John Fogerty paid for the gravestone of blues legend Charley Patton
Charley Patton was as influential as any Mississippi Delta bluesman of the early 20th century. With a distinctive gravely voice and a sprightly guitar-picking style, Patton influenced legions of iconic players who came after him, including Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. However, one person not included on that list, at least not initially, was Creedence Clearwater Revival singer John Fogerty.
“There were so many more people I’d never heard of – like Charley Patton (an early Delta bluesman),” Fogerty claimed. “I’m ashamed to admit that, but he wasn’t commercially accessible, I guess.”
“I read about him, and about a month or two later, I realised there were recordings of his music,” Fogerty added. “To me, that was like if Moses had left behind a DAT with the Dead Sea Scrolls or something! ‘You mean you can hear him?! Oh my God!’ And then, when I did hear Patton, he sounded like Howlin’ Wolf, who was a big influence on me. When I did ‘Run Through the Jungle,’ I was being Howlin’ Wolf, and Howlin’ Wolf knew Charley Patton!”
The lineage of influence became a sticking point for Fogerty, who began to make up for the lost time by taking in Patton’s legendary material. Patton was the man who inspired Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful’, a song that nearly every blues musician has played at some point in their lives. But Patton’s story was hardly well known when Fogerty was coming up in the late 1960s, as there were few historical markers to refer back to.
That also extended beyond the mortal coil. Given that most early blues musicians were poor Black men, their families usually couldn’t afford traditional gravestones. Former vintage guitar dealer Skip Henderson sought to right a wrong that came with a lack of post-mortem markers, so he funded the Moun Zion Memorial Fund in order to give the legends their proper gravestones.
“My thing was this,” Henderson claimed to Justin Nobel in 2014. “You had these blues guys, my heroes, these national treasures, and a vast agricultural operation comes in and wipes out this heritage and turns it into moneymaking cropland. On top of everything else, that is just morally repugnant.”
Henderson managed to get some big names to contribute to the fund. Bonnie Raitt and Eric Clapton are donors, while Columbia Records helped pay for the gravestone of Robert Johnson. It was at the ceremony for Johnson’s grave that Henderson met Fogerty, who mentioned that Charley Patton’s grave, located just a few miles away, was in disrepair.
“Charley Patton was actually buried next to a garbage dump,” Henderson added. “I was so mad I started crying. Here is one of the incredible fathers of the music that I loved, with garbage on his grave.”
A few months after Johnson was given a proper marker, Fogerty donated the money to make sure that Patton got the same treatment. If you travel down to Holly Ridge, Mississippi, you can still find Patton’s gravestone, one that properly memorializes a blues legend.
