Various Artists – Down The Dirt Road: The Songs Of Charley Patton
Precious few tribute albums are in anywhere near the same league as the work of the artists they venerate. Timing only compounds the challenges Down The Dirt Road: The Songs Of Charley Patton will face getting noticed: Its release coincides with that of Revenant’s magnificent 7-CD box of the bluesman’s entire corpus, plus, among other things, sides by his acolytes and peers. Why on earth would anyone want a modest indie compilation of reinterpretations of some of Patton’s best-known recordings when they can have the real thing — and in such unprecedented splendor — on the Revenant set? Or, for that matter, on either of the terrific Patton comps still available on Yazoo?
I won’t snow you; while Down The Dirt Road is a fine record, featuring first-rate contributions by luminaries ranging from Snooky Pryor and Charlie Musselwhite to young lion Corey Harris, and even folk-blues pioneer Dave Van Ronk, it hardly breaks new ground. What makes it worth hearing, though, is the fact that its twelve tracks are reinterpretations of Patton’s material, as opposed to mere re-creations.
In contrast to the bluesman’s preternaturally percussive style, many of the performances here are, interestingly enough, more in the lighter, lyrical vein of songsters such as Mance Lipscomb and Mississippi John Hurt. This is certainly true of Musselwhite’s “Pea Vine Blues”, Paul Rishell’s “I Shall Not Be Moved”, and Guy Davis’ “Some Of These Days” (the last of these boasting Levon Helm on drums).
That said, not all the album’s tracks recontextualize Patton’s music in this way. Pryor’s heavily syncopated version of “Pony Blues” (nothing but harmonica and vocals) hews close to the master’s original, as do similarly polyrhythmic workouts by Harris and Joe Louis Walker.
Nevertheless, Kid Bangham’s urbane jazz reading of “Some Summer Day” was never dreamt of in Patton’s cotton-pickin’ philosophy, while Colleen Sexton’s eerie medley of the title track and the aptly titled “When Your Way Gets Dark” is more Skip James than Charley Patton. Even more far-reaching, though, is “Shake It And Break It”, a juggy duet between singer/banjoist Steve James and tuba maverick Mark Rubin that testifies to just how durable and elastic Patton’s blues remain.