Charley Patton

Charlie Patton是第一位稱得上偉大的blues樂手。
 
1891年4月，Charlie Patton出生在密西西比州南部的一個佃農(nóng)家庭，從小骨瘦如柴。1900年，Patton舉家遷移到Will Dockery農(nóng)場，在那里他受到吉他手Henry Sloan的影響，喜歡上了彈奏吉他，并跟著Sloan四處表演。到1910年，他已經(jīng)成為技藝純熟的樂手和詞曲作者，寫出了《Down The Dirt Road Blues》、《Banty Rooster Blues》和他的代表作《Pony Blues》。從此時開始，Patton開始與同為吉他手的Willie Brown合作，后者后來經(jīng)常參與Patton的唱片錄音。在此期間，Patton還與Chatman家庭的成員合作過，還以Bo Carter的名字灌錄了不少歌曲。
 
Patton以身體力行為后世的blues樂手定義了一種放浪不羈、四處游蕩的生活方式，結(jié)過八次婚，煙酒幾乎不離手，從不在一個地方逗留得太久，他向北去到Memphis（孟菲斯），向西則遠至阿肯色州和路易斯安那州。1926年，年輕的Robert Johnson跟隨著他和Brown四處表演，學習吉他演奏，你們沒看錯，后來被稱為King of the Delta Blues Singers的Robert Johnson出道時就是跟著Patton混的，否則Patton也不會無可爭議地被譽為Founder of the Delta Blues。 
 
Patton在1929年灌錄了他的第一張唱片，共有14首歌，長度為78分鐘，以Paramount的品牌發(fā)行。 Patton的這張唱片大獲成功，于是他被邀請至Paramount位于威斯康星州Grafton的新錄音棚，再次錄制了28首歌曲。
 
Patton的吉他彈奏方式很奇特，他將吉他放在背后或者兩膝之間進行彈奏。他推廣了滑棒演奏法，對后世blues的發(fā)展影響深遠。他對blues的影響就如同the velvet underground對搖滾的影響。前面提到的有Robert Johnson（當然，Johnson后來也是由于Patton等人對他吉他技術(shù)的嘲諷而離開，六個月后Johnson歸來，他的吉他已經(jīng)彈得如火純青，于是就有了他把自己的靈魂出賣給了魔鬼撒旦，換回了演奏天才的傳說），Bukka White的理想是成為Patton那樣的名人，Howlin' Wolf則回憶1926年P(guān)atton在Drew的城市廣場的表演深深影響了他。Patton的作品被后世的眾多blues歌手翻唱，那是很長的一個名單。
 
Patton最后的唱片錄制于1934年2月，兩個月后的4月28日他離開了人世，他被安葬在密西西比州的Holly Ridge，墓碑上記錄了他對Detal Blues發(fā)展所起的深遠影響。
 
《Founder of the Delta Blues》是Charlie Patton最為人所知的專輯，精選了他1929年-1934年期間的26首作品（在我了解下來這些作品應(yīng)該也包括了他早期的創(chuàng)作），出品廠牌是Yazoo，發(fā)行時間是1995年。現(xiàn)在能夠聽到的Patton的作品基本都出自該專輯。 
 
