52 weeks of blues

“One of the most unforgettable people I’ve ever known”. Spoken by Lou Curtiss who recorded Sam Chatmon in the early 70’s. Truer words have never been spoken.
Chatmon launched his recording career in the 1930s, playing alongside his brothers Bo Carter and Lonnie Chatmon in the era’s most celebrated string band, the Mississippi Sheiks. Sam was “rediscovered” in 1960 by Chris Strachwitz and went on to make several fine albums for various labels and attain status as an elder statesmen of the blues.
“I was born in 1899 at a little place between Jackson and Vicksburg called Bolton. I was named Vivian but I changed it to Sam, because that was a girl’s name and I didn’t want to be named after no woman. My father was half Irishman and half nigger, and my mother was half white and half Choctaw. There were so many of us in the family then. My daddy had three wives and my mother had the least children of any of them, which was 13. Daddy said he had 60 children with the three wives, but that ain’t counting Charlie Patton and all of them on the outside. Papa died in 1934 when he was 109 years old. My grandmother lived to be 125”. (While the Patton link is unproved, Henderson reportedly had an affair with Annie Patton, Charley’s mother, during the 1890s.) Pianist Memphis Slim (Peter Chatman) may have been another relative.
“Music was just a giving thing in our family. I got it from watching my brothers. It’s just like driving a car. You sit next to somebody and watch what they do and you can do the same thing with a little practice. If you ain’t got nerve to try it, you can still make a little stab. My brothers and sisters all played; my Daddy and Mama too. My cousins the McCoys (Joe and Charlie) played. We all played so many pieces, I could be here many hours just listing them. “Ants in Your Pants,” “Corrina Corrina,” Alberta,” “Sheiks of Araby” – all different kinds of music. I started playing guitar myself when I was four years old (by laying it flat on the floor and crawling under it). Even before I started to play, I remember my older half-brother Ferdinand and Charlie Patton singing about the first blues I heard, something about “going down to the river” and “if the blues don’t leave me, I’ll rock on away and drown.” The first tune I learned to pick was “Make Me a Pallet Down on Your Floor.” Me and Lonnie put that out on a record later as “If You Don’t Want Me. You Don’t Have to Dog Me Around,” and people would think it was a new tune that I’d just written. I’d sing a verse and then holler, “Oh, step on it,” and Lonnie would get out with that fiddle just like he’d been doing it for years. In the year 1937 I lost three brothers and two sisters and after that the band didn’t play together although I kept picking the guitar some. I kept farming until 1950. I rented that land and worked until I quit with my own team and all. Then I went to work as a night watchman and bought me a house and a half acre. I didn’t play much music until 1965”.
When white interest in the blues was aroused in the 60s, Sam proved to be the only member of the family to have survived with his musical faculties intact, and he came out of almost 20 years of musical retirement to perform for the new audience, playing many of the largest folk festivals that included the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, Washington, D.C., Mariposa Fest in Toronto and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Chatmon in his later career played mostly blues, emphasizing the risqué when he was not covering the recorded hits of others. Perhaps more interesting than this side of his repertoire were the minstrel and popular songs of his youth, such as ‘I Get The Blues When It Rains’ and ‘Turnip Greens’. He claimed, with some plausibility, to have composed ‘Cross Cut Saw’, twice made famous by Tommy McClennan and later by Albert King.
In 1978 Chatmon was filmed and recorded by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax for his american patchwork project. The footage of the elderly bluesman, sporting a long white beard playing the old songs are very popular on YouTube. Sam Chatmon continued to perform until his death on February 2, 1983. A headstone memorial to Chatmon with the inscription “Sitting On Top Of The World” was paid for by Bonnie Raitt and John Fogerty and placed in Sanders Memorial Cemetery, Hollandale, Mississippi.