[78-L] Is it really rarest blues record?, or, Troubled earth

[Joe Scott]

"A man [C. Patton] who influenced a Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolfdirectly (all of them a huge impact on music by themselves) simply IS one of the biggest forces in 20th century music...."Regarding Robert Johnson, for one thing, Columbia-->Sony are very good at making the public believe, have been a for a long time, that a Miles Davis or a Johnny Cash or a Frank Sinatra or a Robert Johnson was far more important than his equally good peers whose material they don't own. (The copy on the back of one of Johnny Cash's CDs points out that he was similar to Miles Davis in his importance, so they don't miss a trick.) Columbia could have promoted Peg Leg Howell in the '60s as the king of the blues if they wanted, but that would have required rock fans to appreciate the sound of a musician 23 years older than Robert Johnson, not as modern and hip as Johnson's jump bluesish music (i.e. actually closer to the farm and early blues than the swing jazz feel of Johnson) and anyway, as it happens, they didn't.For another, if John Hammond had been interested in self-accompanied blues-singing soloists earlier, it likely would have been Lemon Jefferson he got into on record and then tried to get for a Northern show and told all his friends about, and then Alan Lomax in the 1940s might have been visiting Mance Lipscomb and letting people know what the dirt in Texas was like, but Hammond was a little young for that. In 1941 Muddy owned a record player and owned seven records, six of them secular, by Arthur Crudup, Jay McShann (who was similar in style to Count Basie), Peetie Wheatstraw, and John Lee Williamson. The songs he played live at the time included "St. Louis Blues" and "Blues In The Night," and the first song he had learned had been off a Leroy Carr record. Similarly, Robert Johnson admired and was influenced by current hitmakers such as Kokomo Arnold. These guys were influenced by the local Pattonish sound, and by many, many other sounds, and they in turn -- when Howlin' Wolf influenced the lead singer of Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild," for instance -- influenced people who had also been influenced by many, many others. Rock and rollers in general cared about Chuck Berry and Little Richard way, way, way more than they cared about Howlin' Wolf. Proportionally, the influence of Patton on modern rock, indirect and direct, is very, very small."Modern rock can't be imagene e without his sound, feel, overal shape and arrangments.."Can you be more specific?"These people were indeed not selling the most records or were popular with a more mainstrain audience... but commercial succes in art has always showed a limited correlation with importance...."I thought by "music as it's known today" you meant mainstream music."(BTW only ones that come close in terms of importance from the blues( a wrong tem actually in terms of the meaning and actual musical content of these muscicians)corner are Blind lemon and maybe Lonnie Johnson...."Important to what?Joseph Scott