Biography of Charley Patton

If the Delta country blues had 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." A major influence on Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, and John Lee Hooker, Patton truly excelled as a live performer, making him tremendously popular throughout the Delta. The first blues guitarist to introduce the kind of flashy performing gymnastics modern audiences normally associate with artists like Jimi Hendrix, his music embraced everything from blues, ballads, and ragtime to gospel. Recorded in the late '20s to early '30s on primitive equipment (no masters of any kind exist), Patton's music gives us the first flowering of the Delta blues form, before it became homogenized with turnarounds and 12-bar restrictions. ~ Cub Koda