Forget everything you think you know or have been told about the birth of the blues and the histories of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll: Rumble – The Indians Who Rocked The World has a different story to tell and by the sound of it, much of what’s been handed down to us about North American music and its origins has been wrong.
The sound of the American South – the rush of its waters, the song of the bird, the crack of thunder and the rain that follows – informs the sound of Native American music, the root of all other American forms.
Take the story of the Mississippi Delta’s Charley Patton, widely acknowledged to be the father of the country blues. An existing photograph of him reveals he is likely a man of mixed race origins, though without clear proof, historians have remained inconclusive in their findings. Rumble reveals through interviews, research, and recordings, that Patton’s blood ties are to the Chocktaw nation and moreover, his connection to Native American music contributed to the rhythmic and vocal patterns of what we know as country blues. In the film, musician Pura Fé (Tuscarora) a/b’s his technique with a turntable and her voice: “That’s Indian music with a guitar,” she says. Calling on a kind of pre-blues origin of his sound, the assembled scholars and musicians, including modern day bluesmen Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart, go into deeper explanation of Patton’s relationship to Dockery Plantation, the setting where he developed a showstopping style living among Black, Choctaw, and European farmworkers. He went on to pass on what he knew to other area musicians like Son House and visiting players like the young Roebuck Staples and Chester Burnette (who of course became Howlin’ Wolf). So why is Patton’s history generally painted so sketchily in the history books? READ THE ANSWER & THE ENTIRE ARTICLE in Down With Tyranny!
Filed under: Arts and Culture, film, Charley Patton, Jesse Ed Davis, Link Wray, Mildred Bailey, Movies, Native American, Native American singers, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
Denise Sullivan 