Charley Patton and Alan Lomax: Dead men waking

Charley Patton by Keith Shadwick

He was the original blues shouter with a hellhound on his trail: the hard-drinking, hard-living Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton was just 42 years old when he died in spring 1934, his body worn out by punishing and sustained bouts with the bottle, women and a fecklessly itinerant life that gave him little of the niceties of a settled home. Now, close on 70 years after his death, Patton has won three Grammy awards, including historical reissue of the year.

Patton, who spent most of his life entertaining on various plantations in the Mississippi Delta region, was performing blues and dance songs for a living prior to 1910 but had a short recording career starting in 1929 and finishing with his death in 1934. It is a cliché to talk of larger than life personalities, but Patton made an indelible impression on all he met because he was such a forceful – at times uncontrollably violent – character and a mesmerising, charismatic performer. To experience him live was never to forget what you saw and heard. Of course, records could capture only a fraction of that elemental force. These were the early days of the recording industry, and his overwhelming vocal delivery and powerful guitar proved a considerable challenge to the ad-hoc equipment of the day. But the records leave an indelible mark on the listener.

Patton is a performer to reckon with on many levels. His gruff delivery is the vocal equivalent of grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and demanding your undivided attention. But that's not the full story. Patton, credited by many as the prime influence in the formation of Delta blues, created sets of blues lyrics which are by turns stark, brutal and full of human insight, from the pathos of "Poor Me" and "Pea Vine Blues" to the joyful boasting of "Shake It And Break It". Robert Johnson may have been the Raymond Chandler of the blues, but Patton was its Dashiell Hammett, honed to the bone and packed with dangerous intent.

The seven-CD boxed set that has garnered the Grammy nominations for Patton, Screamin' & Hollerin' The Blues (Revenant 212), was personally overseen at every stage by Revenant Records owner and musician John Fahey, who has gone for the authentic at every stage of the project. Revenant's set contained five discs which chronicled not only all of Patton's sides but all those made by his associates and contemporaries like Son House and Son Sims. CD six traced his influence through recordings by The Howlin' Wolf (before he just became Howlin'), Tommy Johnson, Furry Lewis and Bukka White. The final CD was a set of 1960s interviews about Patton with Howlin' Wolf, HC Speir, Pops Staples and Booker Miller.

Due to the technical inadequacies of the original recordings, Fahey retained as much aural information as those old 78s contained. In transferring these old sides to CD he rejected any sound filtering or noise reduction on the basis that this removed as much of the sound spectrum as it reveals through the loss of 78rpm hiss. This makes listening to such records something of a trial at times, but with Patton on the other end of the microphone it also gives you the sort of immediacy that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

The music was poured into perhaps the most sumptuous reissue package album ever. Revenant crafted each CD label to look like an original 78rpm single and mounted it in reproduction 10-inch card discs sewn into a folding presentation that is an exact imitation of the 78rpm albums of the 1940s. Patton's complete song lyrics were included as well as exhaustive essays on Patton's life and music: in fact, one of the Grammys is specifically for them. Little wonder then that the project has been nominated for three awards: special packaging; liner notes and historical recording.

Patton's music has been available for most of the past 70 years, but nobody outside the tiny blues fraternity got to appreciate his greatness. Thanks to the publicity generated by these awards, a wider public may now get a chance to savour his uniquely intense music. Bob Dylan said: "If I made records for my own pleasure, I would record only Charley Patton songs."

Alan Lomax by Michael Church

One day in 1933, a Texan folksong enthusiast and his son loaded their car with equipment weighing a quarter of a ton and set off on a recording trip through the Southern states. Their aim was to document that which could not be written down, and to give a voice to the voiceless. The singers quickly understood the revolutionary potential of the exercise, and treated the mic like a telephone. One black sharecropper prefaced his song with the words: "Now listen here, Mr President, I want you to know they're not treatin' us right down here!"

The collectors took their findings to the song archive at the Library of Congress in Washington, and the son went back to collect more. "Bit by bit," he later recalled, "I learnt to use these early machines to probe the singers' feelings. Every time I took one of those big, black, glass-based platters out of its box, I felt that a magical moment was opening up in time. Never before had the black people, kept almost incommunicado in the Deep South, had a chance to tell their story in their own way."

Thus spoke the young Alan Lomax, whom Brian Eno – speaking for many – has hailed as a central figure in 20th-century culture: "Almost any line you could draw through the whole field of popular musical culture would have him somewhere on it. Without Lomax it's possible there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground."

Leadbelly was the first major discovery by the Lomax team; a few years later Alan Lomax set up the historic studio session that resulted in the LP Blues in the Mississippi Night, which is reissued this month as part of the three-CD box set American Folk-Blues Train.

This box is a Fifties time capsule, containing an American folk compilation in which Lomax presents his own arrangements of the songs he found down South. In Mississippi Night, Memphis Slim plays and reminisces about his white oppressors with Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson. Eleven years had to elapse between this recording and its eventual release, so worried were the bluesmen.

Meanwhile, Lomax paid an equally historic visit to Parchman prison farm, and his recordings there comprise the third record in the box.Knowing that work songs were dying out, he made a point of getting some into his machine, the most beautiful of which reflects the music four men made as they rhythmically chopped down an oak.

Brian Eno and his friends underestimate what this pioneer – who died last year aged 87 – achieved. His multifarious activities included creating ballad-operas, and presenting his Celtic singing discoveries on the BBC's Third Programme network. But as a serious ethnomusicologist, he ranged far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world, and part of his huge sound archive consists of the remarkable recordings he made in Franco's Spain, and in the poverty-stricken villages of post-war Italy.

The 'American Folk-Blues Train' box set is out on Castle Music