If the Delta country blues has a convenient source point, it would probably be Charley Patton, its first great star. His hoarse, impassioned singing style, fluid guitar playing, and unrelenting beat made him the original king of the Delta blues. Much more than your average itinerant musician, Patton was an acknowledged celebrity and a seminal influence on musicians throughout the Delta. Rather than bumming his way from town to town, Patton would be called up to play at plantation dances, juke joints, and the like. Hed pack them in like sardines everywhere he went, and the emotional sway he held over his audiences caused him to be tossed off of more than one plantation by the ownership, simply because workers would leave crops unattended to listen to him play any time he picked up a guitar. He epitomized the image of a 20s sport blues singer: rakish, raffish, easy to provoke, capable of downing massive quantities of food and liquor, a woman on each arm, with a flashy, expensive-looking guitar fitted with a strap and kept in a traveling case by his side, only to be opened up when there was money or good times involved. His records — especially his first and biggest hit, Pony Blues — could be heard on phonographs throughout the South. Although he was certainly not the first Delta bluesman to record, he quickly became one of the genres most popular. By late-20s Mississippi plantation standards, Charley Patton was a star, a genuine celebrity.
Although Patton was roughly five foot, five inches tall and only weighed a Spartan 135 pounds, his gravelly, high-energy singing style (even on ballads and gospel tunes it sounded this way) made him sound like a man twice his weight and half again his size. Sleepy John Estes claimed he was the loudest blues singer he ever heard and it was rumored that his voice was loud enough to carry outdoors at a dance up to 500 yards away without amplification. His vaudeville-style vocal asides — which on record give the effect of two people talking to each other — along with the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice would become major elements of the vocal style of one of his students, a young Howlin Wolf. His guitar playing was no less impressive, fueled with a propulsive beat and a keen rhythmic sense that would later plant seeds in the boogie style of John Lee Hooker. Patton is generally regarded as one of the original architects of putting blues into a strong, syncopated rhythm, and his strident tone was achieved by tuning his guitar up a step and a half above standard pitch instead of using a capo. His compositional skills on the instrument are illustrated by his penchant for finding and utilizing several different themes as background accompaniment in a single song. His slide work — either played in his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and fretted with a pocket knife, or in the more conventional manner with a brass pipe for a bottleneck — was no less inspiring, finishing vocal phrases for him and influencing contemporaries like Son House and up-and-coming youngsters like Robert Johnson. He also popped his bass strings (a technique he developed some 40 years before funk bass players started doing the same thing), beat his guitar like a drum, and stomped his feet to reinforce certain beats or to create counter rhythms, all of which can be heard on various recordings. Rhythm and excitement were the bywords of his style.
The second, and equally important, part of Pattons legacy handed down to succeeding blues generations was his propensity for entertaining. One of the reasons for Charley Pattons enormous popularity in the South stems from his being a consummate barrelhouse entertainer. Most of the now-common guitar gymnastics modern audiences have come to associate with the likes of a Jimi Hendrix, in fact, originated with Patton. His ability to entertain the peoples and rock the house with a hell-raising ferociousness left an indelible impression on audiences and fellow bluesmen alike. His music embraced everything from blues, ballads, ragtime, to gospel. And so keen were Pattons abilities in setting mood and ambience, that he could bring a barrelhouse frolic to a complete stop by launching into an impromptu performance of nothing but religious-themed selections and still manage to hold his audience spellbound. Because he possessed the heart of a bluesman with the mindset of a vaudeville performer, hearing Patton for the first time can be a bit overwhelming; its a lot to take in as the music, and performances can careen from emotionally intense to buffoonishly comic, sometimes within a single selection. It is all strongly rooted in 20s black dance music and even on the religious tunes in his repertoire, Patton fuels it all with a strong rhythmic pulse.
He first recorded in 1929 for the Paramount label and, within a years time, he was not only the largest-selling blues artist but — in a whirlwind of recording activity — also the musics most prolific. Patton was also responsible for hooking up fellow players Willie Brown and Son House with their first chances to record. It is probably best to issue a blanket audio disclaimer of some kind when listening to Pattons total recorded legacy, some 60-odd tracks total, his final session done only a couple of months before his death in 1934. No one will never know what Pattons Paramount masters really sounded like. When the company went out of business, the metal masters were sold off as scrap, some of it used to line chicken coops. All thats left are the original 78s — rumored to have been made out of inferior pressing material commonly used to make bowling balls — and all of them are scratched and heavily played, making all attempts at sound retrieval by current noise-reduction processing a tall order indeed. That said, it is still music well worth seeking out and not just for its place in history. Pattons music gives us the first flowering of the Delta blues form, before it became homogenized with turnarounds and 12-bar restrictions, and few humans went at it so aggressively.