton lived his youth. Again, details are sparse, but he clearly found his niche in the field of entertaining others, not so much as a plantation minstrel playing for the master (Will Dockery had no interest in music), but in something decidedly more lowlife. He played in the “slave quarters,” his audience consisted of illiterate field hands like himself in the combustible atmosphere of “house parties” and plantation “frolics” — Pops Staples called them “breakdowns” — “screaming and hollering” as he sang in one of his more popular tunes. In this insular world, he became something akin to a superstar.
Charlie
“What he can’t do with a guitar ain’t worth mentioning.”
Promotional blurb, Paramount Records, 1929
Charlie Patton was a slightly built string bean of a man. Unlike most blacks, he had a light complexion and smooth curly hair, which made some people think he was a half-breed. More likely he may have had Indian blood mixed in somewhere, from the Choctaw peoples who originally lived in the Delta. Others suspect some white element which, given the sexual crimes perpetuated against Afro-American women suggested by lore and word of mouth anecdote, is certainly possible (this stereotypically lurid notion is often ridiculed by Southern white intelligensia, one of whom noted the usual canard regarding plantation-style degeneracy: “Father is a slobbering drunkard; Mother, an ineffectual dreamer living in the past; Sister, an apprentice nymphomaniac; Junior a reckless youth having a love affair with a Negro girl (his father’s daughter and therefore his half-sister) in the bottoms below the white-columned house crumbling to ruins. In the attic live two crazy aunts. On the moonlight nights they dress themselves in the finery of their ancestors, steal out on the mangy lawn, and do a wild ballet.”[2]
During Patton’s prime, Dockery’s was running full steam ahead. Something like 400 families were spread about the plantation, some 2,000 people, usually sharecropping from ten to fifteen acres each. Their shotgun houses, hardly more than shacks, had no running water, no electricity, were stifling in the summer and often frigid in winter. Some had a rickety shed nearby, perhaps with a cow and pigs as tenants, plus a vegetable garden. Our outhouse, as one remembered, “was about twenty feet in back of the house at the edge of our watermelon patch. I mention this because the melons always seemed to be bigger.” Will Dockery’s son, Joe Rice, claimed that his family never bilked these men come settling time, usually a day or two before Christmas when each farmer squared his account with the boss man, and perhaps he’s being truthful. The Dockery family, whether through interviews they gave or as a the result of the positive spin that the current foundation which maintains the central complex churns out, has enjoyed a reputation of benevolent paternalism. The Dockerys were no tyrants, and the saying goes that an ambitious man “had a better chance of breaking even” there than at most plantations in the area, which can probably be filed under the heading of “faint praise.”[3]
Certainly on many plantations, exploitation remained the rule. A memoir written by John Oliver Hodges about growing up near Clarksdale in the 1950s repeated the familiar lament. “No matter how hard we worked, we always seemed to come out in the hole” and thus dependent on a cash advance to get going the next year, always a prescription for more debt. As he wrote, quoting an old rhymed saying,
Five’s a figger,
Always for the white man,
But none for the nigger.
On the plus side, however, by all accounts Will Dockery was not an ostentatious or vainglorious man. Though his family was native to Mississippi, and his father a Confederate colonel wounded in the war, he did not drag these connotations throughout his own life as some sort of emblematic totem. He refused to call himself a “planter,” or Dockery a “plantation.” Instead, his stationery carried the words “Merchant & Farmer,” a not very subtle rebuke to many of his neighbors, who considered themselves landed aristocracy. “Farmer” to many of them meant white trash working a few barren acres in the hilly uplands that border the Delta to the east and south. David Cohen, born in Greenville, wrote a chapter of memoirs recalling his childhood which emphasized this distinction, constantly reduced to the level of cliché in both the minds of many of his friends and in the pages of cheap fiction. The planter, he said, was never a farmer. “The planter occasionally died in a duel; the farmer of lockjaw got by stepping on a rusty nail.” Will Dockery loved the outdoors, tracking game, fishing, and riding, but he never dressed himself up in a hunt cap, scarlet jacket, white breeches and leather boots to chase foxes, as William Faulkner did.
Settling up at a plantation office, 1939
By 1900, it has been estimated that 30 percent of the swamp land between the Yazoo River and the Mississippi had been reclaimed. Dockery himself would have another decade of work ahead of him before turning the corner on his own place. Demand for masses of workers remained high, and word was out on that score. At Dockery’s, day laborers mostly lived in the twelve or so boarding houses that were set up on the other side of the Sunflower River, across from the cotton gin. These were run by older woman, for the most part, and accommodated bachelor men, often transient workers there for the season and perhaps no more. As with most plantations, men rose early and worked late. As one from a neighboring plantation said to an interviewer, “I had to git up around three in the morning by a bell. The bell rang two times. First time you git up. The second time, be at the barn. Not on your way, [but] at the barn.” Once chores were assigned or laborers sent to the fields either to plough or pick, they were supervised by managers called “riders” because they ran the place from the saddle, or “rode” men to work harder. When Saturday night came along, men were ready for just about anything. [4]
Charlie and his ilk often warmed up on the commissary porch, the plantation’s commercial hub. Dockery’s had seven clerks who sold everyday goods and supplies to the workers and their women who, practically speaking, had no other place to go for shopping and necessities. Cash was usually in short supply, so Dockery’s had its own currency, or “script.” Script was just another way to control plantation workers, though plantation owners, if they were pressed, would say it was just sound business practice. Some tenant farmers, when they received a cash advance on the next spring’s planting, were sometimes known to skip off with the money in their pockets. Script kept them committed to the plantation, since the tender was only occasionally accepted elsewhere. It likewise recycled monetary value within the boundaries of the estate. What men received as wages they often spent at the commissary, owned and operated by men like Dockery. On Saturdays, it was a busy place, and Charlie sang a few songs, with promises for more when the sun went down. He was, essentially, advertising his services and telling people where he’d be.
Saturday night was “nigger night,” the time of the week when blacks pretty much owned the place. Men from the outskirts of Dockery’s would start walking in early to get there in good time, or hitch up their mules to the wagon and come on in. They’d lounge around in the afternoon, shooting the breeze, until the action started. As Joe Rice Dockery put it, “the blues was a Saturday night deal. The crap games would start about noon Saturday, and then the niggers would start getting drunk. I’ve seen niggers stumbling all over this place on a Saturday afternoon. And then they’d have a frettin’ and fightin’ scrapes that night … there were killings, but really very few, and it was nothing premeditated. People would be drinking, and there’d be a spontaneous argument between men in the group. Women played a big part in that. You know the best thing B.B. King [once] said is that the blues means when a man has lost his woman. Which was all he had. He didn’t have anything else.” According to the music critic Robert Palmer, who interviewed Dockery in 1979, some of these “frolics” drew huge crowds, with hundreds of people milling around, many from other plantations. William Faulkner has a character in The Reivers who put his thumb on it. “You’re the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn’t never want to be a white man again as long as you live.” In this world, Charlie Patton was a big draw.
Charlie and his ilk often warmed up on the commissary porch, the plantation’s commercial hub. Dockery’s had seven clerks who sold everyday goods and supplies to the workers and their women who, practically speaking, had no other place to go for shopping and necessities. Cash was usually in short supply, so Dockery’s had its own currency, or “script.” Script was just another way to control plantation workers, though plantation owners, if they were pressed, would say it was just sound business practice. Some tenant farmers, when they received a cash advance on the next spring’s planting, were sometimes known to skip off with the money in their pockets. Script kept them committed to the plantation, since the tender was only occasionally accepted elsewhere. It likewise recycled monetary value within the boundaries of the estate. What men received as wages they often spent at the commissary, owned and operated by men like Dockery. On Saturdays, it was a busy place, and Charlie sang a few songs, with promises for more when the sun went down. He was, essentially, advertising his services and telling people where he’d be.
Saturday night was “nigger night,” the time of the week when blacks pretty much owned the place. Men from the outskirts of Dockery’s would start walking in early to get there in good time, or hitch up their mules to the wagon and come on in. They’d lounge around in the afternoon, shooting the breeze, until the action started. As Joe Rice Dockery put it, “the blues was a Saturday night deal. The crap games would start about noon Saturday, and then the niggers would start getting drunk. I’ve seen niggers stumbling all over this place on a Saturday afternoon. And then they’d have a frettin’ and fightin’ scrapes that night … there were killings, but really very few, and it was nothing premeditated. People would be drinking, and there’d be a spontaneous argument between men in the group. Women played a big part in that. You know the best thing B.B. King [once] said is that the blues means when a man has lost his woman. Which was all he had. He didn’t have anything else.” According to the music critic Robert Palmer, who interviewed Dockery in 1979, some of these “frolics” drew huge crowds, with hundreds of people milling around, many from other plantations. William Faulkner has a character in The Reivers who put his thumb on it. “You’re the wrong color. If you could just be a nigger one Saturday night, you wouldn’t never want to be a white man again as long as you live.” In this world, Charlie Patton was a big draw.
Loafing around on a Saturday afternoon, 1939
The only known photograph of Charlie Patton
A white man’s attitude to such goings-on was often contradictory and morally confusing. Joe Rice Dockery, for all we know, was a righteous family man who would never have given a thought to rolling around on his front lawn drunk as a skunk, or pulling a knife in some lowlife craps game. He had a wife and daughter, he would not have wanted to humiliate them in such fashion. On the other hand, could he in some wistful way have been jealous of a roustabout life with no restraints? The research done by sociologists in the 1930s, when teams of academics did indeed “study” southern life, were often riddled with paradoxical musings. One plantation owner, when asked about it, said, “I often think the Negroes are happier than whites no matter how little they have. You always see them smiling and happy as long as they have a little to eat. One reason they’re so carefree is that they have no morals to worry about and they don’t have to keep up their good name.”
Usually farmhands knew a party spot beforehand, but if they didn’t, venues for a frolic would have a mirror out on the porch with lanterns in front to project illumination. There might be a small entry fee, there’d be craps in the back, some BBQ to purchase, plenty of moonshine, and Charlie playing in the front room, cleared for dancing. And one thing about Charlie Patton, “he didn’t need no mic.”
According to Son House, who played with Patton toward the end of Charlie’s life, “them country balls were rough …They’d start off good, you know. Everyone happy, dancing, and then they’d start getting louder and louder. The women would be dipping that snuff and swallowing that snuff spit along with that corn whiskey, and they’d start to mixing fast, and oh brother! They’d start something then.” Charlie’s style of play whipped up the energy, which is only partially apparent from his recordings. In the studio, he (and all the other blues artists who made it that far) was regulated to about three minutes per song, the physical limits of the discs. But “in concert,” as it were, a single song might last twenty minutes or longer, building up to a frenzied climax. Charlie “could whoop and holler and sing … that’s what made him known. He beat everybody hollering.” He kept the percussion going too, usually stomping his feet on the floor (some players had steel clips on their shoe heels for heightened effect) or thumping his “box,” as a guitar was known. (“This is the way I beat my woman,” he’d say, and the crowd would love it, at least until the fists started flying). Just listen to “High Water Everywhere, Part I,” for what would be a typical dance tune. Lyrics were often improvised and, depending on how much Charlie was drinking, sometimes incoherent, especially as a tune dragged on, but his vocal cords could handle it. “He had a voice,” one old-timer remembered, “he had a voice!” Son House, interviewed after his own “rediscovery” in the 1960s, took a more jaundiced view of his old buddy. His songs “would sound alright,” he recalled. “Some of them had a meaning to them, some didn’t. That’s the way he played: he’d just say anything he could think of, ‘Hey baby,’ [and go from there].” Another contemporary noted that “the blues is kinda like workin’ in a church, I guess. Whatever the ‘spirit’ say do, you do it.”
As a way of keeping everyone involved, Patton would haul out his bag of tricks as well, being a consummate showman. He could pick his guitar from behind his head, throw it up in the air and catch it, twirl it around on the floor, ride it like a pony, anything to work people up. He could also keep going. “He could endure, you know what I mean?” said Booker “Mr. Pink” Miller. “He didn’t get tired and lay his box down and walk out like so many musicians would do, standing around talkin’ about, ‘I’m tired.’ If it took all night he'd be there with you. If you said, ‘Start at seven o’clock,’ he’d be right there. And you say, ‘We goin’ till daylight,’ he’d be right there. You never would hear nobody comin’ in and saying, “Wonder where he at? What’s the matter with the music?’ Cause it would be going. I never saw him get too drunk to play; he’s play anyhow. I don’t know how, but he could do it … keep [swinging] .... He just put so much into it.” Patton’s hijinks, and penchant for flirting, would ratchet up as the night wore on, but with often perilous effect.
Three things Charlie could do: he could play the guitar, drink, and chase women. As far as playing guitar, he was a master; as far as holding his liquor, decidedly less so; as for women, he had his ups and downs, mostly downs.
No can deny that Patton had a drinking problem. As he grew older, he generally preferred, and sometimes could afford, decent stuff, “Bottle n’ Bond,” 100 proof, aged whiskey that was usually warehoused for a year under government supervision; barring that, illegal corn whiskey, moonshine stuff but potent; barring that, whatever gave a kick (sterno comes to mind).[5] Despite Miller’s protestations noted above, Charlie had the reputation of getting blind drunk as the night wore on, which aggravated his penchant for getting “meddlesome.” “He’d call anybody’s wife ‘honey’ and ‘sugar,’” said Willie “Have Mercy” Young, and “a real jealous man didn’t have no business around Charlie Patton.” Another crony recalled that “when he “started talking them blues, the women’d start to popping their fingers and skippin’, and then them niggers [i.e. their men] turn and say, ‘Let’s get away from here.’” Charlie’s matrimonial history reflected his popularity with the opposite sex: his wives (legal or otherwise), live-in girlfriends, and various amorous liaisons were too numerous to keep track of. Some of those we find mentioned, often at varying moments in Charlie’s wanderings, are Gertrude, Lizzie, Roxie, Mandy, Dela, Minnie, Millie, Roxie, Udy, Polly, Bessie, Katie, Bertha Lee, Louise, and Willie. There were surely more. As he sang in “Pony Blues,”
Don’t want to marry
Just want to be your man
Or, perhaps being more sarcastic, there’s a song Willie Brown recorded in 1941 called “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,”
Now, I love you babes, ‘cause you so nice an’ brown
‘Cause you tailor-made an’ you ain’ no hand-me-down.[6]
“He thought he was some pig meat back in those days,” Son House told an interviewer. “Charlie’d meddle all the time, and then get a big laugh off it.” Son House, especially later in his life, considered himself a blues purist. Charlie’s clowning around and show biz antics, meant to lure women into his honey trap, annoyed him no end. Patton was a “jerk” and a “shit ass.” He also paid for his indiscretions. There is some credence to the rumor that Charlie was shot by a disgruntled husband or boyfriend at one point after a frolic, though no solid proof exists, other than that he started limping. What is undeniable is that his throat was slashed with a razor in 1929, an incident he was lucky to survive. In the only known photograph of Patton, his shirt collar and bow tie are slightly hiked by his left-hand shoulder; it has been suggested by several writers that this was purposely done to disguise the scar.
All this suggests the kind of socio-economic milieu in which Charlie Patton both lived his life and, to some degree, thrived. It is not a particularly genteel or refined world, which is saying the obvious, but it was the milieu of the blues. Afro-Americans living near towns or working along the banks of the Mississippi, or loading and offloading cargoes on the wharves of bigger cities like Memphis, had a variety of black musical entertainment to sample: marching brass bands, minstrel shows at vaudeville theatres, ragtime in bars or brothels, sacred music on Sundays. Plantation workers at Dockery’s pretty much had church music and that was it, except for the Saturday night bluesmen. Out of the mainstream as it was, the bluesman could thrive at a place like Dockery’s, as he could on any number of other plantations and low-down dives along the Mississippi, in places like Natchez, Rosedale, and Vicksburg. This was the lowest denominator, in contemporary opinion, on the musical ladder. These guys were the “skid row” of the musical fraternity.
Despite all this, what made him great?
We’re back to asking the same question here that we asked about Robert Johnson earlier. What made Charlie great? To answer that, we should first, I think, get past the showmanship angle. We know he was popular, we know he could hold people’s attention, we know he had exhibitionist tendencies that later stars like a Chuck Berry, an Elvis Presley, and a Jimmy Hendrix would emulate, however little they knew about Patton other than generalities. Playing a guitar behind your neck or gyrating like a madman aren’t exactly patented moves “invented” by anyone. In the noisy, rowdy, and manic atmosphere of house frolics, you needed to command the stage or be hooted off it, and Charlie fought hard to keep the metaphorical spotlight on himself, very difficult indeed when your audience was fired up (“racket’s all they want,” said one musician regarding frolics). When people, especially overwrought women, interfered with the show or moved in to grab center stage themselves, Patton reacted, being, as a contemporary called him, “kind of fractious.” There are anecdotal stories about Charlie hitting people over the head with his guitar when the action veered out of his control. So we know he was a showman, we know he was charismatic in his own way; but how about his musicianship? How was he special?
If blues guitar style is known for anything, it’s the slide, often a bottleneck whose rough edges have been smoothed away, or a short piece of copper tubing slipped on a finger of the left hand (some players used the dull edge of a knife as their slide). A skilled guitarist can extend the expressiveness, range, and pitch of the guitar like a human voice when it keens or “howls” by dragging the slide along the frets, usually to a higher note, and stretching it out, as it were. The most apt comparison would be the trombone, with its elongated “slide,” vis-à-vis (let’s say) the trumpet. A trumpet hits a certain note, but a trombone can range about the scale at will.
