Devil Sent the Rain Read online

  I doubt whether any other popular performer of his time recorded in as many widely spread-out places. Rodgers made records not just in Bristol, but in Dallas, Atlanta, New York City, New Orleans, Louisville, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Camden, New Jersey. He recorded by himself, but he also recorded with country fiddlers, with slick studio jazz bands, with Hawaiian guitarists, pianists, banjo players, jug bands, and blues guitarists. Few white musicians in the jazz genre, where racial integration was not uncommon—let alone musicians who performed anything resembling “country” music—recorded as often with black musicians in the 1920s as Rodgers. Not least among these recording companions was Louis Armstrong, the closest thing Rodgers had to an opposite number in the jazz field (they teamed up for Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #9” in Los Angeles in 1930). But he also recorded with the excellent guitarist Clifford Gibson and with the Louisville Jug Band. In 1929 he even made what might be considered the first music video, entitled The Singing Brakeman, in which he sat in his brakeman’s outfit on a stage set and sang three songs to two women, accompanied only by his own guitar.

  Unlike just about every other major rural performer, though, black or white, Rodgers recorded almost no sacred material. To be precise, he recorded exactly one track: a duet with Sara Carter on “The Wonderful City.” That is one song out of the 150 or so tracks included on the six-CD Bear Family box Jimmie Rodgers: The Singing Brakeman, which contains everything he did. Even blues musicians renowned for the most salacious kinds of material, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Boy Fuller, recorded gospel numbers here and there, although they customarily used pseudonyms to do so. Rare indeed were the white performers who ignored sacred material.

  In some way Jimmie Rodgers seemed to represent a kind of mystery cult of his own. In his persona, as in his music, he united disparate elements in one being. People have the kind of reverence and affection for him that the devout reserve for saints. Bob Dylan, who has a way with an image, says that Rodgers’s sound was like the smell of flowers. His voice, Dylan added (in the notes for the Rodgers tribute disc), “gives hope to the vanquished and humility to the mighty.” Even though we’re a thousand miles away from home, waiting for a train, that train will come, don’t you see, and we’ll be forgiven our rough and rowdy ways and shake hands with Mother and Father again.

  Yet Rodgers delivered not just an echo of the redemption of the New Testament but the earthiness of primitive religion and fertility rites. According to blues authority Paul Oliver, as quoted in both major biographies of Rodgers, a tribe in East Africa called the Kipsigi, who were introduced to gramophone recordings sometime during the 1950s, developed an entire cult around the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers, whom they transformed into a deity they called Chemirocha. To them he seemed to be “a formidable player on their local chepkong lyre, and Kipsigi girls have come to believe that Jimmie Rodgers is a kind of centaur, half man, half antelope.”

  And, of course, there was always a strong element of the sacrificial in Rodgers’s life. His time was not long, as he sang in one song, and he knew it. His entire six years of recording was carried out under what was at the time the almost certain death sentence of tuberculosis, which of course eats away at the very bellows that push the songs out—the seat of the spirit, the lungs. Repeatedly ordered by doctors to stay in bed, he never did. In the last three weeks of his life, he traveled by train, in the company of a private nurse, from San Antonio to Galveston, and then by boat to New York City for an epic series of recording sessions, so that his wife and daughter would have a backlog of material to help out financially after he was gone. He stayed at the Hotel Taft, and he took the time to look at a few songs by a couple of young songwriters, whom he received while in bed, propped up on pillows.

  At the Victor recording studio on East Twenty-fourth Street, a cot was set up where Rodgers could lie down and regain his strength between takes. The first day, May 17, 1933, he recorded four tracks, an amazing effort under the circumstances; they included “I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now,” a composition by one of the young songwriters who visited him at his hotel. The next day he recorded three tracks, including the beautiful “Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes,” and a track released as “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Blue Yodel,” sometimes known as “The Women Make a Fool out of Me.” Rodgers skipped a day and went back in on May 20, but he was able to record only two songs before quitting.

  He rested for three days. On May 24 the Victor people had set up a session with two other guitarists, and Rodgers, hanging on by a thread, recorded three songs with them. Then, solo, he recorded his last song, “Fifteen Years Ago Today,” sometimes issued as “Years Ago.”

