Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia

Leavin' Here, Don't Know Where I'm Goin': Neal Pattman, Cliff Sheats, Willie Hill, Joe Rakestraw: Bluesmen and Songsters of the Piedmont

LeaviriHere, Dorit Know Where I'm Goiri NEAL PATTMAN, CLIFF SHEATS, WILLIE HILL, JOE RAKESTRAW: BLUESMEN AND SONGSTERS OF THE PIEDMONT ARLIER INTHIS CENTURY the blues emerged as a distinct and enormously popular Afro-American musical form, defined and proliferated by the compositions of W. C. Handy and the recordings of innumerable blues men and women, rural and urban. The Piedmont of the South, stretching from Atlanta through South Carolina to Durham, North Carolina, produced its own style of blues, recorded commercially by such singer-guitarists as Blind Boy Fuller and Buddy Moss (see Bruce Bastin's Crying for the Carolines for a study of the Piedmont blues). We have met four very different blues musicians in the Athens area who play and sing the quick, raggy blues of the region. Beyond that they perform the various kinds of black secular music that blues developed from: country frolic songs, ballads about heroes like John Henry and bad "rounders" like Railroad Bill, ragtime pieces, and railroad songs. The blues served for expression of any feelings other than religious and were also used as dance music at country dances and fish fries, along with the older breakdowns and reels. Movement, emotion, and poetic statement flowed through all these types of folk song, and the four musicians whose stories and songs we give here might better be called by the oldterm "songsters" rather than the more limiting modern expression "bluesmen." OF THESE MUSICIANS, Neal Pattman has certainly been the most visible and popular in Athens and beyond, and his voice and (mouth) harp have been heard at country parties and town nightclubs and at folk festivals from Atlanta to Washington. He has "blown" alone or with various blues guitarists, blues bands, and even rock bands. On stage he is a striking figure, a compact and powerfully built man in his middle fifties, wearing a brilliantly flowered silk shirt, projecting both intensity and confidence. He lost an arm in a childhoodillness, but his mouth and one good hand can bend the notes of his harp as well as any two-handed player. His repertoire ranges from old-time country pieces like "Lost John" through blues of the thirties like "Keys to the Highway" to his own modern composition, "Lightnin' Twist," and the proudly aggressive modern blues by Muddy Waters, "I'm a Man." Born in Madison County north of Athens, Neal was given his first harp one Christmas when he was a boy, by his father, who was dressed up as Santa Claus. His first teacher, he recalls, was a man in the community "come around, Oliver Holt, he could blow good, and I jus' kept on learnin' from that, and I kep' on goin'. . . . He played 'Lost John/ 'John Henry,' 'Mamma's Little Baby Loves Shortnin' Bread,' 'Sittin' on Top of the World.' " Neal's regular job is in the kitchen of the Georgia Center on the University of Georgia campus, and we were talking on the back loading dock of the building. He told about playing at country dances as soon as he became proficient on the harp, and I asked him if he had ever thought there was something wrong in playing the blues. "No. Love the blues." "Why do you think some folks don't approve of the blues?" "Lots of 'em don't know the blues." "What arethe blues?" I asked. "What would you say?" "Well, I'd say the blues sometime start from when you feelin' bad, girlfriend, somethin', done lef you, you get to feelin' sad, feelin' blue, you get to singin' the blues." "What do you try to get out of your harp?" 180 Leaviri Here, Don't Know Where I'm Goin' E "I try to get the spirit, be bes' part I can out of it. I jus' feel good blowin' it." Neal thought for a time that the old type of music was fading away, but "now it's bloomin' back out. . . . [People who hear him] like it better than the new music." I asked him if he had ever thought, when he was young, that "there'd be white guys, wanting to play the blues." He laughed. "No, I didn't, then. There been lots of 'em coming over here, I been teachin' 'em how to play—harp." He has also been teaching a younger black man his style of music, and he "plays with me every weekend. "I'll...