In technique, Patton was a guitar player of remarkable fluidity who had a great rhythmic sense, the capability to play multiple “storylines” at once (bass and lead), using four fingers on his right hand to pick notes, and his thumb to establish the bass chords (in different measures), with percussion (slapping the guitar or stomping his feet) to underlie the whole song. Patton’s mastery of the slide was phenomenal, almost an extra voice that extended the emotional range of a particular song. A master like Charlie didn’t need the frets on his guitar, because the slide, when pulled along the strings (“worrying” them, as musicians put it), ignored “notes” per se and became something of a whine or “extender.” Slide added expression and vibrato to whatever he was singing, the stretching of emotion, usually something bleak or sad. It can be the moment in the song – let’s say it’s David Gilmore of Pink Floyd hitting a high note – when you’d expect to see the guitarist wince or jerk his head up or “climax” the riff in some such bodily reaction.
Slide techniques enriched the song, emphasized its message (however simplistic) and made the mood bluer than blue. The slide has some precedence in the history of music -- when W. C. Handy first heard it used at the Tutwiler train station, he was reminded of Hawaiian music -– but early bluesmen were really trailblazers in its application and development. If you want to hear a modern usage, listen to Brian Jones on “Little Red Rooster,” a Rolling Stones hit from 1964 (a cover of a Willie Dixon tune, and the first recording to reach Number 1 on the UK charts with a guitar player using the slide).
To the casual listener of Patton’s tunes, these attributes may seem too grandiose, given the simplicity of the 12-bar blues form. That is a tribute to Charlie’s technical talents, because his skills were often very subtle and easily lost to those of us who are not professional musicians. His melodies were not particularly varied, but within his core repertoire he displayed great virtuosity and an abundance of what one critic called “varieties of expression.” He could play it fast, play it slow, with many twists in between. The accomplished blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite said it best: “Sounds simple, but you try to play it.”
Musicianship aside, Patton also had an enormously distinctive voice, not silky in the fashion of a Robert Johnson, but more like a cement mixer just after sand and gravel have been added to the slosh. Technically a baritone, Patton could change his tone, range, and inflection at will. Frequently, in listening to his often indecipherable lyrics, a second seemingly different voice chimes in with an encouraging push, something like a “My God, I’m gonna sing’em” or “Babe, you know I can’t stay,’” which was usually Patton himself. His vocal range, not that broad, was unusually dense and totally distinctive. At a “blind tasting,” as it were, if someone played a Charlie Patton song and asked you, who’s singing that, anyone who knows anything would recognize his voice in a second. I’m reminded here of what Ronnie Hawkins said when he heard Howlin’ Wolf sing: he “had a hell of a voice,” he remarked, “it was stronger than forty acres of crushed garlic.” I get his point.
On top of all this, Patton was a true poet of feelings. I think he would have laughed in your face if anyone had described him in that way within earshot, but he had a descriptive ability to communicate what he, and his ilk down on the plantation, had on their minds (and not just sex). His lyrics, when you are able to decipher what they are, are often beautifully expressed, and blues at its best, and his influence on a legion of fine players and singers is indisputable (Tommy Johnson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters, among others).
The “Birthplace” of the Blues?
Sunflower County might as well have been a private, medieval kingdom, so remote and isolated was it from anything mainstream in American life –“within America,” as David Cohn put it,” and yet withdrawn from it.” There were few if any roads, none paved. When H. C. Speir drove up from Jackson to audition Charlie Patton in 1929, it took him half a day to travel 100 miles. County barons, like Will Dockery, lorded over an entirely subservient working class of mostly illiterate field hands, dominating just about every facet of their lives. He rented them their farms and shacks, furnished them (on credit) with seeds, supplies, mules, carts, and equipment, sold them food in their company stores, and often liquor and women in plantation brothels. In terms of law and order, the plantation owner dispensed both. Mississippi, like adjoining southern states, was politically dominated by its landowning class, and legislation involving security was written with their interests mostly in mind. Many sheriffs in local communities had little or no jurisdiction when it came to plantation issues, other than the grossest of offenses such as murder, and even then, if the killer was a good worker, sheriffs could be argued out of making an arrest. Revenue agents, as another example, were not allowed to ferret out illegal stills on Dockery Farms, the allowance for which most plantation owners winked an eye at, however unwillingly. Some, more enlightened than others, had a doctor on hand to cope with injuries, and cooperated with health officials when they came around to deal with local scourges such as malaria. Will Dockery paid half the bill for quinine brought down to the plantation by social workers hired by the Rockefeller Foundation. Relatively healthy laborers were far better for the bottom line than dead ones.
Which leads to the basic dichotomy of trying to control large numbers of laborers, first during the slavery years, then afterwards when they were nominally “free.” Coercion was always at the root of slavery. Anyone attempting to flee, or trying to revolt was routinely punished in the most savage manner. Beatings, torture, overseers carrying bullwhips, right on through to lynching. On the other hand, without slaves, or without “indentured” laborers, “white gold,” as cotton was called, could not be planted, tended, or harvested. Until mechanization revolutionized the industry in the mid twentieth century, cotton remained the most labor-intensive crop in the United States. No labor force meant no cotton. While cotton prices often fluctuated, and demands for labor with it, the basic dependence was never questioned. The Afro-America worker was the single most important element in the business, but also the most denigrated, abused, and exploited. As cotton empires thrived and grew, particularly in the Delta, the growing interdependence with European markets, and particularly with Britain, grew along with it. British banks and money houses played a vital role in capitalizing expansion and innovation throughout the South, and what was the primary commodity that was initially used as collateral in most loans? Slaves. In Louisiana alone, something like 88 per cent of all mortgages were backed by actual slaves. If the loan failed, or the borrower went bankrupt, the holder of his note was entitled to the possession of specific slaves. Their value, according to some historians, represented “hundreds of millions of dollars in capital,” just another odiferous aspect of the business. Would a more benevolent system have produced more profit and more business from Britain, with a correspondingly less corrosive moral tincture? Perhaps, but human nature being what it is, the urge to dominate, control, and play the king cannot be trumped, in most instances, by the attractions of more restrained and worthy behavior. Will Dockery, for instance, was not an evil man, but he was, unquestionably, the boss.
Usually farmhands knew a party spot beforehand, but if they didn’t, venues for a frolic would have a mirror out on the porch with lanterns in front to project illumination. There might be a small entry fee, there’d be craps in the back, some BBQ to purchase, plenty of moonshine, and Charlie playing in the front room, cleared for dancing. And one thing about Charlie Patton, “he didn’t need no mic.”
According to Son House, who played with Patton toward the end of Charlie’s life, “them country balls were rough …They’d start off good, you know. Everyone happy, dancing, and then they’d start getting louder and louder. The women would be dipping that snuff and swallowing that snuff spit along with that corn whiskey, and they’d start to mixing fast, and oh brother! They’d start something then.” Charlie’s style of play whipped up the energy, which is only partially apparent from his recordings. In the studio, he (and all the other blues artists who made it that far) was regulated to about three minutes per song, the physical limits of the discs. But “in concert,” as it were, a single song might last twenty minutes or longer, building up to a frenzied climax. Charlie “could whoop and holler and sing … that’s what made him known. He beat everybody hollering.” He kept the percussion going too, usually stomping his feet on the floor (some players had steel clips on their shoe heels for heightened effect) or thumping his “box,” as a guitar was known. (“This is the way I beat my woman,” he’d say, and the crowd would love it, at least until the fists started flying). Just listen to “High Water Everywhere, Part I,” for what would be a typical dance tune. Lyrics were often improvised and, depending on how much Charlie was drinking, sometimes incoherent, especially as a tune dragged on, but his vocal cords could handle it. “He had a voice,” one old-timer remembered, “he had a voice!” Son House, interviewed after his own “rediscovery” in the 1960s, took a more jaundiced view of his old buddy. His songs “would sound alright,” he recalled. “Some of them had a meaning to them, some didn’t. That’s the way he played: he’d just say anything he could think of, ‘Hey baby,’ [and go from there].” Another contemporary noted that “the blues is kinda like workin’ in a church, I guess. Whatever the ‘spirit’ say do, you do it.”
As a way of keeping everyone involved, Patton would haul out his bag of tricks as well, being a consummate showman. He could pick his guitar from behind his head, throw it up in the air and catch it, twirl it around on the floor, ride it like a pony, anything to work people up. He could also keep going. “He could endure, you know what I mean?” said Booker “Mr. Pink” Miller. “He didn’t get tired and lay his box down and walk out like so many musicians would do, standing around talkin’ about, ‘I’m tired.’ If it took all night he'd be there with you. If you said, ‘Start at seven o’clock,’ he’d be right there. And you say, ‘We goin’ till daylight,’ he’d be right there. You never would hear nobody comin’ in and saying, “Wonder where he at? What’s the matter with the music?’ Cause it would be going. I never saw him get too drunk to play; he’s play anyhow. I don’t know how, but he could do it … keep [swinging] .... He just put so much into it.” Patton’s hijinks, and penchant for flirting, would ratchet up as the night wore on, but with often perilous effect.
Three things Charlie could do: he could play the guitar, drink, and chase women. As far as playing guitar, he was a master; as far as holding his liquor, decidedly less so; as for women, he had his ups and downs, mostly downs.
No can deny that Patton had a drinking problem. As he grew older, he generally preferred, and sometimes could afford, decent stuff, “Bottle n’ Bond,” 100 proof, aged whiskey that was usually warehoused for a year under government supervision; barring that, illegal corn whiskey, moonshine stuff but potent; barring that, whatever gave a kick (sterno comes to mind).[5] Despite Miller’s protestations noted above, Charlie had the reputation of getting blind drunk as the night wore on, which aggravated his penchant for getting “meddlesome.” “He’d call anybody’s wife ‘honey’ and ‘sugar,’” said Willie “Have Mercy” Young, and “a real jealous man didn’t have no business around Charlie Patton.” Another crony recalled that “when he “started talking them blues, the women’d start to popping their fingers and skippin’, and then them niggers [i.e. their men] turn and say, ‘Let’s get away from here.’” Charlie’s matrimonial history reflected his popularity with the opposite sex: his wives (legal or otherwise), live-in girlfriends, and various amorous liaisons were too numerous to keep track of. Some of those we find mentioned, often at varying moments in Charlie’s wanderings, are Gertrude, Lizzie, Roxie, Mandy, Dela, Minnie, Millie, Roxie, Udy, Polly, Bessie, Katie, Bertha Lee, Louise, and Willie. There were surely more. As he sang in “Pony Blues,”
Don’t want to marry
Just want to be your man
Or, perhaps being more sarcastic, there’s a song Willie Brown recorded in 1941 called “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,”
Now, I love you babes, ‘cause you so nice an’ brown
‘Cause you tailor-made an’ you ain’ no hand-me-down.[6]
“He thought he was some pig meat back in those days,” Son House told an interviewer. “Charlie’d meddle all the time, and then get a big laugh off it.” Son House, especially later in his life, considered himself a blues purist. Charlie’s clowning around and show biz antics, meant to lure women into his honey trap, annoyed him no end. Patton was a “jerk” and a “shit ass.” He also paid for his indiscretions. There is some credence to the rumor that Charlie was shot by a disgruntled husband or boyfriend at one point after a frolic, though no solid proof exists, other than that he started limping. What is undeniable is that his throat was slashed with a razor in 1929, an incident he was lucky to survive. In the only known photograph of Patton, his shirt collar and bow tie are slightly hiked by his left-hand shoulder; it has been suggested by several writers that this was purposely done to disguise the scar.
All this suggests the kind of socio-economic milieu in which Charlie Patton both lived his life and, to some degree, thrived. It is not a particularly genteel or refined world, which is saying the obvious, but it was the milieu of the blues. Afro-Americans living near towns or working along the banks of the Mississippi, or loading and offloading cargoes on the wharves of bigger cities like Memphis, had a variety of black musical entertainment to sample: marching brass bands, minstrel shows at vaudeville theatres, ragtime in bars or brothels, sacred music on Sundays. Plantation workers at Dockery’s pretty much had church music and that was it, except for the Saturday night bluesmen. Out of the mainstream as it was, the bluesman could thrive at a place like Dockery’s, as he could on any number of other plantations and low-down dives along the Mississippi, in places like Natchez, Rosedale, and Vicksburg. This was the lowest denominator, in contemporary opinion, on the musical ladder. These guys were the “skid row” of the musical fraternity.
Despite all this, what made him great?
We’re back to asking the same question here that we asked about Robert Johnson earlier. What made Charlie great? To answer that, we should first, I think, get past the showmanship angle. We know he was popular, we know he could hold people’s attention, we know he had exhibitionist tendencies that later stars like a Chuck Berry, an Elvis Presley, and a Jimmy Hendrix would emulate, however little they knew about Patton other than generalities. Playing a guitar behind your neck or gyrating like a madman aren’t exactly patented moves “invented” by anyone. In the noisy, rowdy, and manic atmosphere of house frolics, you needed to command the stage or be hooted off it, and Charlie fought hard to keep the metaphorical spotlight on himself, very difficult indeed when your audience was fired up (“racket’s all they want,” said one musician regarding frolics). When people, especially overwrought women, interfered with the show or moved in to grab center stage themselves, Patton reacted, being, as a contemporary called him, “kind of fractious.” There are anecdotal stories about Charlie hitting people over the head with his guitar when the action veered out of his control. So we know he was a showman, we know he was charismatic in his own way; but how about his musicianship? How was he special?
If blues guitar style is known for anything, it’s the slide, often a bottleneck whose rough edges have been smoothed away, or a short piece of copper tubing slipped on a finger of the left hand (some players used the dull edge of a knife as their slide). A skilled guitarist can extend the expressiveness, range, and pitch of the guitar like a human voice when it keens or “howls” by dragging the slide along the frets, usually to a higher note, and stretching it out, as it were. The most apt comparison would be the trombone, with its elongated “slide,” vis-à-vis (let’s say) the trumpet. A trumpet hits a certain note, but a trombone can range about the scale at will.
In technique, Patton was a guitar player of remarkable fluidity who had a great rhythmic sense, the capability to play multiple “storylines” at once (bass and lead), using four fingers on his right hand to pick notes, and his thumb to establish the bass chords (in different measures), with percussion (slapping the guitar or stomping his feet) to underlie the whole song. Patton’s mastery of the slide was phenomenal, almost an extra voice that extended the emotional range of a particular song. A master like Charlie didn’t need the frets on his guitar, because the slide, when pulled along the strings (“worrying” them, as musicians put it), ignored “notes” per se and became something of a whine or “extender.” Slide added expression and vibrato to whatever he was singing, the stretching of emotion, usually something bleak or sad. It can be the moment in the song – let’s say it’s David Gilmore of Pink Floyd hitting a high note – when you’d expect to see the guitarist wince or jerk his head up or “climax” the riff in some such bodily reaction.
Slide techniques enriched the song, emphasized its message (however simplistic) and made the mood bluer than blue. The slide has some precedence in the history of music -- when W. C. Handy first heard it used at the Tutwiler train station, he was reminded of Hawaiian music -– but early bluesmen were really trailblazers in its application and development. If you want to hear a modern usage, listen to Brian Jones on “Little Red Rooster,” a Rolling Stones hit from 1964 (a cover of a Willie Dixon tune, and the first recording to reach Number 1 on the UK charts with a guitar player using the slide).
To the casual listener of Patton’s tunes, these attributes may seem too grandiose, given the simplicity of the 12-bar blues form. That is a tribute to Charlie’s technical talents, because his skills were often very subtle and easily lost to those of us who are not professional musicians. His melodies were not particularly varied, but within his core repertoire he displayed great virtuosity and an abundance of what one critic called “varieties of expression.” He could play it fast, play it slow, with many twists in between. The accomplished blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite said it best: “Sounds simple, but you try to play it.”
Musicianship aside, Patton also had an enormously distinctive voice, not silky in the fashion of a Robert Johnson, but more like a cement mixer just after sand and gravel have been added to the slosh. Technically a baritone, Patton could change his tone, range, and inflection at will. Frequently, in listening to his often indecipherable lyrics, a second seemingly different voice chimes in with an encouraging push, something like a “My God, I’m gonna sing’em” or “Babe, you know I can’t stay,’” which was usually Patton himself. His vocal range, not that broad, was unusually dense and totally distinctive. At a “blind tasting,” as it were, if someone played a Charlie Patton song and asked you, who’s singing that, anyone who knows anything would recognize his voice in a second. I’m reminded here of what Ronnie Hawkins said when he heard Howlin’ Wolf sing: he “had a hell of a voice,” he remarked, “it was stronger than forty acres of crushed garlic.” I get his point.
On top of all this, Patton was a true poet of feelings. I think he would have laughed in your face if anyone had described him in that way within earshot, but he had a descriptive ability to communicate what he, and his ilk down on the plantation, had on their minds (and not just sex). His lyrics, when you are able to decipher what they are, are often beautifully expressed, and blues at its best, and his influence on a legion of fine players and singers is indisputable (Tommy Johnson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters, among others).
The “Birthplace” of the Blues?
