The Clarksdale Series · Episode II
♪ ♪
Saturday Night
at Dockery's
Charley Patton turns a sharecropper's porch
into the first stage of the Delta Blues.
into the first stage of the Delta Blues.
Dockery Plantation · Sunflower County, Mississippi · 1929
🐦 Read on Twitter / X
OpeningDockery Plantation. Two thousand acres of someone else's cotton. But on Saturday night, the music belonged to everyone.
— Dockery Plantation at dusk — tin-roofed cabins, cotton fields, light spilling from one porch.
NarrationCharley Patton didn't play the blues. He WAS the blues — every slap on that guitar body was the sound of the Delta fighting back.
— Charley Patton on the porch, foot stomping, face thrown back, crowd packed in the firelight.
NarrationSon House watched from the corner. Half his soul still belonged to the church. The other half belonged to whatever was happening on that porch.
— Son House in the corner — Bible on one side, whiskey on the other. The war inside him visible.
— Charley's hands: calloused cotton-picker fingers reaching behind his head to play backwards.
NarrationEvery Saturday, the same miracle. A man with a piece of wood and some wire strings turning suffering into something you could dance to.
— The crowd grown large — Saturday night clothes, children in windows, dancing in the dirt yard.
NarrationCome Monday they'd all be back in the fields. But for one night, Dockery's porch was the center of the universe. And Charley Patton was its sun.
— Pre-dawn. Charley still playing to two half-asleep listeners. Son House asleep on the post.
◆ Saturday Night at Dockery's
Episode II — The Clarksdale Series
"Charley Patton is the father of the Delta Blues. Robert Johnson learned from
Son House who learned from Charley Patton. Every rock band in history
traces back to this porch."