Robert has the distinction of not only contributing an undisputed classic to the blues (and rock), but also for supplying us with an identifiable moment when the baton is being passed between the pre-war country blues and the electricity of Chicago.
Robert pops up in the closing years of the pre-war blues scene, just before the war forced a two year ban on commercial recording. This ban usually provides blues historians with a ready boundary between "what was" and "what it became." When Catfish Blues morphed into Muddy's Rollin' Stone in February, 1950, it did so at the dawn of Chicago's fabled Golden Age. Robert's blues may have ended up in post-war Chicago without him, but Rollin' Stone ensured that history would remember his name.Let's be clear about it: Robert Petway didn't think he was standing at the cusp of a damned thing. At best, he would have considered himself a local star, successful enough to have gone to Chicago twice to be recorded. While not as heavily recorded as his partner, Tommy McClennan, with seven records issued in his lifetime, he had his bragging rights backed up.
From a contemporary viewpoint, Robert barely rates as a flash in the pan. What sales his records did generate were modest and very localized. Further, he and his running buddy McClennan were becoming anachronistic by the time they were being recorded. Their label, Bluebird, was all but defining blues recording through this era and they had been steadily shifting towards a slicker, more urban sound. The classic days of the Man and His Guitar had already passed by the time Robert first sat in front of a microphone.
Robert would have seen things somewhat differently. From his perspective, and indeed by the standards of the world in which he lived, he was nigh-on the top of his mark in this time-frame. He'd been a Delta fixture for years and remained a popular local draw. While getting royalties for their recordings would have required a shift in consciousness for the pre-war bluesman, having those records meant your name got spread. Having those records meant you could get more frequent, better-paying gigs. And if you were a bluesman in that day and age, playing live was what paid your rent. Or at least bought your next jug.
Sixty-eight years after he last recorded, Petway remains a true Delta phantom, a man with no real biographical information at all. Beyond his two Bluebird sessions, what we do know of the man is skeletal and anecdotal. We believe he was born "somewhere around 1908" because that was Tommy McClennan's birth-year and they were approximately the same age. It's been conjectured that he was born on or near the J. F. Sligh Farm, close to Yazoo City, MS. Because that's where McClennan was from.
Ultimately, Yazoo ends up being Robert's hometown because Big Bill Broonzy said so. Big Bill's quoted as saying of Petway and McClennan, "...they were in there together, grew up together. But Tommy got better known..." We do know that Robert and Tommy were very much "in there together" and would spend much of the mid-to-late 1930's in each other's company. And McClennan absolutely ended up with most of the fame.
Unfortunately, without any sort of corroboration, Big Bill's testimony on this can rate little higher than anecdotal. Painful as the realization may be, often times our idols were not always our best informants. Even among those whose veracity tends to bear up, whether we're talking about Big Bill Broonzy or Big Joe Williams, Son House or Houston Stackhouse, sometimes they would contradict themselves, sometimes their stories didn't line up with established fact. Memory is a tricky road. Broonzy himself also reported that Sleepy John Estes was dead, helping to delay Estes' rediscovery. Without corroboration or any manner of documentation, we simply cannot know with any certainty. Big Bill may well have been correct in that they'd gone all the way back to Yazoo. Stylistically, both Petway and McClennan resemble each other so closely that both provided moments when they are all but indistinguishable. I would suggest it is equally as plausible that Petway may have come from the Itta Bena area of LeFlore County, where he first pops up on anybody's radar, playing primarily with Tommy McClennan. This is about 1935, by which time Tommy had already been playing and rambling with Honeyboy Edwards. When McClennan started basing himself out of the Greenwood area is when he starts being remembered as being with Petway.
By what few ever managed to be interviewed.
We do know that Robert and Tommy were close, for at least 7 years, and Tommy would spend much of this time in Chicago without him. Back in Greenwood, they would often be joined by Honeyboy Edwards.
"...Tommy and Robert were about the same size. They'd come down the street with two guitars, looking like midgets...I learned a few licks from Tommy, a few numbers he made. He made the 'Bullfrog Blues' and Petway made the 'Catfish Blues'...Robert and Tommy McClennan and me, we'd be together all the time, On days we wasn't out playing at the whiskey houses or on the streets; we'd be at Tommy's house drinking and playing cards, and one of us sitting in the corner practicing some song..."
Tommy had been in Chicago and recording for two years by the time he got Bluebird's Lester Melrose interested in his old friend. He then brought Petway to Chicago. Following the formula that he himself helped patent, Melrose was looking for an artist that "sounded like" an already-established Bluebird artist, in this case McClennan. And nobody sounded more like Tommy McClennan than Robert Petway.
Robert would record for Bluebird twice. The first date, March 28, 1941, yielded 10 sides and included Catfish Blues. Just under a year later, on February 20, 1942, Petway cut his final six sides, of which only 4 would be issued.
It remains tantalizing to wonder what these missing sides (Hard-Working Woman and Arn't Nobody's Fool) sound like as the rest of the material from that session, Bertha Lee b/w In the Evening especially, are solid indeed.We are even mostly certain that Robert actually wrote the song for which he is most famous. Its pedigree has been debated for years, including theories that it was actually McClennan's tune, but the dusty roads still seem to lead back to Robert.
Max Haymes wrote a superlative essay on the origins of Petway's Catfish, which can be found here: http://www.earlyblues.com/essay_catfish.htm . To summarize its evolution, we first see this catfish, or more specifically the line "I wished I was a catfish, swimming down in the sea" bobbing to the surface in the unlikeliest of places, in the third verse of the third of six versions of Kansas City Blues Jim Jackson recorded in 1928. It is ironic that it would show up there, in the middle of a song whose own origins are so labyrinthine.
"I'd have some good women, fishing after me," Jackson sang, following it immediately and curiously with, "and I'll move to Kansas City..."