Sunflower County might as well have been a private, medieval kingdom, so remote and isolated was it from anything mainstream in American life –“within America,” as David Cohn put it,” and yet withdrawn from it.” There were few if any roads, none paved. When H. C. Speir drove up from Jackson to audition Charlie Patton in 1929, it took him half a day to travel 100 miles. County barons, like Will Dockery, lorded over an entirely subservient working class of mostly illiterate field hands, dominating just about every facet of their lives. He rented them their farms and shacks, furnished them (on credit) with seeds, supplies, mules, carts, and equipment, sold them food in their company stores, and often liquor and women in plantation brothels. In terms of law and order, the plantation owner dispensed both. Mississippi, like adjoining southern states, was politically dominated by its landowning class, and legislation involving security was written with their interests mostly in mind. Many sheriffs in local communities had little or no jurisdiction when it came to plantation issues, other than the grossest of offenses such as murder, and even then, if the killer was a good worker, sheriffs could be argued out of making an arrest. Revenue agents, as another example, were not allowed to ferret out illegal stills on Dockery Farms, the allowance for which most plantation owners winked an eye at, however unwillingly. Some, more enlightened than others, had a doctor on hand to cope with injuries, and cooperated with health officials when they came around to deal with local scourges such as malaria. Will Dockery paid half the bill for quinine brought down to the plantation by social workers hired by the Rockefeller Foundation. Relatively healthy laborers were far better for the bottom line than dead ones.
Which leads to the basic dichotomy of trying to control large numbers of laborers, first during the slavery years, then afterwards when they were nominally “free.” Coercion was always at the root of slavery. Anyone attempting to flee, or trying to revolt was routinely punished in the most savage manner. Beatings, torture, overseers carrying bullwhips, right on through to lynching. On the other hand, without slaves, or without “indentured” laborers, “white gold,” as cotton was called, could not be planted, tended, or harvested. Until mechanization revolutionized the industry in the mid twentieth century, cotton remained the most labor-intensive crop in the United States. No labor force meant no cotton. While cotton prices often fluctuated, and demands for labor with it, the basic dependence was never questioned. The Afro-America worker was the single most important element in the business, but also the most denigrated, abused, and exploited. As cotton empires thrived and grew, particularly in the Delta, the growing interdependence with European markets, and particularly with Britain, grew along with it. British banks and money houses played a vital role in capitalizing expansion and innovation throughout the South, and what was the primary commodity that was initially used as collateral in most loans? Slaves. In Louisiana alone, something like 88 per cent of all mortgages were backed by actual slaves. If the loan failed, or the borrower went bankrupt, the holder of his note was entitled to the possession of specific slaves. Their value, according to some historians, represented “hundreds of millions of dollars in capital,” just another odiferous aspect of the business. Would a more benevolent system have produced more profit and more business from Britain, with a correspondingly less corrosive moral tincture? Perhaps, but human nature being what it is, the urge to dominate, control, and play the king cannot be trumped, in most instances, by the attractions of more restrained and worthy behavior. Will Dockery, for instance, was not an evil man, but he was, unquestionably, the boss.
Another day older, and deeper in debt. A commissary store, 1939
At the turn of the century, for example, farm owners like Dockery did not so much negotiate contractual issues with their tenant farmers as dictate them. Since most tenants had nothing in the way of property or possessions – one said that the average Negro laborer who showed up to work with his family at the beginning of planting season seldom had goods or clothing on them worth more than $30 – they stood disadvantaged from the beginning in trying to bargain for terms. “Negotiation was a white person’s prerogative,” as one historian pointed out.
People can argue all they want about where the blues came from, of where its “birthplace” was, or who should be granted the honorific title “father” of the blues. W. C. Handy, as we have noted, has often been singled out for that sort of recognition if only because he was one of first people to jot down on a piece of paper, in 1903, the profound impression that hearing an old blues song had made on him.
One indisputable fact, which I hope this book will make clear, is that the blues as we know them developed first here in the Delta and nowhere else. The relationship between blues and the historical, political, and geographical uniqueness of this several thousand acre, formerly obscure part of the country, are so intertwined as to make them inseparable. There had been slaves in America well before the blues were born, yet the blues did not develop in Virginia or South Carolina. Afro-Americans had ploughed behind mule packs before; they had performed pick and shovel work under dreadful conditions for generations; they had been abused, beaten, and lynched well before Reconstruction. Yet in those time spheres there were no blues songs in existence, and no performers singing them. So why did this whole artistic expression take shape in the Delta?
I think it had something to do with being free, at least in the technical sense, though still imprisoned, as it were, in the everyday sense. A case, in other words, of Great Expectations never met. Men like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson were no longer slave hands. True, men of their ilk, born into intense poverty, might have been economically trapped, cheated, and treated like dirt, but they were free. When Charlie Patton’s parents pulled up stakes and dragged their multitudinous family of kids up north from Bolton, near Jackson, to seek a place on Dockery’s, they did so on their own. No one hindered their going, no one told them they couldn’t do it. Like hundreds of other Negro freedmen, they abandoned the hard scrabble farms that couldn’t support multiple mouths to feed, many from the tilled-out soil of the Mississippi uplands, and followed word-of-mouth gossip that the Delta lowlands were the place to be – fertile, undeveloped, undergoing a transition where labor was valued and paid accordingly. In other words, an alternative to the endless grind of unrewarded sweat. And, in a way, they were initially right.
If Negro freedmen thought this was nirvana, however, they questioned that notion pretty quickly. The sharecropper equation did not work out to their benefit, but was in fact just another form of bondage. Sharecropping meant debt, and debt meant peonage. These men were free, but in fact they were not. It is certainly true that they could skip out of town at a moment’s notice; they could run to the nearest town and catch a train north, and no lynch mobs with dog packs would hunt them down. But this isn’t what they thought “freedom” would mean. In the Delta, there turned out to be no future for them, and gradually they knew it.
Unlike what W. C. Handy felt, the blues were not “good timey” music. They were melodic in their way, danceable, and seemingly focused on the entertainment needs of weary men and women looking to have fun on their once-a-week night of time off. Story lines to the songs were juvenile for the most part, catering to what men had on their minds most of the time (women), which always formed a grievance of one sort or another, an inevitable sense of disappointment. Taken superficially, women troubles were the primary downer; in fact, they were just symptomatic of deeper realities, a sense that life had cheated them. Freedom? What was that? “Up from Slavery,” certainly, “but Not Far,” as one commentator put it. The expectations of Afro-Americans that the Civil War meant a new start, a new avenue to security and economic advancement, had been disappointed, and nowhere more convincingly than in the Delta. “My woman’s no good,” a blues performer might sing, who could add another line just as easily saying “And my life’s no good either.” Unfulfilled hopes, brought on by the unique circumstances of Reconstruction plus the fantasia of the Delta as a new frontier with a silver lining for even those at the bottom of the economic ladder, is what produced the blues.
I'm just a po' cold nigger
Me and the white man and the boll weevil
All living off of cotton
The white man and the boll weevil
All getting fat.
And here's po' me I ain't got a dime
I'm just a po' cold nigger.
The figurative lack of “shackles” allowed loafers like a Patton and a Johnson to hone their craft. No plantation overseer barged into Robert Johnson’s cabin and told him to get his ass into the fields; he never picked cotton in his life as far as we know; and work to a wastrel like Patton was anathema, as he sang in “Rattlesnake Blues” (“I ain’t gonna have no job, mama, rolling through this world”). These men moved around and lived off women. There is a great period illustration by a record company that shows a wayward wife handing a wad of bills out the window of her shack to a lover standing outside, as the man of the house snores innocently away in bed. And at least two of Patton’s “wives” worked in plantation kitchens, where either through theft or by saving leftovers, they fed their man at home, a custom called “totin’.” While blues historians have made herculean efforts to track down every detail of Patton’s journeys through life, there remain considerable gaps. It is believed, however, that he took quarters on at least seventeen different Delta plantations at one time or another, moving from one to another as whim (or an owner’s ire) might dictate. As the lyrics of “Joe Kirby” say, “Just like a rabbit, I ain’t got no den.”
As “kept” men, these guys had the time and leisure to learn their instruments, to cultivate their repertoire. It also, to some degree, granted them a sense of entitlement. They did not work for a living, per se, and took on the cocky attitude of rebellion. Things were no good down in the fields, so why not catch a freight train and take off, a constant refrain in the blues. As James Cobb, an astute observer of the Delta, wrote in The Most Southern Place on Earth, the “bright lights, big city” of Chicago were less than twenty-four hours away. The blues encouraged such random urges.
The Klan
Maintaining harmony among the workforce was a prime consideration for every plantation owner. Overseers who were too harsh or too aggressive were usually encouraged by their employers to practice restraint, to look the other way when it didn’t interfere with productivity. And although the Delta had the distinction of witnessing something like one-third of all the lynchings in Mississippi between 1900 and 1930, the Ku Klux Klan was, according to the recollections of some plantation owners, actively discouraged from rampaging about the countryside causing unrest and disorder. This may be a case of fanciful revisionism, given the history of “night riding” for which the South is infamous. Whether local ruffians wore capes and silly headgear or not, the fact remains that night-time vigilantism was commonplace in the Delta, and the people being abducted, beaten up, whipped or murdered were usually black.
This was not always the case. The Klan has enjoyed three distinct manifestations in its relatively long life, the first occurring just after the Civil War when its violence was so extreme that the Federal Government sent troops into the Deep South to eradicate it by force of arms. They succeeded, but so also did the powers of reaction, which the Klan personified, that led to the gradual reduction of civil rights for the black population, resulting in their economic enslavement. Military intervention did not eliminate the scourge of rural violence -- far from it -- but the sanction of a formal organization with membership, rules, ceremonies, and a common tactical goal had been removed. As such, lynching was pretty much a non-discriminatory mode of meting out punishment. Pre-1900, white malefactors were just as likely as blacks to be lynched in the Delta. Taking the law into one’s own hands was satisfying to citizens impatient for “justice”: people rustling cattle, those guilty of heinous crimes such as rape – it didn’t matter what color they were, they paid the price, in keeping with the frontier ethos of a territory being reclaimed from its primeval wilderness. Tempers in such a flawed environment tended to flare quickly. A miscreant killed a sheriff in Leland, in the heart of the Delta. A mob formed, went out to the man’s shack outside of town and burned him out. The guy ran for it, back into town, but he was caught and promptly hanged from Leland’s only traffic signal. All night long, the blinking red light reflected on his dead body.[7]
People can argue all they want about where the blues came from, of where its “birthplace” was, or who should be granted the honorific title “father” of the blues. W. C. Handy, as we have noted, has often been singled out for that sort of recognition if only because he was one of first people to jot down on a piece of paper, in 1903, the profound impression that hearing an old blues song had made on him.
One indisputable fact, which I hope this book will make clear, is that the blues as we know them developed first here in the Delta and nowhere else. The relationship between blues and the historical, political, and geographical uniqueness of this several thousand acre, formerly obscure part of the country, are so intertwined as to make them inseparable. There had been slaves in America well before the blues were born, yet the blues did not develop in Virginia or South Carolina. Afro-Americans had ploughed behind mule packs before; they had performed pick and shovel work under dreadful conditions for generations; they had been abused, beaten, and lynched well before Reconstruction. Yet in those time spheres there were no blues songs in existence, and no performers singing them. So why did this whole artistic expression take shape in the Delta?
I think it had something to do with being free, at least in the technical sense, though still imprisoned, as it were, in the everyday sense. A case, in other words, of Great Expectations never met. Men like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson were no longer slave hands. True, men of their ilk, born into intense poverty, might have been economically trapped, cheated, and treated like dirt, but they were free. When Charlie Patton’s parents pulled up stakes and dragged their multitudinous family of kids up north from Bolton, near Jackson, to seek a place on Dockery’s, they did so on their own. No one hindered their going, no one told them they couldn’t do it. Like hundreds of other Negro freedmen, they abandoned the hard scrabble farms that couldn’t support multiple mouths to feed, many from the tilled-out soil of the Mississippi uplands, and followed word-of-mouth gossip that the Delta lowlands were the place to be – fertile, undeveloped, undergoing a transition where labor was valued and paid accordingly. In other words, an alternative to the endless grind of unrewarded sweat. And, in a way, they were initially right.
If Negro freedmen thought this was nirvana, however, they questioned that notion pretty quickly. The sharecropper equation did not work out to their benefit, but was in fact just another form of bondage. Sharecropping meant debt, and debt meant peonage. These men were free, but in fact they were not. It is certainly true that they could skip out of town at a moment’s notice; they could run to the nearest town and catch a train north, and no lynch mobs with dog packs would hunt them down. But this isn’t what they thought “freedom” would mean. In the Delta, there turned out to be no future for them, and gradually they knew it.
Unlike what W. C. Handy felt, the blues were not “good timey” music. They were melodic in their way, danceable, and seemingly focused on the entertainment needs of weary men and women looking to have fun on their once-a-week night of time off. Story lines to the songs were juvenile for the most part, catering to what men had on their minds most of the time (women), which always formed a grievance of one sort or another, an inevitable sense of disappointment. Taken superficially, women troubles were the primary downer; in fact, they were just symptomatic of deeper realities, a sense that life had cheated them. Freedom? What was that? “Up from Slavery,” certainly, “but Not Far,” as one commentator put it. The expectations of Afro-Americans that the Civil War meant a new start, a new avenue to security and economic advancement, had been disappointed, and nowhere more convincingly than in the Delta. “My woman’s no good,” a blues performer might sing, who could add another line just as easily saying “And my life’s no good either.” Unfulfilled hopes, brought on by the unique circumstances of Reconstruction plus the fantasia of the Delta as a new frontier with a silver lining for even those at the bottom of the economic ladder, is what produced the blues.
I'm just a po' cold nigger
Me and the white man and the boll weevil
All living off of cotton
The white man and the boll weevil
All getting fat.
And here's po' me I ain't got a dime
I'm just a po' cold nigger.
The figurative lack of “shackles” allowed loafers like a Patton and a Johnson to hone their craft. No plantation overseer barged into Robert Johnson’s cabin and told him to get his ass into the fields; he never picked cotton in his life as far as we know; and work to a wastrel like Patton was anathema, as he sang in “Rattlesnake Blues” (“I ain’t gonna have no job, mama, rolling through this world”). These men moved around and lived off women. There is a great period illustration by a record company that shows a wayward wife handing a wad of bills out the window of her shack to a lover standing outside, as the man of the house snores innocently away in bed. And at least two of Patton’s “wives” worked in plantation kitchens, where either through theft or by saving leftovers, they fed their man at home, a custom called “totin’.” While blues historians have made herculean efforts to track down every detail of Patton’s journeys through life, there remain considerable gaps. It is believed, however, that he took quarters on at least seventeen different Delta plantations at one time or another, moving from one to another as whim (or an owner’s ire) might dictate. As the lyrics of “Joe Kirby” say, “Just like a rabbit, I ain’t got no den.”
As “kept” men, these guys had the time and leisure to learn their instruments, to cultivate their repertoire. It also, to some degree, granted them a sense of entitlement. They did not work for a living, per se, and took on the cocky attitude of rebellion. Things were no good down in the fields, so why not catch a freight train and take off, a constant refrain in the blues. As James Cobb, an astute observer of the Delta, wrote in The Most Southern Place on Earth, the “bright lights, big city” of Chicago were less than twenty-four hours away. The blues encouraged such random urges.
The Klan
Maintaining harmony among the workforce was a prime consideration for every plantation owner. Overseers who were too harsh or too aggressive were usually encouraged by their employers to practice restraint, to look the other way when it didn’t interfere with productivity. And although the Delta had the distinction of witnessing something like one-third of all the lynchings in Mississippi between 1900 and 1930, the Ku Klux Klan was, according to the recollections of some plantation owners, actively discouraged from rampaging about the countryside causing unrest and disorder. This may be a case of fanciful revisionism, given the history of “night riding” for which the South is infamous. Whether local ruffians wore capes and silly headgear or not, the fact remains that night-time vigilantism was commonplace in the Delta, and the people being abducted, beaten up, whipped or murdered were usually black.
This was not always the case. The Klan has enjoyed three distinct manifestations in its relatively long life, the first occurring just after the Civil War when its violence was so extreme that the Federal Government sent troops into the Deep South to eradicate it by force of arms. They succeeded, but so also did the powers of reaction, which the Klan personified, that led to the gradual reduction of civil rights for the black population, resulting in their economic enslavement. Military intervention did not eliminate the scourge of rural violence -- far from it -- but the sanction of a formal organization with membership, rules, ceremonies, and a common tactical goal had been removed. As such, lynching was pretty much a non-discriminatory mode of meting out punishment. Pre-1900, white malefactors were just as likely as blacks to be lynched in the Delta. Taking the law into one’s own hands was satisfying to citizens impatient for “justice”: people rustling cattle, those guilty of heinous crimes such as rape – it didn’t matter what color they were, they paid the price, in keeping with the frontier ethos of a territory being reclaimed from its primeval wilderness. Tempers in such a flawed environment tended to flare quickly. A miscreant killed a sheriff in Leland, in the heart of the Delta. A mob formed, went out to the man’s shack outside of town and burned him out. The guy ran for it, back into town, but he was caught and promptly hanged from Leland’s only traffic signal. All night long, the blinking red light reflected on his dead body.[7]
A lynch victim, down by the railroad tracks
With the new century dawning, things changed, and quickly. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, 2.27 individuals each year were lynched in the Delta. The majority were Afro-Americans, but a significant percentage were whites. After 1901, not only did the numbers of lynch victims jump, but not a single white person found himself dangling from the end of a rope — they were all blacks; and while the crimes these victims were accused of perpetrating were generally heinous, a disproportionate number were actually the result of racial hysteria, putting the underclass in their place, a reminder not to get too uppity with the white establishment. It was generally a not unsurprising event for the good citizens of a rural crossroads to wake up some morning to find a black man hanging from a lamppost down by the rail yard. D. H. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation merely formalized this violence into a white supremacist statement.
