Charley Patton

Charlie Patton是第一位称得上伟大的blues乐手。
 
1891年4月，Charlie Patton出生在密西西比州南部的一个佃农家庭，从小骨瘦如柴。1900年，Patton举家迁移到Will Dockery农场，在那里他受到吉他手Henry Sloan的影响，喜欢上了弹奏吉他，并跟着Sloan四处表演。到1910年，他已经成为技艺纯熟的乐手和词曲作者，写出了《Down The Dirt Road Blues》、《Banty Rooster Blues》和他的代表作《Pony Blues》。从此时开始，Patton开始与同为吉他手的Willie Brown合作，后者后来经常参与Patton的唱片录音。在此期间，Patton还与Chatman家庭的成员合作过，还以Bo Carter的名字灌录了不少歌曲。
 
Patton以身体力行为后世的blues乐手定义了一种放浪不羁、四处游荡的生活方式，结过八次婚，烟酒几乎不离手，从不在一个地方逗留得太久，他向北去到Memphis（孟菲斯），向西则远至阿肯色州和路易斯安那州。1926年，年轻的Robert Johnson跟随着他和Brown四处表演，学习吉他演奏，你们没看错，后来被称为King of the Delta Blues Singers的Robert Johnson出道时就是跟着Patton混的，否则Patton也不会无可争议地被誉为Founder of the Delta Blues。 
 
Patton在1929年灌录了他的第一张唱片，共有14首歌，长度为78分钟，以Paramount的品牌发行。 Patton的这张唱片大获成功，于是他被邀请至Paramount位于威斯康星州Grafton的新录音棚，再次录制了28首歌曲。
 
Patton的吉他弹奏方式很奇特，他将吉他放在背后或者两膝之间进行弹奏。他推广了滑棒演奏法，对后世blues的发展影响深远。他对blues的影响就如同the velvet underground对摇滚的影响。前面提到的有Robert Johnson（当然，Johnson后来也是由于Patton等人对他吉他技术的嘲讽而离开，六个月后Johnson归来，他的吉他已经弹得如火纯青，于是就有了他把自己的灵魂出卖给了魔鬼撒旦，换回了演奏天才的传说），Bukka White的理想是成为Patton那样的名人，Howlin' Wolf则回忆1926年Patton在Drew的城市广场的表演深深影响了他。Patton的作品被后世的众多blues歌手翻唱，那是很长的一个名单。
 
Patton最后的唱片录制于1934年2月，两个月后的4月28日他离开了人世，他被安葬在密西西比州的Holly Ridge，墓碑上记录了他对Detal Blues发展所起的深远影响。
 
《Founder of the Delta Blues》是Charlie Patton最为人所知的专辑，精选了他1929年-1934年期间的26首作品（在我了解下来这些作品应该也包括了他早期的创作），出品厂牌是Yazoo，发行时间是1995年。现在能够听到的Patton的作品基本都出自该专辑。 
 
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.