Devil Sent the Rain Read Online Free

Vallee—came into homes by way of the Victrola or the gramophone. Jimmie Rodgers sang of the railroads and of traveling out West; Duke Ellington brought a new level of sophistication to African-American artistic expression. The medium of the phonograph was a road by which the Great Wide World was made available to the Local World. But it was also, as it turned out, a road by which news of the local, the idiosyncratic, and the personal made it out into the Great World. It was a two-way street, although people didn’t realize it yet.
    When Patton made his first recordings, in June 1929, he’d already been a well-known local musician for more than a decade. Citified, jazz- and vaudeville-influenced artists such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith had been making records with piano and jazz band accompaniment since the early 1920s. But in 1926 Blind Lemon Jefferson showed the companies that they could make money by recording solitary men, with guitars, singing the blues.
    Patton’s first records were issued in the late summer of 1929, a few months before the stock market crash, and he had a couple of regional hits with “Pony Blues” and “Down the Dirt Road Blues.” Patton recorded much more than any of the other major first-generation Delta bluesmen—Son House, Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Ishman Bracey, Willie Brown, and the others. But as the Great Depression deepened, the entire industry was hurt. Records were a luxury item, and those that were issued after the crash tended to sell less and less, until, at the bottom of the Depression—from 1931 to 1933—very few records of any kind were selling anywhere, much less in the Mississippi Delta.
    It is clear from the testimony of eyewitnesses that Patton was very much an entertainer. He would, apparently, do just about anything to get to an audience—play the guitar behind his back or around the back of his neck, stomp on the floor. He played blues, he played dance music, he played religious music, ragtime songs, sentimental ditties, and he recorded examples of all of it.
    But it is, finally, his blues that sit at the center of his body of recorded work. They burn with a fierce bravado and deep emotion. His titles themselves are a kind of poetry: “Heart Like Railroad Steel,” “Circle Round the Moon,” “Devil Sent the Rain,” “When Your Way Gets Dark,” “Moon Going Down,” “High Water Everywhere.” His lyrics are full of the names of towns, and of the people who populated them: Natchez, Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Sunflower, and Belzoni; Sheriff Tom Rushing (spelled “Rushen” on the record label), Jim Lee, even Will Dockery, the owner of the plantation where he lived for most of his adult life.
    If you figure in alternate takes and tracks on which he accompanied others, like the singer Bertha Lee and the fiddler Henry Sims, Patton made somewhere around sixty recordings. Certain lyrics and turns of phrase burn in the mind for keeps after you hear Patton sing them: “Lord, the smokestack is black, and the bell it shines like gold.” “My baby’s got a heart like a piece of railroad steel.” “Where were you, now, baby, when the Clarksdale mill burned down?”
    One reason that Patton’s recordings are so intense is that several different layers of what you may as well call discourse are going on at once. On most of his recordings, Patton hollers out his lyrics while simultaneously using his guitar both to accompany and to comment upon the main vocal line. In addition, Patton frequently adds another layer by making spoken asides, interjections, and questions in a slightly different voice. So he sings a line such as “When your way gets dark, baby, turn your lights on high,” and immediately uses his “other” voice to say, “ What’s the matter with him? ”—as if he were standing there along with you, listening to himself.