Griffith’s film directly sparked a KKK reincarnation, having roughly the same emotive impact, though in the opposite direction, of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin from sixty-three years before. Griffith, who said he was responding to the “eternal romance” of the South, idealized the pre-war atmospherics of plantation life and grossly distorted the after-effects of defeat during Reconstruction times. Black and mulatto personalities in the script are generally portrayed as either simpering helots or rampaging monkeys, and the whites as paragons of courage, fidelity, and Christian behavior. Before one of the film’s many climactic scenes, when a white heroine commits suicide rather than be raped by a black renegade named Gus, one member of an audience pulled out his pistol and shot the brute’s onscreen image. Restoring moral order, in Griffith’s rendition, was the Klan. They ride to the rescue, protect the virtue of endangered white women, and disarm scallywag Negro soldiers bent on loot and associated mayhem. It is well established that blacks in the early days of motion pictures enjoyed going to the movies as much as white people. How they responded to Griffith’s film on a personal level is hard to define, i.e. did blacks flock to theaters to see it? (Since the movie was one of Hollywood’s first financial blockbusters, tickets were disproportionally expensive.) Officially, organizations such as the newly established NAACP and individual, well-known black voices such W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington condemned it.
The Birth of a Nation was an astounding commercial success. Bosley Crowther, the distinguished film critic of The New York Times for nearly three decades, estimates that the film grossed $50 million, a sum in real dollars nearly equal to that of Gone With the Wind, its 1939 counterpart in Southern myth-making. The problem of its racial prejudices conflicts with its pre-eminence as a film classic. Griffith pushed through so many technical barriers, and pursued his vision with such persistence and emotional vigor (through 12 reels of film, a length of almost three hours, unheard of for the times), that one often forgets the blurry historiography that is so frequently distorted in the narrative. The battle scenes in particular are riveting. It is difficult to watch the climatic infantry charge, where so much footage is focused on the gruesome exchange of bayonet thrusts, or the assassination of Lincoln, or the fighting clansmen as they confronted black Union troops, without coming away with enormous admiration for Griffith’s skill as a moviemaker, and how groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation really was. Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian master, found it a “revelation.”
Griffith’s film directly sparked a KKK reincarnation, having roughly the same emotive impact, though in the opposite direction, of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin from sixty-three years before. Griffith, who said he was responding to the “eternal romance” of the South, idealized the pre-war atmospherics of plantation life and grossly distorted the after-effects of defeat during Reconstruction times. Black and mulatto personalities in the script are generally portrayed as either simpering helots or rampaging monkeys, and the whites as paragons of courage, fidelity, and Christian behavior. Before one of the film’s many climactic scenes, when a white heroine commits suicide rather than be raped by a black renegade named Gus, one member of an audience pulled out his pistol and shot the brute’s onscreen image. Restoring moral order, in Griffith’s rendition, was the Klan. They ride to the rescue, protect the virtue of endangered white women, and disarm scallywag Negro soldiers bent on loot and associated mayhem. It is well established that blacks in the early days of motion pictures enjoyed going to the movies as much as white people. How they responded to Griffith’s film on a personal level is hard to define, i.e. did blacks flock to theaters to see it? (Since the movie was one of Hollywood’s first financial blockbusters, tickets were disproportionally expensive.) Officially, organizations such as the newly established NAACP and individual, well-known black voices such W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington condemned it.
The Birth of a Nation was an astounding commercial success. Bosley Crowther, the distinguished film critic of The New York Times for nearly three decades, estimates that the film grossed $50 million, a sum in real dollars nearly equal to that of Gone With the Wind, its 1939 counterpart in Southern myth-making. The problem of its racial prejudices conflicts with its pre-eminence as a film classic. Griffith pushed through so many technical barriers, and pursued his vision with such persistence and emotional vigor (through 12 reels of film, a length of almost three hours, unheard of for the times), that one often forgets the blurry historiography that is so frequently distorted in the narrative. The battle scenes in particular are riveting. It is difficult to watch the climatic infantry charge, where so much footage is focused on the gruesome exchange of bayonet thrusts, or the assassination of Lincoln, or the fighting clansmen as they confronted black Union troops, without coming away with enormous admiration for Griffith’s skill as a moviemaker, and how groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation really was. Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian master, found it a “revelation.”
The dead body of Gus, the would-be rapist (played by a black-faced white actor), is dumped on the porch of a corrupt Negro politician by the Klan.
As for the average moviegoer, the film was, in a sensory fashion, overwhelming. After seeing it, and no doubt gauging its propagandistic effects, a failed medical student by the name of William Joseph Simmons (known as “Doc”) recruited fifteen like-minded simpletons to dress up in white robes and climb Stone Mountain in Georgia on Thanksgiving night 1915. There they re-established the Klan in a ceremony described by a reporter from The Atlantic Constitution as “impressive,” then burned a cross on the summit, something the original Klan from the late 1860s never did (that was a D. H. Griffith wrinkle, apparently derived from a scene in Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake”).[8]
By the early 1920s the Klan had been reinvigorated, largely due to the efforts of a couple of marketing geniuses who had been hauled aboard by Simmons, the otherwise nondescript “Grand Wizard.” This marketing duo, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, oversaw an enormous expansion in membership (reputedly four million by 1924) which saw the Klan intrude itself into mainstream America (Indiana and Oregon were two of its more important chapters). Offices were moved to Washington D.C., lobbying efforts were commenced to influence legislation, Grand Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, who had forced out Simmons, found himself on the cover of Time Magazine (dressed in a business suit, not a cape and magician’s hat) and the KKK rolled in the money (much of it looted by Klan officials). As hard as it may be to imagine today, in 1924 the Klan organized a mass demonstration in Washington D.C. Thousands marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, in full regalia, and then to cemeteries to place wreaths on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and then the grave of William Jennings Bryant, honoring his role in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial. Dozens of members of Congress openly acknowledged that they were members of the KKK, joined by two justices of the Supreme Court. Although attempting to present a more moderate image, the fact remains that instances of vigilante violence throughout the country, much of it in the upper mid-west and widely reported in the press, steadily undermined its appeal. [9] By the end of the next decade, the Klan was in serious decline due, in large measure, to what Hodding Carter called “its own indigestibility,” though efforts to introduce anti-lynching legislation in Congress went nowhere. A Senate filibuster led by Senator Hatton W. Sumners from Texas, argued against such a bill on the grounds of its alleged infringement on states’ rights, but managed to corrode his constitutional point by saying things like the following: “Only a short time ago, their ancestors were roaming the jungle of Africa in absolute savagery ... You do not know where the beast is among them.” When Paul Robeson, visiting President Truman in 1946, brought up the subject yet again, Truman refused to discuss it and the meeting abruptly ended. [10]
Maintaining societal calm, however, was especially important to men like Will Dockery who, as he grew older, spent a considerable amount of time in Memphis enjoying the good life, leaving farm management to others; thus also the insistence that law and order, in the persons of local sheriffs or constables, should mind its own business when it came to hunting down malefactors. On Senator James O. Eastland’s 6,000-acre family place in Doddsville, only nine miles from Dockery, law officers were required to obtain permission before coming onto the property.
That being said, order had to be maintained, and Dockery and his employees ran the plantation as he saw fit. If men refused to behave, or disrupted the “social compact,” he stepped in, or, as Eudora Welty put it in her novel Delta Wedding about a figure just like Dockery in 1923, “Trouble acts up – he puts it down.” Charlie Patton was not a contributing member of the community. He was, in fact, disruptive. He did not work, he fooled around with other people’s women, he was often drunk, and he was a lounger and a sponger. When Charlie went too far, which was often enough, Dockery tossed him out, as did other owners when Charlie showed up at some far-flung shotgun shack on the outer edge of any particular plantation, usually cohabitating with some well-known floozy. Dockery and his ilk, in keeping with paternalistic attitudes on both sides of the racial divide, often interceded in domestic disputes when approached. One of Patton’s girlfriends was so afraid of Charlie’s temper and violence that she asked Dockery to go by her cabin to pick up a suitcase with her few belongings because she was too frightened to go herself. He complied, packed up her clothes from a ramshackle bureau, berated Charlie, and left; presumably he gave the girl what she wanted, and also lectured her on her deplorable taste in men. Whatever it took to keep people showing up for work each morning, Dockery was ready to do. But it could be dangerous.
One morning in 1904 at Woods Caperton Eastland’s plantation, referenced above, Woods’s younger brother was sent to one of his sharecropper’s hovels to settle a dispute between two men regarding a woman. For his trouble he was shot in the forehead and killed, as was one of the disputants. The sharecropper and the woman in question then took off.
In retrospect, those two didn’t have a chance. Running away gave them another three days to live, but their fate was foretold. Woods, though an attorney at law, ignored all attempts by the local sheriff to stand back. Assembling a vigilante mob under his own command, and appealing to Parchman Farm for its team of hounds (to supplement his own pack), the search began. When the fugitives were caught, there was never any question of a trial. On a Sunday afternoon, right in front of the plantation’s church, a pyre was constructed. Before the two were burned to death, they were tortured (apparently with a large corkscrew), the man had his fingers and ears cut off, distributed as souvenirs to various white spectators in the crowd, beaten mercilessly, and then both were consumed by the flames. (The talented novelist Ralph Ellison wrote a short story entitled “A Party Down at the Square” which graphically described a similar atrocity. “I’ll never forget it,” the main character relates. “Every time I eat barbeque I’ll remember that nigger. His back was like a barbecued hog.”) Woods Eastland was arrested and tried for murder, but was acquitted in a matter of minutes. He later became a district attorney, and his son, through his influence, was appointed to the United States Senate in 1941. With one brief interlude, James O. Eastland served there until retirement in 1978, a staunch defender of segregation throughout his long career.
Black people in the Delta, no longer slaves, felt in their hearts that they still were. What really had changed since Reconstruction days, when advancements for Afro-Americans were wiped out by Jim Crow laws, indifference from Washington, and systemic segregation, to say nothing of economic stagnation? The blues come straight from the heart of this despair, a despair that had its origins in hope, which had since fallen off the face of the earth. The blues certainly began on places like Dockery’s, and the life it represented, originating in its most fundamental form at the rear end of a mule. “I remember my daddy, he would call hisself singing on the blues side. He’d be plowing the mule and git hot, and you’d hear him out there in the field hollering ‘I’m going to the bayou, baby, and I can’t carry you.’” That’s an old-timer's recollection. And Bukka White, a blues pioneer (and former inmate at Parchman Farm) said the same thing. The blues “started right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp. That’s where the blues sprang. I know what I’m talking about.” What those simple field hollers needed was a guitar player like a Charlie Patton who knew what he was doing, who could take the holler a step forward; who could devise ornamental accompaniments and a good dance beat to go along with pretty simple lyrics. These reflected exactly what people knew to be the truth when they attended frolics, dancing and drinking the night along. Charlie and his audience were on the same page. As Howlin’ Wolf put it, “The people went for what I was putting down.”
His “Discovery”
With the advent of phonograph recordings in the 1920s, the rush was on to find “content,” and as related previously the great stimulants behind this search were furniture manufacturers such as the Wisconsin Chair Company up north. They had the consoles, they had the Victrolas that could fit into them, they had the storage capacity below to file away records when not in use. What they needed were singers and songs, and the surge to find them came on strong.
For the classics you had Enrico Caruso singing excerpts from La Bohème and La Traviata. (Caruso made over 250 recordings during his career); for blarney, John McCormack or Fiske O’Hara singing “My Wild Irish Rose.” Not to be neglected, there was “race” music, mostly Dixieland jazz. Some of the earliest Afro-American blues “stars” were discovered pretty quickly, mostly performers who had cut their teeth on the vaudeville circuit – Bessie Smith was probably the first such headliner to record profusely, Ma Rainey not too far behind. Trailing far off in the distance were people few knew anything about, itinerant guitar players whose repertoire was limited, whose performances were raw and often coarse, and whose experience with the outside world was next to nil. These were not front liners on anyone’s radar screen, and it was only because of a few “talent scouts” and enthusiasts that any of these people saw the light of day.
Race music had its niche, however, and every Southern town of any size had its furniture stores, many catering to the black trade. H. C. Speir was one of these, with his shop on the Negro end of Farish Street in Jackson. He had no great affection for any of the bluesmen that he auditioned or signed for various recording companies then springing into existence – Paramount, Columbia, RCA Victor, ARC, and others – but he liked their music, respected their talent, and had an intuitive feel for the sound. “Blue’s was like an owl,” he told an interviewer in 1968. “You’re sitting around at night and hear an owl sing or blow or whistle or whatever you call it – toot – makes you feel kind of lonesome, you see, and whenever these niggers would sing late at night, in the evening, it was a lonesome sound too.”
They could be tough to deal with, on a personal level. They had no education, they drank too much, they were smelly – Speir called them “meat barrel types.” – but he saw that they might make him some money. Because he had been around for a while, and had established a bit of a reputation, word spread that he was looking for talent. Charlie Patton wrote him a note in 1929 (actually, he dictated it to someone else; although his education was “good enough to carry him,” it wasn’t sufficient when it came to actual literacy) and Speir invited him down to Jackson for an audition. He recorded a demo in his primitive studio on the second floor, and then sent him back home. Something about Patton intrigued him, however. He thought “his voice would carry” on a record and, rough as it was, he liked what he heard. Patton “had a regular ol’ Mississippi River voice, that’s all there was to it,” and “he could handle a guitar outta this world.” He drove up to Dockery’s to have another listen.
Some recruiters, like Frank Walker of Columbia, sometimes rounded up several prospects for a single all-night jam session. Walker used to rent a suite of motel rooms in a black Atlanta neighborhood (he stayed somewhere else, in a white section). He’d pay $1 day for their expenses, then move from room to room, essentially saying play me something. He never presented songs or sheet music (“they couldn’t learn them”), but just told them to sing what they knew. He wasn't interested in hearing them perform well-known tunes by other people, or traditional standards that were common fare. He always looked for originals, which were generally “eight or ten things that they did well.”
So, when you picked out the three or four that were best in a man’s so-called repertoire you were through with that man as an artist. It was all. It was a culling job, taking the best that they had. You might come out with two selections or you might come out with six or eight, but you did it at the time. You said goodbye. They went back home. They had made a phonograph record and that was the next best thing to being the President of the United States in their mind.
They were paid hardly anything, and the recordings they made, if sold commercially, were pretty much confined to the black market. Record companies expended little effort to sell or promote “blues” music to the white audience. In 1923, when the legendary John Hammond, referenced earlier, tried to find blues records in New York City, of all places, he couldn’t find any “downtown.” He had to take the A Train to Harlem to find a black-owned record shop that had any current inventory.
Speir had the same mindset: he was interested in a singer “only if he’d sell.” Most of the blues guys he worked with were “interchangeable,” he later said, and there were lots of them. A blues historian related a typical story. He asked “a white farmer, who around the countryside could sing the blues? He took him by truck to a sharecropper’s shack, stopped the car and threw a few pebbles onto the tin roof. The guy came out and sang a few songs.” But in Speir’s view, Patton “had a style that was a little bit different.” Unlike others, he wasn’t shy around white men. He knew he was good and didn’t mind saying so; “he just stuck on himself,” as one of his friends put it. When he finally tracked down Patton on Dockery’s, they went into his shack and Patton sat down and played a good number of tunes. “Most singers had only one or two songs. Lots of singers could sing other people’s songs but not make up their own.” But “he had lots of them, unusual, six to ten at a time. We went there to the house, and he really had a lot of [originals]. My working way was to get originals, what he got up himself.” Speir was suitably impressed, especially when Patton said he wasn’t exactly himself that day. “He told me he’d be better if he’d had a whiskey.”
Speir recommended Patton to Paramount Records, and made $150 for the referral, and Charlie was soon on a train for Richmond, Indiana, where he was first recorded, churning out fourteen songs on a Stella guitar, which the recording engineer figured was worth $30 (a Gibson, considered the best, sold for around $50). Paramount had salesmen who then peddled the records not only through the company’s furniture outlets but to anywhere that sold anything on main street America: drug stores, soda shops, gift and commissary stores, door-to-door, whatever. Most of these guys were white, and many of them, as one admitted, couldn’t “tell one fucking note from another,” and considered the lyrics of the tunes they were selling as indecipherable and low life (to show how stupid most of these people were, they thought “Spoonful” was a song about soup, when in fact it related to cocaine). These sessions were followed by two others in Grafton, Wisconsin, near the headquarters of Wisconsin Furniture, where a total of thirty-two songs were recorded. On the second of these trips, Speir drove some of Patton’s crew up north in his own car, and later remarked that it took a month to air out the stench of body odor and cheap whiskey.
These first sessions produced most of Charlie’s “hits,” and these were formidable given the times and circumstances. Paramount was suitably impressed. They advertised Patton’s various releases in black press outlets such as The Defender, out of Chicago, and used a few gimmicks to gin up interest, at one point printing a crude image that has Charlie wearing a Lone Ranger mask, highlighted by the caption “The Masked Marvel: Who Is He?” Pony Blues may have sold as many as 50,000 copies, when the sale of 10,000 was considered record-breaking for a blues number. Charlie probably was paid a per side average, anywhere from $50 to maybe $200 a song, so he didn’t exactly cash in on any of this, but nonetheless it was more money than he had ever seen, and substantially more than most itinerant bluesmen could ever expect to make. His most accomplished biographers estimate that he may have pulled in about $3000 for the first two sessions alone, well above the average Mississippian, who made about $500 a year.
