Debate in the Delta

Almost everything about pop music is subject to debate--from naming the best Beatles album to figuring out whether Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” or the Crows’ “Gee” was the first true rock ‘n’ roll hit.

It has long been possible, however, to take comfort in at least one certainty: Robert Johnson was the king of the Delta blues singers.

Thanks to a small but enormously influential body of work in the late 1930s, Johnson, the illegitimate son of a Mississippi sharecropper, helped inspire generations of blues and rock musicians, from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones. The latter’s version of Johnson’s “Love in Vain” is a masterpiece of romantic anguish.

Bob Dylan even toasted Johnson, who died in 1938 at age 37, by featuring a Johnson album prominently in the cover photo of his 1965 album “Bringing It All Back Home.”

So why is there suddenly all this talk about Charley Patton?

Dylan contributed to the buzz last fall by dedicating a song to Patton in his Grammy-nominated “Love and Theft” album. He piqued curiosity even more by declaring in an interview that if he were just making records for his own pleasure, he would “only record Charley Patton songs.”

Revenant Records, a tiny, Austin, Texas, label founded by the late guitarist John Fahey, has now stirred the Patton fires further with a seven-disc boxed set, “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.”

The project seems absurdly ambitious at first glance--the packaging is so lavish that the set weighs 7 pounds. The price is equally hefty--about $175 in most stores.

“Screamin’” contains not only all 50 or so recordings Patton made between 1929 and his death from heart failure in 1934, but also nearly a dozen more recordings he played on (or “possibly” played on). There is also a disc devoted to some of Patton’s peers (including Ma Rainey and Furry Lewis) and followers (Howlin’ Wolf, the Staple Singers), as well as a paperbound copy of Fahey’s 1970 master’s thesis on Patton.

It’s hard not to be intrigued.

Patton recorded with the same raw, primal approach as Johnson, but seven years earlier. As you hear him drawing from the various pop, folk and blues strains of the time, you get the sense of someone instinctively trying to stitch together a new art form.

“What Patton portrays brilliantly is the uncanny feeling that the real forces controlling him are not forces outside himself, but dimly beheld, obscure ‘jinxes’ which hang over him and cloud his thoughts like a pall,” Fahey wrote in his thesis.

It sure sounds as if we’ve got another debate on our hands.

The enthusiasm of Dylan and Fahey aside, Patton is little known outside hard-core blues circles, partly because his music isn’t as easy to absorb as Johnson’s and because it hasn’t been promoted as aggressively by a major label.

A Grammy-winning, two-disc Johnson retrospective, “The Complete Recordings,” has sold more than 2 million copies since its release by Columbia Records in 1990.

Patton recorded the bulk of his material in 1929 for Paramount Records, which closed a few years later and sold Patton’s original recording masters for scrap. The material then went into public domain, meaning any label could pick it up.

That free access would seem to be a help in getting someone’s music exposed, but it has the opposite effect. No major label wants to invest in re-releasing the old Patton records because budget labels would be free to release the same material and profit from the major label’s promotion campaign. There’s also the problem of sound quality. Without the master recordings, labels would have to turn to scratchy old 78s as source material.

Patton’s name has popped up enough in blues histories for roots-minded music fans to search out his records on small, indie labels, including Yazoo and Catfish, but Patton’s vocals are frequently so hard to decipher that most listeners probably just wrote him off.

Even on the new set, which benefits from sonic upgrading, it’s virtually impossible to follow Patton’s vocals because of his careless diction and tendency to drop syllables or even whole words. Thankfully, the Revenant team includes lyrics as part of its obsessive attention to detail, as well as detailed accounts of each song.

As folk-music scholar Dick Spottswood points out in one of the set’s historical essays, there is a strong sense of spontaneity to Patton’s recordings--as if they were always works in project with the recording session version being no more definitive than the version he might sing a week or year later in a club.

Using the perspective provided by the set’s essays, you can follow Patton’s musical path with far more ease and appreciation than before--and it’s a fascinating journey.

Patton, who was born in rural Mississippi around 1890, was already a popular entertainer throughout the Mississippi Delta by the time he started recording for Paramount in June 1929. His first singles sold so well in the South that he was brought back four months later to record more songs.

To avoid flooding the market with material by the prolific writer, according to one account, Paramount released “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” a single from that first session, under the name the Masked Marvel. It was part of an advertising campaign that offered buyers a free record if they could identify the mystery singer. The only clue was that he was an exclusive Paramount artist.

Although it was easy for anyone familiar with the Paramount roster to identify the man behind the raw, robust vocals on the single, the facts of Patton’s personal life remain pretty much a mystery.

After being enthralled by Patton’s music, Fahey, a much respected guitarist with a great love of American roots music, went to the Delta in 1958 in hopes of finding out more about Patton.

Much of the information Fahey relays in his thesis has been challenged by others who also went to Mississippi in search of answers. There is debate over everything from the spelling of Patton’s first name--Charlie or Charley? Both spellings are found on his records and even on his death certificate.

There’s also debate over his birthplace and even his heritage. In the only existing photo of him, Patton has strong white features that separate him from most other Delta blues artists.

David Evans, who wrote one of the set’s essays, believes Patton was one-quarter white, one-quarter to one-half Native American and the remainder African American.

Patton’s background can’t compete with the folklore surrounding Johnson--including the pact Johnson supposedly made with the devil that gave him special musical powers. With up to eight wives, however, Patton was clearly no slouch himself in the notoriety department.

However, it’s the music that ultimately matters most--and that is showcased spectacularly in “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues.”

“High Water Everywhere,” one of an astonishing 24 songs recorded during the October 1929 sessions, is the tune Dylan specifically salutes with “High Water (for Charley Patton),” on “Love and Theft,” and it is probably Patton’s most celebrated recording.

Long before signing with Paramount, Patton was a charismatic entertainer, who relied on show-biz flair and even comedy as much as songwriting to win audience favor. Much like Jimi Hendrix decades later, Patton frequently delighted crowds by playing the guitar behind his head or between his legs.

By the time of “High Water Everywhere,” however, one senses an increasing element of commentary and personal observation in his music.

“High Water Everywhere” reflects on the suffering caused by the massive Mississippi River flood that devastated parts of Mississippi and Louisiana in 1927. Unlike earlier folk and blues narratives about tragic events, Patton injected a greater sense of personal emotion into the recording.

As Spottswood points out in the set, “No longer just a blues entertainer, he becomes a sanctified preacher delivering an impassioned sermon, with snapped bass strings and thumbed guitar box to emphasize the text and underscore the tension.”

Patton was so moved by seeing the wrath of the flood that he wrote “High Water Everywhere” in two parts. In the first, he expresses helplessness. In the second, he is shaken by the devastation: “Oh, woman, children sinkin’ down. Lord have mercy! I couldn’t see nobody

In the same October sessions, Patton also recorded “I Will Not Be Moved,” a declaration of religious faith that years later was adapted by civil rights protesters: “I’m on my way to glory/I shall not be moved.” He too sang happy songs, lustful songs, heartbreak songs--all in the spirit of ultimate self-affirmation that is at the heart of the Delta blues style.

Johnson most certainly benefited from listening to Patton. By adding polish, intensity and discipline to his own recordings, Johnson speaks more directly and clearly to today’s audiences, but it’s no longer possible to start your investigation of the Delta blues singers with Johnson. Patton’s body of work is simply too substantial.

So, who was the original king of the Delta blues?

That’s now open to debate.

*

Robert Hilburn, the Times pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.