My Black Mama

When Charley Patton traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin in 1930, he brought his friend Son House along for the ride. House, an ex-preacher torn between the pulpit and the bottle, played the blues with a furious, unholy intensity. On "My Black Mama," he attacked his steel-bodied National resonator guitar, snapping the strings against the fretboard with a heavy copper slide while shouting his vocals until his voice went hoarse. This brutal, percussive two-part recording was the purest distillation of the raw Mississippi Delta sound, later acknowledged by Robert Johnson as a major influence on his own development.