Charlie and Speir kept up their relationship for the next couple of years. Charlie, for a while, served as a “spotter” for Speir, recommending other singers and bringing some down to Jackson for auditions. Several were girlfriends or mistresses whom Patton was trying to impress, but Speir was a shrewd judge of talent and turned most of these away. “I didn’t think much of the women,” he said. He usually recorded each of them for a song on his machine, and gave them a copy gratis, being a generous man, since he generally charged $5 for a vanity recording (the insatiably ambitious Tallulah Bankhead allegedly requested an audition). But with the Depression, sales began to shrink in the record business, and marginal outfits like Paramount quickly went out of business. The white recording executive in charge of Paramount’s race records lost his job and became a traveling salesman, peddling plaster images of George Washington for a living. Speir eventually gave it up too.
Charlie’s final recording session took place in New York in January and February 1934. By then he was living on borrowed time. His health was bad, he had been thrown off Dockery’s for the last time, he had been jailed for public drunkenness, immortalized in “High Sheriff Blues,” wherein he names the sheriff who arrested him (Officer Webb). A white spotter for American Records, W. R. Callaway, tracked him down, bailed him out of jail in Belzoni, Mississippi, (disorderly conduct, it appears) and off they went to New York. Patton and his common law wife, Bertha Lee Pate, were put up in a Harlem hotel, then shuttled downtown for two recording sessions that produced twelve songs, few of which approach the quality of his earlier work. Some of these were issued under the Vocalion label, the least expensive of ARC’s stable (35 cents per record).
Patton was tired out, but old habits die hard. He drank heavily, as usual (listening to one of his recordings years later, Speir said “He’s about drunk now. You can hear it”). He even took his guitar to a Harlem street corner and played for tips, although it was the middle of winter. Probably no one knew who he was. Would W. C. Handy, who lived nearby, have stopped for a moment to hear Patton sing Pony Blues for the thousandth time, and had the same revelation as he had had at the Tutwiler train station in 1903? I doubt it. He probably would have shaken his head and walked on by. He was past “the blues” by then.
Three months later, Patton was dead at forty-three years of age. He had been diagnosed with heart problems, and evidently died from its deleterious effects. On his death certificate, which had a notation on it for his widow, the clerk wrote n/k, as in “not known,” perhaps offending the many women in his life who may have begged to differ. He was buried in a potters’ field outside Holly Ridge, Mississippi. It is said that initially the grave had a tombstone on it, but that disappeared long ago (if, in fact, it ever existed). John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame had a new marker put up in 1990 – “The Voice of the Delta” is inscribed beneath Patton’s name – but the most authoritative field guide to blues sites in Mississippi claims there is some confusion as to where Charlie is actually buried. Some say he lies underneath an adjoining cotton gin that was built after 1934. No one can say for certain. As for Bertha Lee, she headed north for Chicago, and lived there for the next forty-one years.
His Legacy
White talent spotters and record producers generally had an ingrained contempt for most of these bluesmen. They were little better than a bunch of street performers and deadbeats. “All these fellas, I never run across a worker, I’d say,” Speir recalled. “He’s not a worker [I’d think], he’s just looking for a few nickels so he might buy himself a bottle of something to drink.” That being said, and no one will ever make a case that Charlie Patton was a man of good character, there is something thrilling about listening to some of his classic recordings. Here was a guy most people from mainstream life considered a nobody, and yet the purity and power (no other words for it) of songs like
“Pony Blues” and “Down the Road Blues” are impossible to ignore. Listening to them is a kind of time warp; you find yourself right there in the Delta, sensing a way of life forever gone (thank goodness), but indelibly important to any understanding of America’s history: a ragged black man whose music mirrored the lives and value systems of an oppressed and abjectly powerless class of people, gradually betrayed even by Northern whites who had fought four bloody years to free them. “Every day seem like murder here,” he sings, and wandering around the fossilized remains of Dockery’s, you get that sense full bore.
“Pony Blues,” rightly considered his finest song, can probably be dismissed as just another double-entendre tune that celebrates the sexual subordination of women. You “get in the saddle, tighten up on your rein,” and ride, baby, ride. But it’s way more than that. Contemporary notions of fleeing a hopeless environment present an underlying foundation to the more pedestrian ridicule of women. Railroad imagery – the lifeline to something better – is omnipresent, presented in a commonplace fashion as “my baby” is going to the station and getting out of town, but more profoundly grounded in dejection. “My baby’s going,” but I’m still stuck here. The result? “The blues comes down, baby, like a showers a rain.” Add this to Patton’s musical inventiveness and percussive accompaniment, and you have what the jazz guitarist Woody Mann called “the most perfect blues recording ever made.”
The most remarkable sense of all this is how ephemeral the Charlie Patton trajectory could have been. The few record companies interested in black music were flimsy, tightfisted operations tangential to the main business at hand (selling furniture). Their very existences were marketing sideshows, and the Depression brushed them into oblivion. It was really almost a matter of luck that Patton was ever recorded, given the narrow niche of the people he appealed to, the poorest of the poor. Dixieland washed over white America like a tidal storm; the blues, never, not until the whole original thrust, born in the Delta, was made irrelevant by the monumental black exodus north in the 1930s. The great orators of the past – for example, William Pitt the Elder, let’s say -- we know nothing of them viscerally other than what others said about them: their spellbinding speeches, their marvelous turn of phrase, the effect they had on people. We’ll never appreciate the power or effect of their voices except by reputation or hearsay. Take that to the world of early blues music and, but by the grace of God, what we might have is only the word of a small-town white furniture storeowner, H. C. Speir, that one lowlife drifter Charlie Patton was a hell of a singer. It’s a miracle we have the fifty-four songs we have.
Tourists
When H. C. Speir first showed up at Joe Rice Dockery’s home asking for the whereabouts of one Charlie Patton, Dockery was suspicious. The only species of human being that Delta farm owners disliked more than Union soldiers or Bolsheviks were labor organizers or recruiters sniffing about, looking to lure away valuable workers to other farms equally desperate for field hands. When Speir said he was interested in Patton only because he was a good blues singer, Dockery couldn’t believe it. Blues singer? What was that?
Dockery told an interviewer many years later that he loved music (mainly opera), but had no idea at all about the kind of stuff his Negroes listened to on a Saturday night. It wasn’t until researchers, mostly white kids, starting turning up in the 1960s to ask a lot of questions about black guys long dead or very long in the tooth, that people like Dockery began figuring out that something was going on here. “None of us really gave much thought to this blues thing,” he said; “we never heard these people sing. We were never the type of plantation owners who invited their help to come in and sing for parties. I wish we had realized that these people were so important.” Charlie Patton as an icon of any sort was about as remote a thought as Joe Rice could possibly imagine.
Dockery must really have scratched his head, because Speir was not the only inquisitive person to knock on his door. There was Roark Bradford, for instance, a white Southerner like himself who spent the first fourteen years of his life growing up on a Mississippi River cotton plantation, some “fifteen miles from a railroad,” before his family moved to another plantation in Arkansas. Why were these people so interested in “studying niggers?”
Bradford’s family was a large one, and sufficiently wealthy that he was privately educated mostly at home, and well enough, it appears, that he matriculated from the University of California, Berkeley. All through his youth on the farm he was acutely interested in Afro-American life, inspired originally by his exposure to the often-electrifying character of evangelical black church services. His friend David Cohn once called him a Christian man, a label Bradford rejected, but he was certainly interested in what people believed and why they believed it, especially in the folkloric milieu of his rural and isolated surroundings. It would be a gold mine of material that he would go to time and time again, but he never confined himself to the “upper shelf” of his subject’s lives, admitting that “he was more interested in ‘the Nigger’ than ‘the Negro.’” After spending a decade working in journalism, and most conspicuously as the night editor of the New Orleans Times Picayune, he retired in 1926 to write full time. A slew of short stories followed, many of which won literary prizes, and one collection, Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun, was adapted to the stage in 1930 by Marc Connelly, a well-known playwright and a charter member of the famous (or infamous) Algonquin Round Table.[11] The Green Pastures, as it was called, was a stupendous Broadway hit, running for some 640 performances and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama (though it was banned in Britain for its alleged blasphemy, and having an all-black cast didn’t help). Connelly gave Bradford full measure of credit for the play’s success, saying Brad had guided him around black churches in the New Orleans area, introducing him to pastors and parishioners to give him a feel for the evangelical experience; but the crucial ingredient that Connelly gave the script was also the most controversial: God as a black man. Bradford “hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the God in his book was a white granddaddy-colonel sort of figure. The black God was my idea; that’s the only way you could have made it consistent. You had to try to think of the Old Testament as it would be looked at by ingenuous, uninformed Negroes,” which is one reason Connelly wouldn’t allow the play to travel outside of Manhattan for preview performances, as was the custom. “We had a cold opening" in New York City, he recalled years later, “because we didn’t dare take it on the road. If we’d taken it to the hinterland, we might very well still be in jail someplace.”
Another of Connelly’s gambles was the hiring of a complete unknown to play “de Lawd.” He had, at first, thought that it would be simple to find his leading man -- just a case of uncovering a commanding presence with good posture and a deep resounding voice from the hundreds of black actors who responded to his casting calls. But as rehearsals were about to begin, he hadn’t discovered a single person fit for the role. In desperation he turned to the leading black minister of the day, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., whose Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street in Harlem, boasted a congregation of 10,000 members. Powell considered the offer, but turned it down. Only at the last moment did Connelly uncover one Richard Berry Harrison, an elderly gent with no theatrical experience whatsoever. But Connelly, the old theatre hand that he was, trusted his instincts. Just one look at Harrison and he knew he had it: “God came down the street like a man and a half.”[12] The Green Pastures received ecstatic reviews, though when the cast had a celebratory party a few days after its opening, they felt more comfortable giving it in Harlem. A few “hysteroids” in the black community notwithstanding, Connelly was delighted. He didn’t feel as though he was an Uncle Tom.[13]
By the early 1920s the Klan had been reinvigorated, largely due to the efforts of a couple of marketing geniuses who had been hauled aboard by Simmons, the otherwise nondescript “Grand Wizard.” This marketing duo, Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, oversaw an enormous expansion in membership (reputedly four million by 1924) which saw the Klan intrude itself into mainstream America (Indiana and Oregon were two of its more important chapters). Offices were moved to Washington D.C., lobbying efforts were commenced to influence legislation, Grand Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, who had forced out Simmons, found himself on the cover of Time Magazine (dressed in a business suit, not a cape and magician’s hat) and the KKK rolled in the money (much of it looted by Klan officials). As hard as it may be to imagine today, in 1924 the Klan organized a mass demonstration in Washington D.C. Thousands marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, in full regalia, and then to cemeteries to place wreaths on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and then the grave of William Jennings Bryant, honoring his role in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial. Dozens of members of Congress openly acknowledged that they were members of the KKK, joined by two justices of the Supreme Court. Although attempting to present a more moderate image, the fact remains that instances of vigilante violence throughout the country, much of it in the upper mid-west and widely reported in the press, steadily undermined its appeal. [9] By the end of the next decade, the Klan was in serious decline due, in large measure, to what Hodding Carter called “its own indigestibility,” though efforts to introduce anti-lynching legislation in Congress went nowhere. A Senate filibuster led by Senator Hatton W. Sumners from Texas, argued against such a bill on the grounds of its alleged infringement on states’ rights, but managed to corrode his constitutional point by saying things like the following: “Only a short time ago, their ancestors were roaming the jungle of Africa in absolute savagery ... You do not know where the beast is among them.” When Paul Robeson, visiting President Truman in 1946, brought up the subject yet again, Truman refused to discuss it and the meeting abruptly ended. [10]
Maintaining societal calm, however, was especially important to men like Will Dockery who, as he grew older, spent a considerable amount of time in Memphis enjoying the good life, leaving farm management to others; thus also the insistence that law and order, in the persons of local sheriffs or constables, should mind its own business when it came to hunting down malefactors. On Senator James O. Eastland’s 6,000-acre family place in Doddsville, only nine miles from Dockery, law officers were required to obtain permission before coming onto the property.
That being said, order had to be maintained, and Dockery and his employees ran the plantation as he saw fit. If men refused to behave, or disrupted the “social compact,” he stepped in, or, as Eudora Welty put it in her novel Delta Wedding about a figure just like Dockery in 1923, “Trouble acts up – he puts it down.” Charlie Patton was not a contributing member of the community. He was, in fact, disruptive. He did not work, he fooled around with other people’s women, he was often drunk, and he was a lounger and a sponger. When Charlie went too far, which was often enough, Dockery tossed him out, as did other owners when Charlie showed up at some far-flung shotgun shack on the outer edge of any particular plantation, usually cohabitating with some well-known floozy. Dockery and his ilk, in keeping with paternalistic attitudes on both sides of the racial divide, often interceded in domestic disputes when approached. One of Patton’s girlfriends was so afraid of Charlie’s temper and violence that she asked Dockery to go by her cabin to pick up a suitcase with her few belongings because she was too frightened to go herself. He complied, packed up her clothes from a ramshackle bureau, berated Charlie, and left; presumably he gave the girl what she wanted, and also lectured her on her deplorable taste in men. Whatever it took to keep people showing up for work each morning, Dockery was ready to do. But it could be dangerous.
One morning in 1904 at Woods Caperton Eastland’s plantation, referenced above, Woods’s younger brother was sent to one of his sharecropper’s hovels to settle a dispute between two men regarding a woman. For his trouble he was shot in the forehead and killed, as was one of the disputants. The sharecropper and the woman in question then took off.
In retrospect, those two didn’t have a chance. Running away gave them another three days to live, but their fate was foretold. Woods, though an attorney at law, ignored all attempts by the local sheriff to stand back. Assembling a vigilante mob under his own command, and appealing to Parchman Farm for its team of hounds (to supplement his own pack), the search began. When the fugitives were caught, there was never any question of a trial. On a Sunday afternoon, right in front of the plantation’s church, a pyre was constructed. Before the two were burned to death, they were tortured (apparently with a large corkscrew), the man had his fingers and ears cut off, distributed as souvenirs to various white spectators in the crowd, beaten mercilessly, and then both were consumed by the flames. (The talented novelist Ralph Ellison wrote a short story entitled “A Party Down at the Square” which graphically described a similar atrocity. “I’ll never forget it,” the main character relates. “Every time I eat barbeque I’ll remember that nigger. His back was like a barbecued hog.”) Woods Eastland was arrested and tried for murder, but was acquitted in a matter of minutes. He later became a district attorney, and his son, through his influence, was appointed to the United States Senate in 1941. With one brief interlude, James O. Eastland served there until retirement in 1978, a staunch defender of segregation throughout his long career.
Black people in the Delta, no longer slaves, felt in their hearts that they still were. What really had changed since Reconstruction days, when advancements for Afro-Americans were wiped out by Jim Crow laws, indifference from Washington, and systemic segregation, to say nothing of economic stagnation? The blues come straight from the heart of this despair, a despair that had its origins in hope, which had since fallen off the face of the earth. The blues certainly began on places like Dockery’s, and the life it represented, originating in its most fundamental form at the rear end of a mule. “I remember my daddy, he would call hisself singing on the blues side. He’d be plowing the mule and git hot, and you’d hear him out there in the field hollering ‘I’m going to the bayou, baby, and I can’t carry you.’” That’s an old-timer's recollection. And Bukka White, a blues pioneer (and former inmate at Parchman Farm) said the same thing. The blues “started right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp. That’s where the blues sprang. I know what I’m talking about.” What those simple field hollers needed was a guitar player like a Charlie Patton who knew what he was doing, who could take the holler a step forward; who could devise ornamental accompaniments and a good dance beat to go along with pretty simple lyrics. These reflected exactly what people knew to be the truth when they attended frolics, dancing and drinking the night along. Charlie and his audience were on the same page. As Howlin’ Wolf put it, “The people went for what I was putting down.”
His “Discovery”
With the advent of phonograph recordings in the 1920s, the rush was on to find “content,” and as related previously the great stimulants behind this search were furniture manufacturers such as the Wisconsin Chair Company up north. They had the consoles, they had the Victrolas that could fit into them, they had the storage capacity below to file away records when not in use. What they needed were singers and songs, and the surge to find them came on strong.
For the classics you had Enrico Caruso singing excerpts from La Bohème and La Traviata. (Caruso made over 250 recordings during his career); for blarney, John McCormack or Fiske O’Hara singing “My Wild Irish Rose.” Not to be neglected, there was “race” music, mostly Dixieland jazz. Some of the earliest Afro-American blues “stars” were discovered pretty quickly, mostly performers who had cut their teeth on the vaudeville circuit – Bessie Smith was probably the first such headliner to record profusely, Ma Rainey not too far behind. Trailing far off in the distance were people few knew anything about, itinerant guitar players whose repertoire was limited, whose performances were raw and often coarse, and whose experience with the outside world was next to nil. These were not front liners on anyone’s radar screen, and it was only because of a few “talent scouts” and enthusiasts that any of these people saw the light of day.
Race music had its niche, however, and every Southern town of any size had its furniture stores, many catering to the black trade. H. C. Speir was one of these, with his shop on the Negro end of Farish Street in Jackson. He had no great affection for any of the bluesmen that he auditioned or signed for various recording companies then springing into existence – Paramount, Columbia, RCA Victor, ARC, and others – but he liked their music, respected their talent, and had an intuitive feel for the sound. “Blue’s was like an owl,” he told an interviewer in 1968. “You’re sitting around at night and hear an owl sing or blow or whistle or whatever you call it – toot – makes you feel kind of lonesome, you see, and whenever these niggers would sing late at night, in the evening, it was a lonesome sound too.”
