Devil Sent the Rain Read Online Free Page A

Sometimes this other voice addresses the singing voice directly. All the time this is happening Patton is playing chords, bass lines, or little repeated riffs on the guitar. The result is a kind of three-dimensional listening experience. Patton summons up not just his own persona, but an entire set of implicit dramatic relationships. A performance like “A Spoonful Blues” is practically an anthology of these devices, an amazing example of someone thinking and playing on several parallel lines simultaneously.
    Some writers speak of Patton’s “imprecise” diction, but the word “imprecise,” with its implication of inadvertency, seems wrong. I would say that his diction often seems to be intentionally distorted. Words are broken in half for rhythmic effect; vowels, as mentioned, are stretched and pulled until they seem to be little more than sound for sound’s sake. But what a sound they make. Patton’s timing is staggeringly effective, his rhythm is elastic yet absolutely steady, and his intonation—for all the roughness in his voice—is perfect, and perfectly controlled.
    His last records, made for Vocalion at the beginning of 1934 as the Depression was starting to be relieved by President Roosevelt’s efforts, came along too late to do him any good; he died in April, before the records were issued. And anyway, by that time Patton was an anachronism. As the 1930s went on, the danceable, more urban sound of Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson, Tampa Red, and Big Maceo began to dominate the scene. There was little appetite anymore for Patton’s kind of dark, rough, uncut sound. Robert Johnson’s records of 1936 to 1937 were a kind of throwback, the last big explosion in the munitions dump of the Delta blues. The slightly later recordings of Tommy McClennan and Robert Petway were little more than a footnote to the classic era of Patton and the others.
    In the very late 1950s and early 1960s, it began to occur to a handful of young record collectors that some of the men and women who made the super-rare 78 records they treasured might still be alive and living in the Delta and environs. Guitarist John Fahey, collectors Dick Spottswood, Gayle Dean Wardlow, and a number of others looked in phone books, accosted people on the street, followed leads, and encountered the singers’ friends, cousins, nieces, sons, daughters and, occasionally, the singers themselves. In this way Skip James was found, and Son House, Bukka White, Ishman Bracey, and Mississippi John Hurt, all of whom had recorded around the same time as Patton. But Charley Patton, of course, was long gone.
    From interviews with these sources, a very sketchy life story for Patton began to be pieced together. In the late 1960s Samuel B. Charters included some of this material in a chapter on Patton in his book The Bluesmen . In 1970 Fahey published a groundbreaking study of Patton, including lyric transcriptions, musical analysis of the songs, descriptions of instrumental techniques Patton used, and what biographical material he had access to at the time. It looked as though it would be quite a while before anything like a full-scale biography could be attempted, and now it appears that there never will be one. There just isn’t enough documentation—no diaries, no letters, no logs of engagements, calendars, pay records, accountants’ books. Researchers had to rely on the memories of a small handful of people who actually knew Patton and were articulate enough to convey some of what they remembered.
    The closest thing we have to a biography is King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton , by Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow. It is in some ways a valuable book and in other ways an unfortunate one. It gathers together a lot of information, but in a disorganized and sometimes nearly unreadable fashion. Calt, who has also written books on Skip James and Robert Johnson, and who seems to