Charley Patton
Wikimp3 information about the music of Charley Patton. On our website we have 70 albums and 70 collections of artist Charley Patton. You can find useful information and download songs of this artist. We also know that Charley Patton represents Blues genres.
Biography
[Edit]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. He'd 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 genre's 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 Patton's legacy handed down to succeeding blues generations was his propensity for entertaining. One of the reasons for Charley Patton's 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 Patton's 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; it's 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 year's time, he was not only the largest-selling blues artist but — in a whirlwind of recording activity — also the music's 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 Patton's 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 Patton's 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 that's 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. Patton's 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.
Title: Down The Dirt Road Blues (1929-1934 Wisconsin & New York Recordings) (CD1)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues - The Worlds Of Charley Patton (CD7)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Down The Dirt Road Blues (1929-1934 Wisconsin & New York Recordings) (CD2)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Rough Guide To Charley Patton – Father Of The Delta Blues
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Screamin' & Hollerin' The Blues - The Worlds Of Charley Patton (CD2)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues - The Worlds Of Charley Patton (CD3)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues - The Worlds Of Charley Patton (CD1)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues - The Worlds Of Charley Patton (CD4)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues (The Complete Recordings 1929, Vol. 1)
Artist: Charley Patton
Genre: Blues
Title: Primeval Blues, Rags, And Gospel Songs
Artist: Charley Patton
Title: The Complete Recordings 1929-34, Vol. 1
Artist: Charley Patton
Title: Dry Well Blues (The Complete Recordings 1930 & 1934)
Artist: Charley Patton, Bertha Lee
Genre: Blues
Collections
Title: 101 - The Best of Vintage Blues
Genre: Electronica, Dancefloor, Dance Pop
Title: 30 Essential American Folk Blues Classics
Genre: Blues, Songwriter/Lyricist, Acoustic
Title: Blues Roots Black and Blue (Blues Roots 25 Tracks)
Genre: Blues
Title: The Dark Shadow of Blues (Doxy Collection)
Genre: Blues
Title: Blues!
Genre: Blues, World Music
Title: American Legacy: Essential Blues, Folk & Country Music
Genre: Blues
Title: Baby Please Don't Go! 30 Essential Blues Songs
Genre: Blues
Title: Blues Hits! 20 Songs That Inspired the Rockers
Genre: Blues
Title: 100 Songs Of Misery, Grief & Destruction
Genre: Pop
Title: Big Road Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: Roots 'n' Blues - The Retrospective (1925-1950)
Genre: Blues
Title: Vintage Novelty Songs
Genre: Pop
Title: The Roots of Robert Johnson
Genre: Rock
Title: Southern Blues, Vol. 1
Genre: Blues
Title: The Great Blues Pioneers
Genre: Blues
Title: Songs of American History
Genre: Songwriter/Lyricist
Title: American Primitive, Vol. I: Raw Pre-War Gospel
Genre: Gospel
Title: The Best of the Blues Vol. 1
Genre: Blues
Title: The Greatest In Country Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: The Blues Roots Of Robert Johnson
Genre: Blues
Title: Early Blues Pioneers
Genre: World Music
Title: The World Of... Blues Power!
Title: Blues Ramblers - The Essential Masters
Genre: Blues
Title: Blues Roots & Folk Music
Genre: Blues
Title: Country Blues Outlaws
Genre: Blues
Title: Country Blues Hard Hitters Vol. One
Genre: Blues
Title: Bumble Bee
Genre: Jazz
Title: Ten Years of Prohibited Records
Genre: Rock, Pop, Alternative
Title: Hillbilly Boogie Essentials
Genre: Country
Title: Mississippi Blues Trail
Genre: Blues
Title: The Blues Came from Mississippi
Genre: Blues
Title: New York Blues 30's (Doxy Collection)
Genre: Blues
Title: The Ultimate Best of the Blues Collection
Genre: Blues
Title: Blues and More Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: All by Yourself
Genre: Blues
Title: Southern Blues, Vol. 1
Genre: Blues
Title: Music & The Moon Vol. 2
Genre: Pop
Title: New York City Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: Feel Like Going Home - A Film By Martin Scorsese
Genre: Blues
Title: Original Vintage Delta Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: Southern Country Blues, Vol. 2 (Box Set)
Genre: Blues
Title: Unforgetable - Bottleneck Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: Lifting the Veil: The First Bluesmen
Genre: Blues
Title: Before the Blues Vol. 2
Genre: Rock
Title: The Return of the Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Genre: Blues
Title: The Blind Side of Blues (Doxy Collection)
Genre: Blues
Title: The Acoustic Blues Box Set
Genre: Blues
Title: Delta Blues, Vol. 1
Genre: Blues
Title: The History of Blues One
Genre: Blues
Title: 100 Original Blues Kings
Genre: Blues
Title: New York Blues (Doxy Collection, Remastered)
Genre: Blues
Title: Roots of the Blues
Genre: Blues
Title: The Missing Country & Blues Album
Genre: Blues
Featuring albums
Title: Rough Guide To Blind Lemon Jefferson
Artist: Blind Lemon Jefferson
Genre: Blues, Country, Songwriter/Lyricist, Acoustic
Title: Rough Guide To Blind Willie Johnson
Artist: Blind Willie Johnson
Title: Legends of the Blues, Vol. 1
Artist: Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong Orchestra
Title: American Primitive, the Complete Recordings (Doxy Collection, Remastered)
Artist: Various Artists
Genre: Blues
Title: The Best There Ever Was: The Legendary Early Blues Performers
Artist: Various Artists
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Title: People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938
Artist: Various Artists
Genre: Country
Title: Love, Consequences, And Serenity: Volumes 1-4
Artist: Consequence, Mikah Sykes
Title: The Ultimate Country Blues Collection
Artist: Leadbelly
Genre: Blues, Country, Songwriter/Lyricist, Acoustic
Title: Epic Americana: Pre-War Blues, Country & Folk
Artist: Various Artists
Genre: Blues, Country, Songwriter/Lyricist
Title: R. Crumb´s Heroes Of Blues, Jazz & Country
Artist: Various Artists
Genre: Blues, Jazz, World Music, Country, Folk
Title: A Journey Through The Inner World Of Eric Clapton (CD3)
Artist: Eric Clapton, The Many Faces Of Eric Clapton
Genre: Blues, Blues Rock