They could be tough to deal with, on a personal level. They had no education, they drank too much, they were smelly – Speir called them “meat barrel types.” – but he saw that they might make him some money. Because he had been around for a while, and had established a bit of a reputation, word spread that he was looking for talent. Charlie Patton wrote him a note in 1929 (actually, he dictated it to someone else; although his education was “good enough to carry him,” it wasn’t sufficient when it came to actual literacy) and Speir invited him down to Jackson for an audition. He recorded a demo in his primitive studio on the second floor, and then sent him back home. Something about Patton intrigued him, however. He thought “his voice would carry” on a record and, rough as it was, he liked what he heard. Patton “had a regular ol’ Mississippi River voice, that’s all there was to it,” and “he could handle a guitar outta this world.” He drove up to Dockery’s to have another listen.
Some recruiters, like Frank Walker of Columbia, sometimes rounded up several prospects for a single all-night jam session. Walker used to rent a suite of motel rooms in a black Atlanta neighborhood (he stayed somewhere else, in a white section). He’d pay $1 day for their expenses, then move from room to room, essentially saying play me something. He never presented songs or sheet music (“they couldn’t learn them”), but just told them to sing what they knew. He wasn't interested in hearing them perform well-known tunes by other people, or traditional standards that were common fare. He always looked for originals, which were generally “eight or ten things that they did well.”
So, when you picked out the three or four that were best in a man’s so-called repertoire you were through with that man as an artist. It was all. It was a culling job, taking the best that they had. You might come out with two selections or you might come out with six or eight, but you did it at the time. You said goodbye. They went back home. They had made a phonograph record and that was the next best thing to being the President of the United States in their mind.
They were paid hardly anything, and the recordings they made, if sold commercially, were pretty much confined to the black market. Record companies expended little effort to sell or promote “blues” music to the white audience. In 1923, when the legendary John Hammond, referenced earlier, tried to find blues records in New York City, of all places, he couldn’t find any “downtown.” He had to take the A Train to Harlem to find a black-owned record shop that had any current inventory.
Speir had the same mindset: he was interested in a singer “only if he’d sell.” Most of the blues guys he worked with were “interchangeable,” he later said, and there were lots of them. A blues historian related a typical story. He asked “a white farmer, who around the countryside could sing the blues? He took him by truck to a sharecropper’s shack, stopped the car and threw a few pebbles onto the tin roof. The guy came out and sang a few songs.” But in Speir’s view, Patton “had a style that was a little bit different.” Unlike others, he wasn’t shy around white men. He knew he was good and didn’t mind saying so; “he just stuck on himself,” as one of his friends put it. When he finally tracked down Patton on Dockery’s, they went into his shack and Patton sat down and played a good number of tunes. “Most singers had only one or two songs. Lots of singers could sing other people’s songs but not make up their own.” But “he had lots of them, unusual, six to ten at a time. We went there to the house, and he really had a lot of [originals]. My working way was to get originals, what he got up himself.” Speir was suitably impressed, especially when Patton said he wasn’t exactly himself that day. “He told me he’d be better if he’d had a whiskey.”
Speir recommended Patton to Paramount Records, and made $150 for the referral, and Charlie was soon on a train for Richmond, Indiana, where he was first recorded, churning out fourteen songs on a Stella guitar, which the recording engineer figured was worth $30 (a Gibson, considered the best, sold for around $50). Paramount had salesmen who then peddled the records not only through the company’s furniture outlets but to anywhere that sold anything on main street America: drug stores, soda shops, gift and commissary stores, door-to-door, whatever. Most of these guys were white, and many of them, as one admitted, couldn’t “tell one fucking note from another,” and considered the lyrics of the tunes they were selling as indecipherable and low life (to show how stupid most of these people were, they thought “Spoonful” was a song about soup, when in fact it related to cocaine). These sessions were followed by two others in Grafton, Wisconsin, near the headquarters of Wisconsin Furniture, where a total of thirty-two songs were recorded. On the second of these trips, Speir drove some of Patton’s crew up north in his own car, and later remarked that it took a month to air out the stench of body odor and cheap whiskey.
These first sessions produced most of Charlie’s “hits,” and these were formidable given the times and circumstances. Paramount was suitably impressed. They advertised Patton’s various releases in black press outlets such as The Defender, out of Chicago, and used a few gimmicks to gin up interest, at one point printing a crude image that has Charlie wearing a Lone Ranger mask, highlighted by the caption “The Masked Marvel: Who Is He?” Pony Blues may have sold as many as 50,000 copies, when the sale of 10,000 was considered record-breaking for a blues number. Charlie probably was paid a per side average, anywhere from $50 to maybe $200 a song, so he didn’t exactly cash in on any of this, but nonetheless it was more money than he had ever seen, and substantially more than most itinerant bluesmen could ever expect to make. His most accomplished biographers estimate that he may have pulled in about $3000 for the first two sessions alone, well above the average Mississippian, who made about $500 a year.
Charlie and Speir kept up their relationship for the next couple of years. Charlie, for a while, served as a “spotter” for Speir, recommending other singers and bringing some down to Jackson for auditions. Several were girlfriends or mistresses whom Patton was trying to impress, but Speir was a shrewd judge of talent and turned most of these away. “I didn’t think much of the women,” he said. He usually recorded each of them for a song on his machine, and gave them a copy gratis, being a generous man, since he generally charged $5 for a vanity recording (the insatiably ambitious Tallulah Bankhead allegedly requested an audition). But with the Depression, sales began to shrink in the record business, and marginal outfits like Paramount quickly went out of business. The white recording executive in charge of Paramount’s race records lost his job and became a traveling salesman, peddling plaster images of George Washington for a living. Speir eventually gave it up too.
Charlie’s final recording session took place in New York in January and February 1934. By then he was living on borrowed time. His health was bad, he had been thrown off Dockery’s for the last time, he had been jailed for public drunkenness, immortalized in “High Sheriff Blues,” wherein he names the sheriff who arrested him (Officer Webb). A white spotter for American Records, W. R. Callaway, tracked him down, bailed him out of jail in Belzoni, Mississippi, (disorderly conduct, it appears) and off they went to New York. Patton and his common law wife, Bertha Lee Pate, were put up in a Harlem hotel, then shuttled downtown for two recording sessions that produced twelve songs, few of which approach the quality of his earlier work. Some of these were issued under the Vocalion label, the least expensive of ARC’s stable (35 cents per record).
Patton was tired out, but old habits die hard. He drank heavily, as usual (listening to one of his recordings years later, Speir said “He’s about drunk now. You can hear it”). He even took his guitar to a Harlem street corner and played for tips, although it was the middle of winter. Probably no one knew who he was. Would W. C. Handy, who lived nearby, have stopped for a moment to hear Patton sing Pony Blues for the thousandth time, and had the same revelation as he had had at the Tutwiler train station in 1903? I doubt it. He probably would have shaken his head and walked on by. He was past “the blues” by then.
Three months later, Patton was dead at forty-three years of age. He had been diagnosed with heart problems, and evidently died from its deleterious effects. On his death certificate, which had a notation on it for his widow, the clerk wrote n/k, as in “not known,” perhaps offending the many women in his life who may have begged to differ. He was buried in a potters’ field outside Holly Ridge, Mississippi. It is said that initially the grave had a tombstone on it, but that disappeared long ago (if, in fact, it ever existed). John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival fame had a new marker put up in 1990 – “The Voice of the Delta” is inscribed beneath Patton’s name – but the most authoritative field guide to blues sites in Mississippi claims there is some confusion as to where Charlie is actually buried. Some say he lies underneath an adjoining cotton gin that was built after 1934. No one can say for certain. As for Bertha Lee, she headed north for Chicago, and lived there for the next forty-one years.
His Legacy
White talent spotters and record producers generally had an ingrained contempt for most of these bluesmen. They were little better than a bunch of street performers and deadbeats. “All these fellas, I never run across a worker, I’d say,” Speir recalled. “He’s not a worker [I’d think], he’s just looking for a few nickels so he might buy himself a bottle of something to drink.” That being said, and no one will ever make a case that Charlie Patton was a man of good character, there is something thrilling about listening to some of his classic recordings. Here was a guy most people from mainstream life considered a nobody, and yet the purity and power (no other words for it) of songs like
“Pony Blues” and “Down the Road Blues” are impossible to ignore. Listening to them is a kind of time warp; you find yourself right there in the Delta, sensing a way of life forever gone (thank goodness), but indelibly important to any understanding of America’s history: a ragged black man whose music mirrored the lives and value systems of an oppressed and abjectly powerless class of people, gradually betrayed even by Northern whites who had fought four bloody years to free them. “Every day seem like murder here,” he sings, and wandering around the fossilized remains of Dockery’s, you get that sense full bore.
“Pony Blues,” rightly considered his finest song, can probably be dismissed as just another double-entendre tune that celebrates the sexual subordination of women. You “get in the saddle, tighten up on your rein,” and ride, baby, ride. But it’s way more than that. Contemporary notions of fleeing a hopeless environment present an underlying foundation to the more pedestrian ridicule of women. Railroad imagery – the lifeline to something better – is omnipresent, presented in a commonplace fashion as “my baby” is going to the station and getting out of town, but more profoundly grounded in dejection. “My baby’s going,” but I’m still stuck here. The result? “The blues comes down, baby, like a showers a rain.” Add this to Patton’s musical inventiveness and percussive accompaniment, and you have what the jazz guitarist Woody Mann called “the most perfect blues recording ever made.”
The most remarkable sense of all this is how ephemeral the Charlie Patton trajectory could have been. The few record companies interested in black music were flimsy, tightfisted operations tangential to the main business at hand (selling furniture). Their very existences were marketing sideshows, and the Depression brushed them into oblivion. It was really almost a matter of luck that Patton was ever recorded, given the narrow niche of the people he appealed to, the poorest of the poor. Dixieland washed over white America like a tidal storm; the blues, never, not until the whole original thrust, born in the Delta, was made irrelevant by the monumental black exodus north in the 1930s. The great orators of the past – for example, William Pitt the Elder, let’s say -- we know nothing of them viscerally other than what others said about them: their spellbinding speeches, their marvelous turn of phrase, the effect they had on people. We’ll never appreciate the power or effect of their voices except by reputation or hearsay. Take that to the world of early blues music and, but by the grace of God, what we might have is only the word of a small-town white furniture storeowner, H. C. Speir, that one lowlife drifter Charlie Patton was a hell of a singer. It’s a miracle we have the fifty-four songs we have.
Tourists
When H. C. Speir first showed up at Joe Rice Dockery’s home asking for the whereabouts of one Charlie Patton, Dockery was suspicious. The only species of human being that Delta farm owners disliked more than Union soldiers or Bolsheviks were labor organizers or recruiters sniffing about, looking to lure away valuable workers to other farms equally desperate for field hands. When Speir said he was interested in Patton only because he was a good blues singer, Dockery couldn’t believe it. Blues singer? What was that?
Dockery told an interviewer many years later that he loved music (mainly opera), but had no idea at all about the kind of stuff his Negroes listened to on a Saturday night. It wasn’t until researchers, mostly white kids, starting turning up in the 1960s to ask a lot of questions about black guys long dead or very long in the tooth, that people like Dockery began figuring out that something was going on here. “None of us really gave much thought to this blues thing,” he said; “we never heard these people sing. We were never the type of plantation owners who invited their help to come in and sing for parties. I wish we had realized that these people were so important.” Charlie Patton as an icon of any sort was about as remote a thought as Joe Rice could possibly imagine.
Dockery must really have scratched his head, because Speir was not the only inquisitive person to knock on his door. There was Roark Bradford, for instance, a white Southerner like himself who spent the first fourteen years of his life growing up on a Mississippi River cotton plantation, some “fifteen miles from a railroad,” before his family moved to another plantation in Arkansas. Why were these people so interested in “studying niggers?”
Bradford’s family was a large one, and sufficiently wealthy that he was privately educated mostly at home, and well enough, it appears, that he matriculated from the University of California, Berkeley. All through his youth on the farm he was acutely interested in Afro-American life, inspired originally by his exposure to the often-electrifying character of evangelical black church services. His friend David Cohn once called him a Christian man, a label Bradford rejected, but he was certainly interested in what people believed and why they believed it, especially in the folkloric milieu of his rural and isolated surroundings. It would be a gold mine of material that he would go to time and time again, but he never confined himself to the “upper shelf” of his subject’s lives, admitting that “he was more interested in ‘the Nigger’ than ‘the Negro.’” After spending a decade working in journalism, and most conspicuously as the night editor of the New Orleans Times Picayune, he retired in 1926 to write full time. A slew of short stories followed, many of which won literary prizes, and one collection, Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun, was adapted to the stage in 1930 by Marc Connelly, a well-known playwright and a charter member of the famous (or infamous) Algonquin Round Table.[11] The Green Pastures, as it was called, was a stupendous Broadway hit, running for some 640 performances and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama (though it was banned in Britain for its alleged blasphemy, and having an all-black cast didn’t help). Connelly gave Bradford full measure of credit for the play’s success, saying Brad had guided him around black churches in the New Orleans area, introducing him to pastors and parishioners to give him a feel for the evangelical experience; but the crucial ingredient that Connelly gave the script was also the most controversial: God as a black man. Bradford “hadn’t given much thought to the fact that the God in his book was a white granddaddy-colonel sort of figure. The black God was my idea; that’s the only way you could have made it consistent. You had to try to think of the Old Testament as it would be looked at by ingenuous, uninformed Negroes,” which is one reason Connelly wouldn’t allow the play to travel outside of Manhattan for preview performances, as was the custom. “We had a cold opening" in New York City, he recalled years later, “because we didn’t dare take it on the road. If we’d taken it to the hinterland, we might very well still be in jail someplace.”
Another of Connelly’s gambles was the hiring of a complete unknown to play “de Lawd.” He had, at first, thought that it would be simple to find his leading man -- just a case of uncovering a commanding presence with good posture and a deep resounding voice from the hundreds of black actors who responded to his casting calls. But as rehearsals were about to begin, he hadn’t discovered a single person fit for the role. In desperation he turned to the leading black minister of the day, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., whose Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street in Harlem, boasted a congregation of 10,000 members. Powell considered the offer, but turned it down. Only at the last moment did Connelly uncover one Richard Berry Harrison, an elderly gent with no theatrical experience whatsoever. But Connelly, the old theatre hand that he was, trusted his instincts. Just one look at Harrison and he knew he had it: “God came down the street like a man and a half.”[12] The Green Pastures received ecstatic reviews, though when the cast had a celebratory party a few days after its opening, they felt more comfortable giving it in Harlem. A few “hysteroids” in the black community notwithstanding, Connelly was delighted. He didn’t feel as though he was an Uncle Tom.[13]
Richard Berry Harrison, as de Lawd
Six years later Connelly co-directed a film version, still available for viewing on YouTube, with some memorable spirituals by the Hall Johnson Choir.[14] The narrative by twenty-first century standards is pretty objectionable, a kind of primitive exposition of how poorly educated Delta farmers viewed heaven and hell, God (de Lawd) and Satan. Watching extras walking about the screen with fake wings attached to their backs is not an image a Black Panther in a Bed-Sty housing project would embrace.*
Reading some of Bradford’s stories today is a curious experience, and in many instances his reputation as a fine storyteller is well merited. He was also entertaining in an outlandish sense, with his variety of colorful characters sporting garish nicknames and habits. I was reminded on several occasions of where Levon Helm of The Band, who was born and raised in Arkansas, may have been inspired when he sang about Crazy Chester in “The Weight.” Sounds just like Bradford with his “Crazy Chester Cooter, the daughter of old Crazy Jerry, and probably of big old Blue Steel, who was a blue-gummed black man if there ever was one… [a] razor-throwin nigger, ain’t he?”
When Bradford is in a descriptive mood, or analyzing a character’s behavior and thought processes, many rationalizations as to how blacks and whites interact with each other are also telling. There was Willie, for instance, jailed for killing a white man (a mistake according to Willie), who thought he was only shooting his neighbor’s hogs, which were running wild through his corn crop. The question for the all-white jury to consider was whether Willie was “a hog hunter or a man hunter? The jury was divided on that point, but all agreed that no nigger had any right to shoot a white man’s hogs anyway, much less shoot a white man. So they found him guilty as charged.” Poor Willie! As he sits in jail awaiting execution, he still thinks he can talk his way into some sort of accommodation with the man. They weren’t all that complicated, he reasoned. “Sometimes they could talk with you and laugh with you, and sometimes when they were busy they wouldn’t pay any attention to you unless you get in their way or something, and then they will curse you. Willie knew how to get along with white folks.” He felt that way right up until they put a noose around his neck and hanged him.
Bradford was also proud of his phonetic representations of Negro speech, and pretty sure that he had things right, not only based on his personal observations as a Southerner, but from pointed research that he conducted throughout his career as a writer. One reason he approached Joe Rice Dockery was to get an introduction to the warden at Parchman Farm, so he could talk shop with inmates there. Joe Rice did just that, and let him hang around his kitchen as well, where Bradford jotted down things he heard from the cook.
Probably the piece of writing most associated with Bradford was his 1931 novel John Henry, another commercial success. The John Henry legend was widespread throughout the Piedmont and Deep South from the Civil War era onwards. Because he was “a hammer-swingin’ man” who died competing, depending on the story line, with a mechanized machine of some sort (there are many variants, the most widespread being a steel bit driver that drilled holes into tunnel rock for dynamite charges), John Henry’s heroic efforts appealed to both poor whites and subjugated blacks who felt disenfranchised both by modernity and by an Industrial Revolution that so disparaged their individual struggles. A typical case of man versus machine, and in this case John Henry was the ultimate Luddite.
As a ballad, the subject was immensely popular. Mountain people sang it, chain gangs sang it, Mississippi hill people sang it. The earliest recorded version was put out by Charlie Patton’s first label, Paramount, in 1921, featuring the Harlem Harmony Kings. W. C. Handy did a foxtrot rendition as well, and printed the sheet music for it. In 1928, Mississippi John Hurt released Spike Driver Blues. By the time Bradford’s novel came out, there were thirty-four versions on records, more than half by white artists.
