Charley Patton

Voice of the Mississippi Delta

Robert Sacré

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496816146
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Blues Book of the Year
—26th Annual Living Blues Awards Contributions by Luther Allison, John Broven, Daniel Droixhe, David Evans, William Ferris, Jim O'Neal, Mike Rowe, Robert Sacré, Arnold Shaw, and Dick Shurman Fifty years after Charley Patton's death in 1934, a team of blues experts gathered five thousand miles from Dockery Farms at the University of Liege in Belgium to honor the life and music of the most influential artist of the Mississippi Delta blues. This volume brings together essays from that international symposium on Charley Patton and Mississippi blues traditions, influences, and comparisons. Originally published by Presses Universitaires de Liège in Belgium, this collection has been revised and updated with a new foreword by William Ferris, new images added, and some essays translated into English for the first time. Patton's personal life and his recorded music bear witness to how he endured and prevailed in his struggle as a black man during the early twentieth century. Within this volume, that story offers hope and wonder. Organized in two parts—"Origins and Traditions" and "Comparison with Other Regional Styles and Mutual Influence"—the essays create an invaluable resource on the life and music of this early master. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, these pieces secure the legacy of Charley Patton as the fountainhead of Mississippi Delta blues.

PART 1

Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues: Origins and Traditions

Black Music USA: From African to African American Music

—Robert Sacré

When I first got the blues, they brought me over on a ship / Men was standin’ over me and a lot more with a whip
—B.B. King, “Why I Sing the Blues”

African Roots and Heritage

Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. Slaves shipped to the New World were naked and had been separated from their families, their relatives, and their friends, but their traditions were alive in their minds. These were oral traditions, which explains the paucity of written indigenous archives. But we know a lot about the music of Africa because the oral traditions of modern Africa contain reliable clues to the past—many musical practices of today and yesterday (mid-twentieth century) are remarkably similar to those of the past; and, most of all, we know a lot thanks to the writings of early travelers and traders in Africa.¹

Many musical instruments of the past are still used today, and a lot of music has been transmitted orally down through the generations.

Most of the African slaves brought to America came from an area in Western Africa now occupied by Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Gabon. More precisely, they were captured in the savanna area lying between the coastal lands and the northern desert. Although musical cultures varied from nation to nation, tribe to tribe, they had enough in common to constitute an identifiable heritage for the Africans brought to the New World.

In Africa, songs, music, and dance are of great importance in daily life and on important occasions. There is appropriate music and dance for almost any activity: birth and death, initiation rites, funerals, weddings, agricultural rites, work in the fields, hunting and fishing expeditions, wars, and religious events. The master of ceremonies for musical occasions in some parts of the savanna region is called a griot; he is historian, musician, and songwriter. He has a high status in African societies and is much respected.

The instruments most often encountered by early travelers in Africa were percussive—drums of all sizes and shapes played with the fingers or palms, or with wooden sticks, and an endless variety of bells, gongs, sticks, rattles. As well, there were balafons (ancestors of the xylophone) and sanzas (thumb pianos). Second in importance were stringed instruments including the mvet (harp-zither), lutes made of gourds or calabashes with strings, the five-stringed harp, and the kora, one of the most beautiful instruments in Africa, both visually and aurally, which consists basically of a sound-box (a large half calabash), a neck, a large bridge and twenty-one strings (nineteen in Guinea). Wind instruments included whistles, male flute (longer), female flutes (shorter), and trumpets made from wood, ivory, or the horns of animals, but these were scarcer and only occasionally used.

The instrumentalists were usually men but singers and dancers could be anyone, man, woman, or child. In Africa, music was—and still is—a collective event and all bystanders participated by joining in song refrains, clapping hands, tapping feet, and entering dance rings whenever they wanted to.

The favorite singing style was, and still is, antiphonal, alternating modernity with improvised verses and tradition with unchanging refrains. The style is known as the call-and-response pattern, and it is also a foundation of African American music—improvised solos and unchanging refrains occur in all styles of jazz, blues, and gospel music.