  The next day his nurse took him for a tour of Coney Island. He suffered a terrible attack of coughing and spasms and had to be brought back to the hotel, and in the deep morning hours of May 26 he died. Listening to the last recordings, if you know the story, is almost unbearably poignant. If you don’t know the story, they are merely great records. You would never guess the circumstances.

  After Rodgers died, a number of the best known country singers, including Gene Autry, Bradley Kincaid, W. Lee O’Daniel, and Ernest Tubb, recorded tribute songs. Most, if not all, of them are assembled on Bear Family’s disc Memories of Jimmie Rodgers. Decades later, the list of major country performers who either recorded Rodgers’s songs or did whole albums in tribute is not just long but nearly endless.

  There is an inner poetry in Jimmie Rodgers’s work that doesn’t force itself on you, that reveals itself in its own time. It is very precious. It is tempting to say that they don’t make them like that anymore, but maybe they do and we just don’t know about them.

  From the Oxford American’s Fourth

  Annual Music Issue, Summer 2000

  A Light Went On and He Sang

  It is always a shock to hear him again.

  I first heard Charley Patton thirty years ago, on a two-LP compilation called The Story of the Blues, which I won in a contest. My adolescent ear was immediately sucked in by the mystery, the wit, the slyness, and the expressive variety of the performances by Blind Boy Fuller, Memphis Minnie, Texas Alexander, Leroy Carr, Barbecue Bob, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Turner, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Otis Spann, Blind Willie McTell, and the rest.

  Nearly all the tracks, even one by a group of “Fra-Fra Tribesmen” from Ghana, felt somehow familiar to me. Each had some rhythmic or melodic or expressive handle to grab onto. But one track seemed nearly unlistenable: It was “Stone Pony Blues” by Charley Patton, recorded in 1934. It seemed almost to be an artifact from some lost world. Patton hollered and growled, rather than sang; he sounded like someone suddenly and belligerently addressing you from a nearby stool in a darkened bar. On top of that, his diction was nearly opaque. His vowels were stretched out, inflated from within; they expanded until they were all but unrecognizable. The words “stone pony” came out sounding like “doughboanayyyy.” What I eventually recognized as “door” sounded like “duwowwwwahhhh.” He added to the confusion by breaking words in half, and by choosing odd syllables to accent. All of this was delivered by a voice from which any trace of varnish had apparently been stripped.

  Patton was too much for me, like the first time you taste really strong black coffee as a kid. He left an aftertaste that burned. And yet, exactly because his sound felt so repellent, I wanted to come to terms with it. It seemed, almost, to be daring me to recognize it as a human sound.

  To this day listening to him can be like having a caged tiger in the middle of your floor. Something is a little too close for comfort. On any given afternoon you might prefer to hear Tommy Johnson, or the Mississippi Sheiks, or Son House, or Willie Brown, or any number of others. But Patton ultimately exerts a greater claim on the imagination, for me at least. Underneath the surface, once you learn how to breathe in the atmosphere Patton generates, there is humor, subtlety, pathos, braggadocio, wit, and, the more you listen, an extraordinary musical sophistication. But t
hat quality of being part of a time and a world that are lost to us adheres to Patton’s recordings in ways that remain palpable.

  Charley Patton was probably born in 1891, of mixed black, white, and Native American ancestry, on a plantation near Edwards, Mississippi, midway between Vicksburg and Jackson. He was one of twelve children, only five of whom survived infancy. Before he was in his teens he had moved a hundred miles or so north with his family to the Mississippi Delta, to the now legendary Dockery plantation, on Route 8, near Ruleville.

  His family was stable and even well-off by the standards of African-American Delta life in the early twentieth century. Patton’s father worked hard and eventually owned some land and a drugstore. His sister Viola married the man who ran the plantation grocery store. Apparently Patton had some schooling; according to one of his nieces, Patton and Viola stayed in school through the ninth grade.

  Beginning in the late 1910s and up to his death in 1934, Patton traveled all through the Delta, playing at house parties and in small makeshift barrelhouses for white and black audiences, and his songs are full of references to places and people and events of that world. The Mississippi Delta at that time was a backwater’s backwater. It was a very circumscribed area through which few outsiders made their way. Nobody thought much about documenting black life there. People didn’t have cameras; there are no snapshots of Patton hanging out on a porch with his friends or family, no pictures of dances where he played. By the time the WPA photographers and folklorists like the Lomaxes came through, Patton was dead. Except for a couple of trips north to make records, Patton almost never left the Delta.