This was familiar territory. John Henry was the superhuman man, “I works and I rambles and I rambles and works, And dat’s de way I gits all around. I’m a natchal man and I’m six foot tall.” He could haul a 500-pound bale of cotton up and down the gangplank of a riverboat like no one else, he could drive a 9-inch steel nail into a railroad tie faster than anyone, he could shovel coal into the firebox of a highballin’ locomotive with breakneck speed, he could pick more cotton quicker than any field hand down on the farm. When he tired from his work, he headed out “for de back er town,” where he encountered all the usual vices. He blew money on fancy clothes, he gambled, he wanted a woman who cooked his dinner and didn’t go “creeping” with other studs. When Julie Anne habitually cheated on him the moment he closed the door and went off to work, he’d have to slap her to the floor; when she got up, he’d slap her again. At the heart of all his troubles it was always “a woman would bear down on his soul.”
Along the way we’re treated to the usual parade of stock characters, from profanity-spewing steamboat captains to relentless plantation owners and railroad tycoons (John Henry helped build the Yellow Dog, for instance). Gamblers, pimps, women of easy virtue, witches, soothsayers, and all manner of colorful deadbeats wander through the narrative, along with a few historical figures like Blind Lemon Jefferson, an early blues singer to whom John Henry turns for some lovelorn advice. Blind Lemon is sitting on a street corner, singing a one-verse tune, “I love you, woman, but I don’t like yo’ low-down ways,” and John Henry asks him to expand a bit. What’s your problem, boy, Blind Lemon asks, “Ain’t dat enough?”
“John Henry took Blind Lemon by the right hand. ‘You might be blind and can’t see,’ he told him, ‘but you sho kin see inside er my poor heart, ‘cause I loves a gal, but she sho treat me low down. I do for her and she do me bad.’” Blind Lemon’s advice?
Take a shot er cocaine,
And take a shot er gin.
You kin tell hit’ll kill yo’ troubles,
But you can’t tell when.
All these picaresque adventures, and the many dialogues therein, are presented in phonetically appropriate “Negro speak,” or at least Bradford’s version of it, which is one reason his reputation has sunk so dramatically since his prime appeal in the 1930s. He also offends current sensibilities through John Henry’s stereotypical lapses in judgment, which are buffoonish to say the least. John Henry may be the meanest man in town, but he also hasn’t a brain in his head. He’s a cartoon figure, and the dilemmas that ensnare him, as he stumbles from one “coon trap” into another, seem biblical to his mind but cartoonish (and amusing) to ours. This is pretty definitely a condescension, a slide into Aunt Jemima land where, lurking in the corner, are her friends, Uncle Ben with his rice, and Rastus with his Cream of Wheat, the last mentioned a creation of Joel Chandler Harris from his collection of Uncle Remus stories (Uncle Remus is deservedly indecipherable for today’s reader).[15] Many black contemporaries, especially those generalized under the caption of the Harlem Renaissance, were dismissive. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the more interesting of these writers, couldn’t stand it: Bradford was nothing but “a ham,” and his dialogue a pastiche of cliché right out of the “plantation school,” reminding her of “blackface” white minstrels who played country vaudeville circuits. Heaven was “one continual fish fry.” Black writers could get away with purple prose and lurid plotlines when writing about their own people and their troubles (Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children comes to mind), but white people did not have equal rights in that particular sphere.
Bradford sought to replicate the success of The Green Pastures in 1940, when his stage version of John Henry opened on Broadway, starring the internationally famous Paul Robeson in the title role, Robeson’s first stage appearance in New York City in eight years. Robeson’s career defies brief explanation, ranging as it did over just about every facet of Afro-American life, and often transcending it into broader, more international territory such as European politics, the wars against fascism, McCarthyism in the 1950s, and much more. What he was not was a Delta sharecropper, having been born in New Jersey where he attended college and played football at Rutgers University. He made his name on stage and screen both as an actor and as a singer (he had a magnificent bass baritone voice). His rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in the London production of Show Boat remains a standard that has yet to be matched, though it created a stir when Robeson altered some of the lyrics during recitals – “You get a little drunk, and you land in jail,” he changed to “You show a little spunk, and you land in jail.” Robeson’s social conscience never deserted him; in fact, it caused him more trouble, both personally and professionally, than most people could have survived.
Robeson was a natural for the character of John Henry, though he often complained that “black” roles were limited and often confined to stock characterization. Othello was down his alley, as was his star turn in Eugene O’Neill’s All Gods Chillun Got Wings, which had its 1924 première in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The theme, as befits O’Neill, was controversial -- one of interracial marriage, and Robeson had a few scenes where he kissed his white wife. As Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoy Jones) wrote, that was enough to “bring the Klan out of their garbage can.” John Henry, however, was a fiasco. When the cast gathered at a Manhattan restaurant to read early newspaper editions, all they saw were dreadful reviews. The show closed after only seven performances, and with it Bradford’s reputation, which went into a slow, gradual, and somewhat lengthy decline. Today, mainstream criticism dismisses his work out of hand, some of which is more gentle than others: “sentimental,” “patronizing,” “demeaning,” “vaudeville,” and so on. Where earlier critics might characterize him, with some hyperbole, as a Mark Twain figure, others condemned him as downright “racist.”
Bradford’s cultural eclipse would have stunned him. No man, he would have claimed, was more in sympathy with black people than he was. No one more deplored the feudalistic conditions under which blacks labored than he, and no one had a more affectionate view of the average black person. Bradford belonged to the southern intellectual elite, he hung around with people like David Cohn, Will Percy and William Faulkner, and would have recoiled from being labeled “paternalistic.” He depicted with accuracy the life of average Delta Negroes, and had the delicacy of spirit not to depict their moral inadequacies with too realistic a brushstroke. Had he been more bawdy, a New York theatre critic noted, perhaps his play John Henry might have been less of an idealistic cartoon.
What rendered him irrelevant was the fact that Afro-American writers were beginning their emergence from utter obscurity into, if not a limelight, at least more general circulation. While not particularly true of the early twentieth century South, the fact remains that educational opportunities were beginning to open up for Afro-Americans, and particularly in the North. Black people no longer faced a future of universal illiteracy; more and more were transforming from oral folklorists, trapped on the farm or plantation, into refined intellectuals with typewriters and college degrees and the standard literary ambitions that often come along with sociological progress. The above-mentioned Zora Neale Hurston was the only black woman in her class at Barnard College in New York, and she was thirty-seven years old when she received her degree in 1928, but her circle of friends and literary contemporaries in Harlem was wide-ranging, sophisticated, contentious, and invigorating. No wonder Hurston’s friend, Carl Van Vechten (who, incidentally, was Gertrude Stein’s executor) could entitle his 1926 novel about Harlem, Nigger Heaven. This intellectual circle of elites had no time for a Roark Bradford.[16]
Brad died in 1948 from a parasitic infection he picked up in French West Africa during wartime service. His body was cremated, and the ashes scattered on the Mississippi River.
Charlie Patton Unearthed
The ARC company that brought Charlie to New York issued the last Patton song, Hang it on the Wall, in 1935. That was it. Columbia bought out ARC three years later, and according to Patton’s most diligent biographers, they lost sight of Patton’s masters for some thirty years (they were apparently listed in the filing system under Chinese folk songs). A new breed of blues collectors were hot on his trail, however. One recounts that, as a depressed and downtrodden teenager in the 1960s, he found relief in scouring black neighborhoods in his native Meridian, knocking on front doors and asking if anyone had any “Victrola records” they were looking to unload. On his first day he found Bertha “Chippie” Hill singing “Mess Katie Mess” with Louis Armstrong on cornet, and pretty soon he was finding Charlie Patton records as well. An obscure label, Origin Jazz Library, began collecting and issuing Patton material in 1961, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the slightly more mainstream Yazoo Records made the full body of his work widely available. This did not make nearly the commercial splash that Robert Johnson’s work had received ten years before, one reason being that Patton’s death never attained “tragic hero status,” and no one had ever claimed that he had met Satan in the middle of the night at a lonely rural crossroads.
Later in life, long after H. C. Speir had retired, people came by to interview him about Charlie, which amused him. None of this was a big deal, in his opinion, just business. He liked the music, and Charlie “beat ‘em all,” but “those days are past. I don’t remember too much of the talent.”
References
[1] Railroad and lumber companies were eager to dispossess themselves of what they now considered worthless land, having extracted the only thing that in their view had any value. They looked to poor freedmen as potential buyers, though this particular group was hindered by a collective lack of money and a resultant lack of credit, which hindered many blacks from taking advantage of low selling prices. Marketing campaigns were also directed to the North, in the hopes of attracting entrepreneurial types. Their advertising campaigns sought to dispel myths of an archaic, feudal society run along the lines of Gone With the Wind. The “Southern colonel with drooping mustache, long tail coat, and string tie is seen only in picture shows, patent medicine shows, and occasionally in Congress,” this last jibe a reference to Tallulah Bankhead’s granddaddy, John Hollis Bankhead, who served as a senator from Alabama from 1907 to 1920. As a captain in the Confederate army, wherein he was wounded eight times, he became the last surviving rebel to serve in the United States Senate. In 1916 he proposed an authorization to fund a statue of Robert E. Lee, a project that generated little enthusiasm. Debate on the floor dawdled, and he seethed. As Tallulah wrote in her entertaining biography, “one morning he put on his Confederate uniform, donned his sword, then proceeded to the capitol by streetcar. Taking his seat on the floor, he remained a silent, mute accuser of those lacking in respect for his hero.”
[2] David Cohn’s rebuke was probably directed at Tennessee Williams, but examples of Gothic renditions of Delta lifestyles have continued in a steady stream since his many works. A good example is Ellen Gilchrist's The Annunciation, published in 1983, in which the heroine, if such is an apt description, roars through its pages in a drunken haze, to be replaced (when she decides to sober up) with other unsavory inclinations. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all right,” she says to a relative she has been intimate with since she was what, ten years of age. “It’s raining and Grandmomma’s dead, and you’re supposed to fuck your cousins at your grandmother’s funeral. Don’t they know things like that in Chicago?”
[3] In “Cotton Crop Blues,” James Cotton sang that a man “needs luck raising a good crop,” and equated it with shooting dice, the implication being that the odds always favored the house, never the gambler.
[4]Will Dockery’s overseer turned in his horse for a car. He was known to drive out onto the cotton fields, and follow his workers about from behind the steering wheel.
[5] Sterno was developed in the 1890s by S. Sternau & Co. of Brooklyn, New York, as a portable fuel to heat up food at campsites, buffet tables, or underneath chafing dishes. It came in a distinctive can; you popped the lid, put a match to it, and it flamed. A jelly-like substance made from alcohol, denatured to give it a foul (or warning) taste, it was often bought by sharecroppers who had no electricity or stoves in their shacks to heat up their dinner. To alcoholics, it was a temptation. Sterno was often scooped into socks or cheesecloth and liquid extracted from the jelly, known as “squeezejuice,” a toxic concoction if there ever was one. The Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson, whose “Big Road Blues” was the foundation of Howlin’ Wolf’s 1956 smash “Smokestack Lightning,” was so poor that he became almost addicted to the stuff. His 1928 “Canned Heat Blues” tells the sorry tale. The mediocre1960s’ group, Canned Heat, took their moniker from Johnson’s tune.
[6] A pallet on the floor was a common blues motif, suggesting a modicum of propriety on the part of a cheating woman, who wouldn’t want to mess the sheets (if she had any) of the matrimonial bed, i.e. she’d do her love stuff on the floor with her lover of the moment. In a similar vein, the Southern writer William Alexander Percy wrote in his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, a conversation he had with a local sharecropper. “The last time I saw Mims I asked him how he and his wife were getting along. He poked out his mouth: ‘Pretty good, pretty good, I reckon. Cose I always goes up the front steps whistling.’ I praised his cheerfulness. ‘That ain’t it, Mr. Will. I want to give anybody what’s in the house and don’t belong there time to git out the back way. You know I never dud like no rookus.’”
[7] The most interesting of Leland’s native sons was James “Son” Thomas, an accomplished bluesman but better know as a potter/sculptor, whose trademark was grotesque representations of human skulls. It is disquieting to note that Thomas, who earned his keep digging graves in the town cemetery, often incorporated human teeth into his “portraits,” certainly the epitome of scavenging for art’s sake. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. gave Thomas a one-man show in 1985, which Nancy Reagan graced with her presence. Johnny Winter, another famous rock and blues character, grew up in Leland, as did the avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. On the other end of the relevance scale, Jim Henson of Muppets fame was also a native son.
[8] A year after the Klan’s inaugural ceremony on Stone Mountain, work began there on what would become the largest bas-relief sculpture in the universe, profiles of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved into the north face. The first “architect” was Gutson Borglum, who moved on nine years later to begin work on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Three sculptors after him, the project was finally completed in 1972. It was initiated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who, along with like-minded fraternal organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, were particularly active in the 1920s and ‘30s, commissioning memorials and commemorative ceremonies throughout the South (and even in Boston, Massachusetts), including the now controversial equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia (1924).
[9] Five Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to newspapers that had commissioned serial exposés of the Klan.
[10] The Klan’s next, and it is to be hoped, final reincarnation occurred in the 1960s, as civil rights agitation roiled the South.
[11] Dorothy Parker, herself an original member, later complained that this assemblage of wits, who met every day for lunch at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, were in fact “just a bunch of loudmouths showing off.”
[12] Powell was the father of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the flamboyant congressman who represented Harlem for twenty-six years. Harrison appeared on the cover of Time Magazine on March 4, 1935, but did not live long to enjoy his fame, dying ten days later.
[13]Bradford told an amusing story about his sister, who started a school of sorts for young black kids on the family farm, and opened one session with the question: was God a white man or a black man? The latter for sure, one of her students answered, because the first thing God created was the sun. If God was black, by contrast, “his fust command would ‘a’ been, ‘Let me be white!’”
[14] Hall Johnson was a prolific and well-known arranger who enjoyed a long career with both his choir and in Hollywood, where he worked on at least thirty feature films. In Walt Disney’s Dumbo, 1941, he was one of the four-crow quartet, portrayed as a black vaudeville group, which sang “When I See An Elephant Fly.” The Hall Johnson Choir can be heard backing them up.
[15] Frank Zappa had a weird song on his Uncle Meat album (1969) called “Electric Aunt Jemima.” Don’t ask me what it means (probably nothing). He referred to his Standel amplifier by this same name. Again, I have no idea why.
[16] Hurston led a tumultuous and varied life, published profusely, and engaged in numerous spirited controversies with friends, lovers, and literary contemporaries. Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was violently attacked by Richard Wright who, ironically, criticized her for her own use of Negro dialect. Hurston is rightly praised for her coverage of the 1952 Florida murder trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who shot a local white doctor to death in, she claimed, self-defense. The woman had been, in effect, a house slave, had serviced the doctor for years as a concubine, bore his child and was, at the time of the shooting, pregnant by him again. The trial was farcical in many ways. McCollum was not allowed to testify about her relationship with the doctor other than the physical act of shooting him when he pressed her for sex. The details of their long relationship were suppressed by the judge (who had been a pallbearer at the doctor’s funeral), and the all-white jury had little compunction in finding her guilty. Hurston, seated in the segregated balcony, couldn’t believe it. Her reporting helped bring international attention to what was a defiantly squalid act of injustice. (It didn’t help that McCollum shot the doctor four times in the back.) McCollum was finally granted a second trial, where her attorney recommended a plea of guilty by insanity; he knew a stacked deck when he saw one. A psychiatric examination “confirmed” McCollum’s mental instability, and she was incarcerated for the next two decades before finally gaining release.
Hurston’s last years were obscure and unhappy. Continually pressed for money, she scraped by in Florida living on public assistance and occasional housekeeping jobs. She died in 1960 and, like a true bluesman, was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, resuscitated interest in Hurston when she wrote “In Search of Zora Hurston” for Ms. Magazine in 1975. Her entire oeuvre was reissued in two volumes by Library of America. It runs to over two thousand pages.
Reading some of Bradford’s stories today is a curious experience, and in many instances his reputation as a fine storyteller is well merited. He was also entertaining in an outlandish sense, with his variety of colorful characters sporting garish nicknames and habits. I was reminded on several occasions of where Levon Helm of The Band, who was born and raised in Arkansas, may have been inspired when he sang about Crazy Chester in “The Weight.” Sounds just like Bradford with his “Crazy Chester Cooter, the daughter of old Crazy Jerry, and probably of big old Blue Steel, who was a blue-gummed black man if there ever was one… [a] razor-throwin nigger, ain’t he?”
When Bradford is in a descriptive mood, or analyzing a character’s behavior and thought processes, many rationalizations as to how blacks and whites interact with each other are also telling. There was Willie, for instance, jailed for killing a white man (a mistake according to Willie), who thought he was only shooting his neighbor’s hogs, which were running wild through his corn crop. The question for the all-white jury to consider was whether Willie was “a hog hunter or a man hunter? The jury was divided on that point, but all agreed that no nigger had any right to shoot a white man’s hogs anyway, much less shoot a white man. So they found him guilty as charged.” Poor Willie! As he sits in jail awaiting execution, he still thinks he can talk his way into some sort of accommodation with the man. They weren’t all that complicated, he reasoned. “Sometimes they could talk with you and laugh with you, and sometimes when they were busy they wouldn’t pay any attention to you unless you get in their way or something, and then they will curse you. Willie knew how to get along with white folks.” He felt that way right up until they put a noose around his neck and hanged him.
