Charley Patton's Grave

Charley Patton was the first great figure of the Delta blues, a small, loud, theatrical performer who by Son House's account clowned for a crowd by playing the guitar behind his back and between his knees, thirty years before Jimi Hendrix, and whose records shaped Howlin' Wolf, Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson. He cut some sixty sides between 1929 and 1934, first for Paramount and at the end for Vocalion, and he was well enough regarded at Paramount to bring Son House to the label in 1930, so the influence ran through the studio door and not only through the music. He died of a heart condition on 28 April 1934 on the Heathman-Dedham plantation near Indianola, in his forties, though the sources put his birth anywhere between 1881 and 1891. He was buried at Holly Ridge in a grave nobody marked. It stayed unmarked for more than half a century, in a small cemetery beside a cotton gin, and the location survived in one man's memory. In the early 1990s Skip Henderson of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund and Jim O'Neal of Living Blues tracked down the cemetery's longtime caretaker, Joseph Howard, known as Cootchie, who had been ten years old in 1934 and could walk out and point at the spot. John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival paid for a headstone, bought in 1990 and dedicated in July 1991, because, as he put it, a man so great had nothing to mark his life on earth and his name had not travelled as far as his influence. The Mississippi Blues Trail chose the grave for the first marker in the series, unveiled on 11 December 2006. The gin still stands beside the cemetery.