Delta Blues by Ted Gioia

Author:Ted Gioia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W.W & Norton
Published: 2008-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Well if I were a catfish, mama,

I said swimming deep down in the big blue sea,

All these gals now, sweet mama,

Setting out, setting out hooks for me.

The song may be biographical. Honeyboy Edwards tells us that Petway had already been married two or three times before he moved to Chicago. His tastes ran to sanctified church women, and these encounters inspired him to bring his guitar into the house of worship, where he would play religious music, at least for a spell. But neither the marriages nor the conversions lasted long, and Petway would soon be back performing the blues, drinking whiskey, and playing cards.

Edwards later heard that Petway was living on the North Side, but he never saw him in Chicago, and we know little beyond this about his activities after he recorded for Bluebird. The Social Security Death Index includes a Robert Petway who was born on October 18, 1907, and was living in Chicago when he died in May 1978. However, this birthdate does not match either of the two Robert Petways listed in the 1920 Leflore County Census, aged eighteen and twenty-six at the time, and apparently related, given their location in adjacent households. Although Petway may have survived until the late 1970s, our knowledge of his music ends with his few 78s from 1941 and 1942.

Around the time of McClennan and Petway’s first recordings, Robert Nighthawk also made the move to Chicago, and he too struggled in establishing himself in these new surroundings. Yet Nighthawk had already participated in several recording sessions, and had developed a degree of fame in the blues world. “He was popular all over Mississippi,” later recalled Muddy Waters, who had known Nighthawk in Clarksdale. “He left and came north in the 30s. The next thing I heard he had a record out and on the market.” Nighthawk had been born as Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas, on November 30, 1909. He had learned the rudiments of blues guitar from his cousin Houston Stackhouse in 1931, and over the next several years he roamed widely, and honed his craft. He changed his name to Robert Lee McCoy around the time he arrived in St. Louis in 1935—both moves made, perhaps, to avoid prosecution for his involvement in a shooting in Louisiana. He thrived on the St. Louis scene, and his popular recording of “Prowling Nighthawk” likely prompted his final name change to Robert Nighthawk. At the end of the decade, he decided to move to Chicago.

Robert Nighthawk was far better suited for success on the Chicago scene than either McClennan or Petway. Nighthawk’s single-note guitar style was imbued with a distinctly modern, urban flavor, and his singing voice possessed a fullness and warmth that would allow him to tackle ballads or swing tunes as well as country blues. His recording of “Friars Point Blues,” made in Chicago on June 5, 1940, is a strong, confident performance, and demonstrates his growing skill with the slide, a technique that would become a trademark of his later work.

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