  There was no reason for anyone to think that the black Delta’s people, landscape, and atmosphere would be immortalized. Other entertainers of the time—Bing Crosby, Maurice Chevalier, Fanny Brice, Rudy Vallee—came into homes by way of the Victrola or the gramophone. Jimmie Rodgers sang of the railroads and of traveling out West; Duke Ellington brought a new level of sophistication to African-American artistic expression. The medium of the phonograph was a road by which the Great Wide World was made available to the Local World. But it was also, as it turned out, a road by which news of the local, the idiosyncratic, and the personal made it out into the Great World. It was a two-way street, although people didn’t realize it yet.

  When Patton made his first recordings, in June 1929, he’d already been a well-known local musician for more than a decade. Citified, jazz- and vaudeville-influenced artists such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith had been making records with piano and jazz band accompaniment since the early 1920s. But in 1926 Blind Lemon Jefferson showed the companies that they could make money by recording solitary men, with guitars, singing the blues.

  Patton’s first records were issued in the late summer of 1929, a few months before the stock market crash, and he had a couple of regional hits with “Pony Blues” and “Down the Dirt Road Blues.” Patton recorded much more than any of the other major first-generation Delta bluesmen—Son House, Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Ishman Bracey, Willie Brown, and the others. But as the Great Depression deepened, the entire industry was hurt. Records were a luxury item, and those that were issued after the crash tended to sell less and less, until, at the bottom of the Depression—from 1931 to 1933—very few records of any kind were selling anywhere, much less in the Mississippi Delta.

  It is clear from the testimony of eyewitnesses that Patton was very much an entertainer. He would, apparently, do just about anything to get to an audience—play the guitar behind his back or around the back of his neck, stomp on the floor. He played blues, he played dance music, he played religious music, ragtime songs, sentimental ditties, and he recorded examples of all of it.

  But it is, finally, his blues that sit at the center of his body of recorded work. They burn with a fierce bravado and deep emotion. His titles themselves are a kind of poetry: “Heart Like Railroad Steel,” “Circle Round the Moon,” “Devil Sent the Rain,” “When Your Way Gets Dark,” “Moon Going Down,” “High Water Everywhere.” His lyrics are full of the names of towns, and of the people who populated them: Natchez, Vicksburg, Clarksdale, Sunflower, and Belzoni; Sheriff Tom Rushing (spelled “Rushen” on the record label), Jim Lee, even Will Dockery, the owner of the plantation where he lived for most of his adult life.

  If you figure in alternate takes and tracks on which he accompanied others, like the singer Bertha Lee and the fiddler Henry Sims, Patton made somewhere around sixty recordings. Certain lyrics and turns of phrase burn in the mind for keeps after you hear Patton sing them: “Lord, the smokestack is black, and the bell it shines like gold.” “My baby’s got a heart like a piece of railroad steel.” “Where were you, now, baby, when the Clarksdale mill burned down?”

  One reason that Patton’s recordings are so intense is that several different layers of what you may as well call discourse are going on at once. On most of his recordings, Patton hollers out his lyrics while simultaneously using his guitar both to accompany and to comment upon the main vocal line. In addition, Patton frequently adds another layer by making spoken asides, interjections, and questions in a slightly different voice. So he sings a line such as “When your way gets dark, baby, turn your lights on high,” and immediately uses his “other” voice to say, “What’s the matter with him?”—as if he were standing there along with you, listening to himself. 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, inclu
ding 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 have done much of the actual writing here, has a style full of a puzzling mean-spiritedness and pomposity. For some reason the authors rely on Son House’s negative evaluations of Patton’s musical abilities, which were transparently motivated by professional jealousy. Calt’s own musical analyses verge on gibberish. For example, he calls “When Your Way Gets Dark” a “12 and 1/4 bar” song that “begins with an amputated six beat vocal phrase that is followed by an unexpected instrumental measure. . . . An unorthodox eleven beat bottleneck figure, capped with a conventionally fretted six beat bridge, follows a repeating of the tonic riff.” Huh? There is worthwhile material to be had in this book, just as there is nutriment to be had in a plate of fish that is filled with tiny bones. Eat carefully, and swallow nothing whole.