African singers often used vocal effects, including falsetto, shouts, gasps, whispers, and moans; the same techniques are used by African American artists.

There are many types of African scales, but the most common were pentatonic and modal. It is still like that today in Africa.

In Africa, lyrics and melodies were improvised by soloists. But rhythm was usually more important than melody. The superimposition of different rhythms on each other was the rule, creating a polyrhythmic structure. In general, music-making, singing, and dancing were inextricably linked and always associated. Like music, dance was a way to communicate and ring dances were the most common practice.

It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. So every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree.

Music in the Colonies and Independent America, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (till 1865)

When enslaved Africans arrived in the New World they were in chains, naked, separated from families and friends. They were barred from practicing their religion and following their traditions, and no music was allowed. But their minds were free and their music was alive and strong in their heads. As in Africa, they transmitted it to their children and grandchildren who did the same in successive generations. Gradually African American musical patterns emerged, took shape, and grew strong. Sources of information are colonial newspapers, town and court records, diaries, letters, missionary reports, journals, and the like.

In seventeenth-century rural America, music was mostly vocal, focused on church, where psalms were sung a cappella. But there was also instrumental music from fifes and drums in militia and marching bands.

In the eighteenth century, hymns superseded psalms in churches; dance music with violins and percussion was popular, performed in public houses in coastal towns such as New York, Baltimore, Boston, Savannah, New Orleans, and other places. In such towns, music conservatories were also established, and by the end of the century, concert music was popular.

Black musicians were highly valued. They were free men in the North, but remained as slaves in the South, where a tradition of “plantation songs” blossomed when black house servants on plantations were allowed to learn to play violins and/or harpsichord to entertain their masters: “… local blacks appear to have been involved in just about every aspect of musical experience available to local whites.”² On special occasions, they played for other slaves dancing to win a piece of cake—the famous “cake walks,” precursors of rags and ragtime, itself precursor of jazz.

Many African Americans fought in the Revolutionary War. A black battalion from Massachusetts, the “Bucks of America,” was under the command of a black colonel, George Middelton, a violinist.

The era after the Revolutionary War brought freedom for large numbers of slaves in the North and the community of Free People of Color expanded. But black people in the South stayed as slaves and their only permitted music was work songs, sung in the fields as they tended cotton or tobacco. Change came around 1750, when slaves were admitted in churches and allowed to sing psalms, drawn from the Bible and set to music. These were gradually replaced by hymns—poems built around verses of the Bible, with melodies popular at that time, which started to spread after the First Religious Awakening of 1730. An early hymn writer whose work had strong appeal to African Americans was Isaac Watts, an English nonconformist pastor who in 1707 wrote a compilation of songs popular in England and in America. He had disciples in John Newton and John and Charles Wesley, who preached in private houses, on the street, and other outdoor places instead of waiting for people to come into churches. John Wesley had a methodical approach to the Bible and he was called a “Methodist,” the name applied to his new denomination around 1730. From then on, the Baptist Church and the Methodist Church attracted a majority of African Americans (either slaves or free people of color). That is why the first black American music to appear as such was black religious music, and its development can be traced through several stages.

First step: The black church. Beginning in 1775, a movement for the establishment of separate black congregations quickly developed, initially among Baptist and Methodist churches but spreading quickly to Catholic and Presbyterian churches. It appeared first in the South, where black preacher George Liele (also Leile and Lisle) established the African Baptist Church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, around 1775 before going to Savannah. In the North, it started with an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in New York in 1787 and a Free African Society led by Richard Allen in Philadelphia, also in 1787. Allen published A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns selected from various Authors in 1801, and became the first black bishop in America.

Second step: Independent black denominations. These blossomed at the end of the eighteenth century, led by the Black Baptist Church and the Black Methodist Church, which had black preachers and black congregations with their own rules and liturgy, although these did not differ significantly from their white counterparts. Zion A.M.E. Church in New York in 1796, Black Catholic churches (New York 1807), and Black Presbyterian churches (Philadelphia 1807) were quick to follow.