Bradford was also proud of his phonetic representations of Negro speech, and pretty sure that he had things right, not only based on his personal observations as a Southerner, but from pointed research that he conducted throughout his career as a writer. One reason he approached Joe Rice Dockery was to get an introduction to the warden at Parchman Farm, so he could talk shop with inmates there. Joe Rice did just that, and let him hang around his kitchen as well, where Bradford jotted down things he heard from the cook.
Probably the piece of writing most associated with Bradford was his 1931 novel John Henry, another commercial success. The John Henry legend was widespread throughout the Piedmont and Deep South from the Civil War era onwards. Because he was “a hammer-swingin’ man” who died competing, depending on the story line, with a mechanized machine of some sort (there are many variants, the most widespread being a steel bit driver that drilled holes into tunnel rock for dynamite charges), John Henry’s heroic efforts appealed to both poor whites and subjugated blacks who felt disenfranchised both by modernity and by an Industrial Revolution that so disparaged their individual struggles. A typical case of man versus machine, and in this case John Henry was the ultimate Luddite.
As a ballad, the subject was immensely popular. Mountain people sang it, chain gangs sang it, Mississippi hill people sang it. The earliest recorded version was put out by Charlie Patton’s first label, Paramount, in 1921, featuring the Harlem Harmony Kings. W. C. Handy did a foxtrot rendition as well, and printed the sheet music for it. In 1928, Mississippi John Hurt released Spike Driver Blues. By the time Bradford’s novel came out, there were thirty-four versions on records, more than half by white artists.
This was familiar territory. John Henry was the superhuman man, “I works and I rambles and I rambles and works, And dat’s de way I gits all around. I’m a natchal man and I’m six foot tall.” He could haul a 500-pound bale of cotton up and down the gangplank of a riverboat like no one else, he could drive a 9-inch steel nail into a railroad tie faster than anyone, he could shovel coal into the firebox of a highballin’ locomotive with breakneck speed, he could pick more cotton quicker than any field hand down on the farm. When he tired from his work, he headed out “for de back er town,” where he encountered all the usual vices. He blew money on fancy clothes, he gambled, he wanted a woman who cooked his dinner and didn’t go “creeping” with other studs. When Julie Anne habitually cheated on him the moment he closed the door and went off to work, he’d have to slap her to the floor; when she got up, he’d slap her again. At the heart of all his troubles it was always “a woman would bear down on his soul.”
Along the way we’re treated to the usual parade of stock characters, from profanity-spewing steamboat captains to relentless plantation owners and railroad tycoons (John Henry helped build the Yellow Dog, for instance). Gamblers, pimps, women of easy virtue, witches, soothsayers, and all manner of colorful deadbeats wander through the narrative, along with a few historical figures like Blind Lemon Jefferson, an early blues singer to whom John Henry turns for some lovelorn advice. Blind Lemon is sitting on a street corner, singing a one-verse tune, “I love you, woman, but I don’t like yo’ low-down ways,” and John Henry asks him to expand a bit. What’s your problem, boy, Blind Lemon asks, “Ain’t dat enough?”
“John Henry took Blind Lemon by the right hand. ‘You might be blind and can’t see,’ he told him, ‘but you sho kin see inside er my poor heart, ‘cause I loves a gal, but she sho treat me low down. I do for her and she do me bad.’” Blind Lemon’s advice?
Take a shot er cocaine,
And take a shot er gin.
You kin tell hit’ll kill yo’ troubles,
But you can’t tell when.
All these picaresque adventures, and the many dialogues therein, are presented in phonetically appropriate “Negro speak,” or at least Bradford’s version of it, which is one reason his reputation has sunk so dramatically since his prime appeal in the 1930s. He also offends current sensibilities through John Henry’s stereotypical lapses in judgment, which are buffoonish to say the least. John Henry may be the meanest man in town, but he also hasn’t a brain in his head. He’s a cartoon figure, and the dilemmas that ensnare him, as he stumbles from one “coon trap” into another, seem biblical to his mind but cartoonish (and amusing) to ours. This is pretty definitely a condescension, a slide into Aunt Jemima land where, lurking in the corner, are her friends, Uncle Ben with his rice, and Rastus with his Cream of Wheat, the last mentioned a creation of Joel Chandler Harris from his collection of Uncle Remus stories (Uncle Remus is deservedly indecipherable for today’s reader).[15] Many black contemporaries, especially those generalized under the caption of the Harlem Renaissance, were dismissive. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the more interesting of these writers, couldn’t stand it: Bradford was nothing but “a ham,” and his dialogue a pastiche of cliché right out of the “plantation school,” reminding her of “blackface” white minstrels who played country vaudeville circuits. Heaven was “one continual fish fry.” Black writers could get away with purple prose and lurid plotlines when writing about their own people and their troubles (Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children comes to mind), but white people did not have equal rights in that particular sphere.
Bradford sought to replicate the success of The Green Pastures in 1940, when his stage version of John Henry opened on Broadway, starring the internationally famous Paul Robeson in the title role, Robeson’s first stage appearance in New York City in eight years. Robeson’s career defies brief explanation, ranging as it did over just about every facet of Afro-American life, and often transcending it into broader, more international territory such as European politics, the wars against fascism, McCarthyism in the 1950s, and much more. What he was not was a Delta sharecropper, having been born in New Jersey where he attended college and played football at Rutgers University. He made his name on stage and screen both as an actor and as a singer (he had a magnificent bass baritone voice). His rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in the London production of Show Boat remains a standard that has yet to be matched, though it created a stir when Robeson altered some of the lyrics during recitals – “You get a little drunk, and you land in jail,” he changed to “You show a little spunk, and you land in jail.” Robeson’s social conscience never deserted him; in fact, it caused him more trouble, both personally and professionally, than most people could have survived.
Robeson was a natural for the character of John Henry, though he often complained that “black” roles were limited and often confined to stock characterization. Othello was down his alley, as was his star turn in Eugene O’Neill’s All Gods Chillun Got Wings, which had its 1924 première in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The theme, as befits O’Neill, was controversial -- one of interracial marriage, and Robeson had a few scenes where he kissed his white wife. As Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoy Jones) wrote, that was enough to “bring the Klan out of their garbage can.” John Henry, however, was a fiasco. When the cast gathered at a Manhattan restaurant to read early newspaper editions, all they saw were dreadful reviews. The show closed after only seven performances, and with it Bradford’s reputation, which went into a slow, gradual, and somewhat lengthy decline. Today, mainstream criticism dismisses his work out of hand, some of which is more gentle than others: “sentimental,” “patronizing,” “demeaning,” “vaudeville,” and so on. Where earlier critics might characterize him, with some hyperbole, as a Mark Twain figure, others condemned him as downright “racist.”
Bradford’s cultural eclipse would have stunned him. No man, he would have claimed, was more in sympathy with black people than he was. No one more deplored the feudalistic conditions under which blacks labored than he, and no one had a more affectionate view of the average black person. Bradford belonged to the southern intellectual elite, he hung around with people like David Cohn, Will Percy and William Faulkner, and would have recoiled from being labeled “paternalistic.” He depicted with accuracy the life of average Delta Negroes, and had the delicacy of spirit not to depict their moral inadequacies with too realistic a brushstroke. Had he been more bawdy, a New York theatre critic noted, perhaps his play John Henry might have been less of an idealistic cartoon.
What rendered him irrelevant was the fact that Afro-American writers were beginning their emergence from utter obscurity into, if not a limelight, at least more general circulation. While not particularly true of the early twentieth century South, the fact remains that educational opportunities were beginning to open up for Afro-Americans, and particularly in the North. Black people no longer faced a future of universal illiteracy; more and more were transforming from oral folklorists, trapped on the farm or plantation, into refined intellectuals with typewriters and college degrees and the standard literary ambitions that often come along with sociological progress. The above-mentioned Zora Neale Hurston was the only black woman in her class at Barnard College in New York, and she was thirty-seven years old when she received her degree in 1928, but her circle of friends and literary contemporaries in Harlem was wide-ranging, sophisticated, contentious, and invigorating. No wonder Hurston’s friend, Carl Van Vechten (who, incidentally, was Gertrude Stein’s executor) could entitle his 1926 novel about Harlem, Nigger Heaven. This intellectual circle of elites had no time for a Roark Bradford.[16]
Brad died in 1948 from a parasitic infection he picked up in French West Africa during wartime service. His body was cremated, and the ashes scattered on the Mississippi River.
Charlie Patton Unearthed
The ARC company that brought Charlie to New York issued the last Patton song, Hang it on the Wall, in 1935. That was it. Columbia bought out ARC three years later, and according to Patton’s most diligent biographers, they lost sight of Patton’s masters for some thirty years (they were apparently listed in the filing system under Chinese folk songs). A new breed of blues collectors were hot on his trail, however. One recounts that, as a depressed and downtrodden teenager in the 1960s, he found relief in scouring black neighborhoods in his native Meridian, knocking on front doors and asking if anyone had any “Victrola records” they were looking to unload. On his first day he found Bertha “Chippie” Hill singing “Mess Katie Mess” with Louis Armstrong on cornet, and pretty soon he was finding Charlie Patton records as well. An obscure label, Origin Jazz Library, began collecting and issuing Patton material in 1961, but it wasn’t until a decade later that the slightly more mainstream Yazoo Records made the full body of his work widely available. This did not make nearly the commercial splash that Robert Johnson’s work had received ten years before, one reason being that Patton’s death never attained “tragic hero status,” and no one had ever claimed that he had met Satan in the middle of the night at a lonely rural crossroads.
Later in life, long after H. C. Speir had retired, people came by to interview him about Charlie, which amused him. None of this was a big deal, in his opinion, just business. He liked the music, and Charlie “beat ‘em all,” but “those days are past. I don’t remember too much of the talent.”
References
[1] Railroad and lumber companies were eager to dispossess themselves of what they now considered worthless land, having extracted the only thing that in their view had any value. They looked to poor freedmen as potential buyers, though this particular group was hindered by a collective lack of money and a resultant lack of credit, which hindered many blacks from taking advantage of low selling prices. Marketing campaigns were also directed to the North, in the hopes of attracting entrepreneurial types. Their advertising campaigns sought to dispel myths of an archaic, feudal society run along the lines of Gone With the Wind. The “Southern colonel with drooping mustache, long tail coat, and string tie is seen only in picture shows, patent medicine shows, and occasionally in Congress,” this last jibe a reference to Tallulah Bankhead’s granddaddy, John Hollis Bankhead, who served as a senator from Alabama from 1907 to 1920. As a captain in the Confederate army, wherein he was wounded eight times, he became the last surviving rebel to serve in the United States Senate. In 1916 he proposed an authorization to fund a statue of Robert E. Lee, a project that generated little enthusiasm. Debate on the floor dawdled, and he seethed. As Tallulah wrote in her entertaining biography, “one morning he put on his Confederate uniform, donned his sword, then proceeded to the capitol by streetcar. Taking his seat on the floor, he remained a silent, mute accuser of those lacking in respect for his hero.”
[2] David Cohn’s rebuke was probably directed at Tennessee Williams, but examples of Gothic renditions of Delta lifestyles have continued in a steady stream since his many works. A good example is Ellen Gilchrist's The Annunciation, published in 1983, in which the heroine, if such is an apt description, roars through its pages in a drunken haze, to be replaced (when she decides to sober up) with other unsavory inclinations. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all right,” she says to a relative she has been intimate with since she was what, ten years of age. “It’s raining and Grandmomma’s dead, and you’re supposed to fuck your cousins at your grandmother’s funeral. Don’t they know things like that in Chicago?”
[3] In “Cotton Crop Blues,” James Cotton sang that a man “needs luck raising a good crop,” and equated it with shooting dice, the implication being that the odds always favored the house, never the gambler.
[4]Will Dockery’s overseer turned in his horse for a car. He was known to drive out onto the cotton fields, and follow his workers about from behind the steering wheel.
[5] Sterno was developed in the 1890s by S. Sternau & Co. of Brooklyn, New York, as a portable fuel to heat up food at campsites, buffet tables, or underneath chafing dishes. It came in a distinctive can; you popped the lid, put a match to it, and it flamed. A jelly-like substance made from alcohol, denatured to give it a foul (or warning) taste, it was often bought by sharecroppers who had no electricity or stoves in their shacks to heat up their dinner. To alcoholics, it was a temptation. Sterno was often scooped into socks or cheesecloth and liquid extracted from the jelly, known as “squeezejuice,” a toxic concoction if there ever was one. The Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson, whose “Big Road Blues” was the foundation of Howlin’ Wolf’s 1956 smash “Smokestack Lightning,” was so poor that he became almost addicted to the stuff. His 1928 “Canned Heat Blues” tells the sorry tale. The mediocre1960s’ group, Canned Heat, took their moniker from Johnson’s tune.
[6] A pallet on the floor was a common blues motif, suggesting a modicum of propriety on the part of a cheating woman, who wouldn’t want to mess the sheets (if she had any) of the matrimonial bed, i.e. she’d do her love stuff on the floor with her lover of the moment. In a similar vein, the Southern writer William Alexander Percy wrote in his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, a conversation he had with a local sharecropper. “The last time I saw Mims I asked him how he and his wife were getting along. He poked out his mouth: ‘Pretty good, pretty good, I reckon. Cose I always goes up the front steps whistling.’ I praised his cheerfulness. ‘That ain’t it, Mr. Will. I want to give anybody what’s in the house and don’t belong there time to git out the back way. You know I never dud like no rookus.’”
[7] The most interesting of Leland’s native sons was James “Son” Thomas, an accomplished bluesman but better know as a potter/sculptor, whose trademark was grotesque representations of human skulls. It is disquieting to note that Thomas, who earned his keep digging graves in the town cemetery, often incorporated human teeth into his “portraits,” certainly the epitome of scavenging for art’s sake. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. gave Thomas a one-man show in 1985, which Nancy Reagan graced with her presence. Johnny Winter, another famous rock and blues character, grew up in Leland, as did the avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. On the other end of the relevance scale, Jim Henson of Muppets fame was also a native son.
[8] A year after the Klan’s inaugural ceremony on Stone Mountain, work began there on what would become the largest bas-relief sculpture in the universe, profiles of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved into the north face. The first “architect” was Gutson Borglum, who moved on nine years later to begin work on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Three sculptors after him, the project was finally completed in 1972. It was initiated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who, along with like-minded fraternal organizations such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, were particularly active in the 1920s and ‘30s, commissioning memorials and commemorative ceremonies throughout the South (and even in Boston, Massachusetts), including the now controversial equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia (1924).
[9] Five Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to newspapers that had commissioned serial exposés of the Klan.
[10] The Klan’s next, and it is to be hoped, final reincarnation occurred in the 1960s, as civil rights agitation roiled the South.
[11] Dorothy Parker, herself an original member, later complained that this assemblage of wits, who met every day for lunch at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel, were in fact “just a bunch of loudmouths showing off.”
[12] Powell was the father of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the flamboyant congressman who represented Harlem for twenty-six years. Harrison appeared on the cover of Time Magazine on March 4, 1935, but did not live long to enjoy his fame, dying ten days later.
[13]Bradford told an amusing story about his sister, who started a school of sorts for young black kids on the family farm, and opened one session with the question: was God a white man or a black man? The latter for sure, one of her students answered, because the first thing God created was the sun. If God was black, by contrast, “his fust command would ‘a’ been, ‘Let me be white!’”
[14] Hall Johnson was a prolific and well-known arranger who enjoyed a long career with both his choir and in Hollywood, where he worked on at least thirty feature films. In Walt Disney’s Dumbo, 1941, he was one of the four-crow quartet, portrayed as a black vaudeville group, which sang “When I See An Elephant Fly.” The Hall Johnson Choir can be heard backing them up.
[15] Frank Zappa had a weird song on his Uncle Meat album (1969) called “Electric Aunt Jemima.” Don’t ask me what it means (probably nothing). He referred to his Standel amplifier by this same name. Again, I have no idea why.
[16] Hurston led a tumultuous and varied life, published profusely, and engaged in numerous spirited controversies with friends, lovers, and literary contemporaries. Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was violently attacked by Richard Wright who, ironically, criticized her for her own use of Negro dialect. Hurston is rightly praised for her coverage of the 1952 Florida murder trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who shot a local white doctor to death in, she claimed, self-defense. The woman had been, in effect, a house slave, had serviced the doctor for years as a concubine, bore his child and was, at the time of the shooting, pregnant by him again. The trial was farcical in many ways. McCollum was not allowed to testify about her relationship with the doctor other than the physical act of shooting him when he pressed her for sex. The details of their long relationship were suppressed by the judge (who had been a pallbearer at the doctor’s funeral), and the all-white jury had little compunction in finding her guilty. Hurston, seated in the segregated balcony, couldn’t believe it. Her reporting helped bring international attention to what was a defiantly squalid act of injustice. (It didn’t help that McCollum shot the doctor four times in the back.) McCollum was finally granted a second trial, where her attorney recommended a plea of guilty by insanity; he knew a stacked deck when he saw one. A psychiatric examination “confirmed” McCollum’s mental instability, and she was incarcerated for the next two decades before finally gaining release.
Hurston’s last years were obscure and unhappy. Continually pressed for money, she scraped by in Florida living on public assistance and occasional housekeeping jobs. She died in 1960 and, like a true bluesman, was buried in an unmarked grave. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, resuscitated interest in Hurston when she wrote “In Search of Zora Hurston” for Ms. Magazine in 1975. Her entire oeuvre was reissued in two volumes by Library of America. It runs to over two thousand pages.
