Charley Patton stood about five feet five inches tall, yet his gravelly voice was reputed to carry the length of five football fields without a microphone, and he played guitar behind his head and behind his back decades before rock and roll existed. This episode reconstructs the slippery historical record of the man called the father of the Delta blues: a birth year most often given as April 1891 in Hinds County, Mississippi, but variously listed as 1881, 1885 and 1887; his upbringing by Bill and Annie Patton alongside persistent rumors that his biological father was Henderson Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks family; and a mixed Black, white and Native American heritage that exposed him to many musical traditions at once.

The conversation examines the Dockery Plantation in Sunflower County, a 10,000-acre cotton farm and sawmill where Patton learned from Henry Sloan and later mentored Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson and Chester Burnett, the future Howlin’ Wolf. It follows his volatile relationship with Bertha Lee, their 1934 jailing in Belzoni, Mississippi, and the Vocalion executive W.R. Calloway who bailed them out and escorted them to New York for final sessions that produced 34 Blues, High Sheriff Blues, Stone Pony Blues and the duets Oh Death and Troubled ‘Bout My Mother. It closes with his death on April 28, 1934 near Indianola, the total silence of the press, and the slow recognition that followed: John Fogerty’s 1990 headstone, the Grammy-winning 2001 box set Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues, the National Recording Registry, the American Epic documentary series, Mississippi Blues Trail markers and his 2021 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• Why a working entertainer in the 1920s played hillbilly waltzes and folk ballads as readily as deep blues
• How the Dockery Plantation functioned as an incubator where laborers swapped tunings, lyrics and rhythms
• Why Patton’s showmanship and booming voice were survival tools in loud, rowdy barn dances
• What it meant that a record label posted bail to get a star into the studio in 1934
• How a caretaker who attended the 1934 burial helped locate the unmarked grave more than 50 years later