Third step: camp meetings. A Second Religious Awakening took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and extended outdoor religious services were held in fields and clearings. They lasted for days—up to a week—and attracted large crowds of people. The awakening was an interracial institution, but most of the participants were poor and illiterate; the campers had to sing from memory or learn songs during the meeting. At most meetings there was a small majority of blacks and their influence was great. Song leaders added improvised choruses and refrains to official hymns; they also introduced brand new improvised songs with repetitive stanzas and catchy tunes drawing on popular melodies of the time. These were called “tabernacle songs.” Physical participation was also encouraged, and people would shout, gesticulate, clap hands, and even dance. This is the origin of the “ring shout”: religious dance ceremonies reflecting African form and tradition held by black people after the camp meeting services were finished.

Fourth step: spiritual songs, as pre-Negro spirituals. After 1800, religious black songs began to appear as a distinct genre, covering spirituals, ring spirituals, running spirituals, and shout spirituals. Many black ministers encouraged the singing of these songs, and the performances reflected deep-rooted African traditions. It can be assumed that by just before the Civil War, the foundations had been laid for a characteristic African American folk music. African and European traditions were blended to produce a new style of music. Blacks went on singing African songs and performing African dances, but they learned psalms, hymns, and popular songs—including lullabies, ditties, plantation songs, and marches—from the white man. However, the new black folk music that came out of this was predominantly African in tone. Black religious music was ready to rise from the underground, but a big change in society was necessary. It came with the Civil War.

Politically, it is important to take note of the rise of abolitionist movements in the North. The international slave trade was declared illegal in 1807; this was partially ignored in the South until the first years of the Civil War. Slaves were emancipated in the Northern states in the early nineteenth century.

An American Antislavery Society was founded in 1833, organizing the “underground railroad” to help slaves escape from the South to the North and to Canada. Safe routes were created with guides, “stations” (in which to hide during the day), and station masters. Ex-slaves wrote songs, books, and articles in newspapers and magazines, gave lectures, and tried to make as many people as possible aware of the wretched fate of the slaves in the South and the injustice of their condition … and it worked.

From the War Years (1861–65) and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to World War I (1917): Pre-Blues and Blues

About 200,000 black men served the Union in the United States Colored Troops, and a couple of regiments were headed by black officers. Large numbers of black musicians served in fife and drum bands, gaining skills they would later use when they returned to civilian life.³

In the fall of 1862, President Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation stating that from January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward and forever free” and, in 1865, the Congress added the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in all states. By the thousands, ex-slaves fled to urban areas South and North and to the plains of the West. But they were not welcomed, and within a few years many were back in the South, engaged in agricultural occupations as before. It had been rumored that each family would receive “40 acres and a mule,” but this proved to be a lie. Many were trapped in the sharecropping system, under which the landowner provided land, tools, a mule, and food to a family whose responsibility was to raise crops. When the crop—usually cotton—was sold, a small share of the proceeds went to the workers in return for labor and the rest went to the landowner. It was a vicious system because the black worker virtually never made enough money to repay the cost of goods advanced to him, so his debt increased year after year, leaving him without any hope of clearing it. To escape this new form of slavery, many ex-farmers sought work in lumber and turpentine camps, on steamboats, in coal and iron mines, in factories, in ports as longshoremen, and on railroad gangs. The work songs from slavery times were augmented with new kinds of songs created in these various forms of employment. People who opted for itinerant lives as hoboes and tramps were easily arrested and sentenced to work without pay on levees and roads or on farm or in various industries. Many others were sentenced to prison and prison farms, where song styles were developed to ease the brutal workload. All of these work songs, from the farm, from the factories, and from the prison farms, were the precursors of blues.

Religious Songs

After the Civil War, several Negro institutes and colleges were built in the South and hundreds of black and white teachers came from the North to teach in them, from first grade to university level. Among the more successful were Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; the Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia; Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi; and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. To raise money to help develop their university, Fisk’s a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues: Origins and Traditions
• Part 2: Charley Patton, Mississippi Delta Blues: Comparison with Other Regional Styles and Mutual Influences
• Part 3: Conclusion
• Index