When we hear McClennan singing the line about being a bullfrog "swimming in that deep blue sea, Lord, I'd have all these good looking women fishin after me..." we should probably be remembering Honeyboy's recollections from the quote above: "..we'd be at Tommy's house, drinking and playing cards, and one of us sitting in the corner practicing some song..." I believe we end up seeing both Catfish Blues and Bullfrog Blues being born in that corner by Tommy McClennan's kitchen table. According to Honeyboy,Petway "...just made that song up and used to play it at them old country dances. He just made it up and kept it in his head."
When Robert cut Catfish Blues, and while he did draw on pre-established lyrics, he ditched the slide, changed the tempo, and the lyrics would still end up being mostly his own. It is as pure a bloodline as one is likely to get with the pre-war blues.
We see mules kicking in other folks' stalls from the Piedmont to Texas because many of those lines and images were already well-disseminated by the time anyone got caught recording them. In this respect, how many of those songs evolved more closely resembles oral tradition than traditional songwriting. If it was a bluesman's job to keep asses moving in the jukehouses, he got his rhythm going, found his groove, and threw the lyrics in as he went along, his, someone else's, or any combination thereof. Find a common theme and take it for a walk in the woods. Often as not, these lyrics and images were treated as a communal reservoir by the prewar bluesmen. You took what you needed and contributed yours in passing. If you got your blues right, it might just get you remembered.
Like the rest of the planet, I was introduced to Robert Petway because Catfish Blues showed up on a compilation. In my case it would be Volume 8: Mississippi Delta Blues, from Rhino's Blues Masters series. That series especially proved pivotal to my early development, introducing me to the likes of Son House, Elmore James, Koko Taylor, Little Walter, Blind Willie Johnson... From that eighth volume I met the likes of Robert Nighthawk, Willie Brown, Louise Johnson, Floyd Jones..and Robert Petway.
It would take a few more years before I lucked across a collection of Petway's sides--and I was on it like a crack whore on a $5 rock.
When we come across such collections, we hope they will prove a treasure trove. Document's Mississippi Blues, 1935-51 was hitting pay-dirt.
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Assembled there were not only Robert's 14 released sides, which more than lived up to their anticipation, but half a dozen hard-to-find early cuts by Robert Lockwood and Otto Virgial's complete recorded works, all 4 songs of it.
Virgial's so obscure he makes Petway look like a superstar by comparison. He shows up in Chicago on Halloween, 1935, cuts his four sides and vanishes without a trace. Re mains one of the blues' enduring phantoms. My personal theory is that he came to Chicago with Big Joe Williams, who also recorded for Bluebird that day.
When Document re-issued Petway's work in the late 1990's, he would this time be sharing his stage with Mississippi Mathilda and Sonny Boy Nelson, a pair of artists whose obscurity almost rivals Virgial's. This time around, we at least have the virtue of knowing who Sonny Boy and Mathilda were. Eugene Powell took the stage name Sonny Boy Nelson in a nod to his stepfather, Sid Nelson. His wife at this time had been born Matilda Witherspoon. They had been married a year and were packing harp player Robert Hill when they showed up at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans on October 15, 1936.
They would cut a total of 14 sides between them that day, of which nine are offered on Document 5671 (3 out of 4 Mathilda's & 6 of the Sonny Boy Nelson/Hill tunes.)Powell would not record again for 34 years, eventually being coaxed back into music by none other than Sam Chatmon. He debuted at the 1970 Festival of American Folklife in Washington, DC, too late to reap any benefits from the folk blues revival of the preceding decade. He would die in a nursing home in Greenville, MS in 1994 at the age of 86.
Mathilda kept working the country juke circuit into the 1950's, roughly about the time she and Powell divorced. She was on her third husband when she passed away in Chicago in 1978.
Though incomplete, what sides are collected here are well worth their discovery. Sonny Boy's finger-work is clear and impressive, as is Mathilda's voice, when not hampered by sound issues (e.g. A & V Blues). They remain a 27-minute delight.
But it is Petway's contributions that provide the meat to both collections. These 14 sides are just a wonder of the Delta blues.
While he may have been a follower of McClennan's, i would argue that he was Tommy's better as a musician. Robert's finger-work is more fluid, while retaining their shared aggressive approach. Petway's vocals strike me as more engaging, whether in emoting or in his delightfully lascivious spoken asides.Weighing in at just over 42 minutes, Robert's 14 released sides must surely rank as essential to any serious blues collection. In the waning years of the prewar era, Robert's blues provided a growling, rollicking sendoff.
Neither Robert nor McClennan would make the jump to the post-war scene. Tommy banged around Chicago through the years to follow, playing only occasionally before not playing at all. What scattered accounts there are of his presence are unanimous in that Tommy was more interested in his next drink than his next song. He spent his last years in abject poverty and was last reported living in a converted storage trailer at the corner of 22nd and State Streets on the South Side. He is believed to have died between 1958 and 1962.
If anyone had bothered to ask him whatever became of his road-dawg, Robert Petway, his answer was never recorded.
Petway vanishes. Utterly. Honeyboy Edwards provides the only rumors of what became of him following his February, '42 session. "He moved to Blytheville, Arkansas," Honeyboy remembered. "He was picking cotton there, then he come to Chicago." Honeyboy had heard that Robert was on the North Side. He just never saw him there. "Nobody I know heard what become of him."
One rather hopes that Petway managed to live out his days with his guitar in the back of a bedroom closet, comfortably settled down and raising a family in total anonymity, ironically ignorant that he left a legacy behind him. Picturing Robert in his dotage, grandchild at his knee, would have proved a gentler end than the blues life generally afforded its musicians.
Peace, Mudcatz
Catfish Blues: Mississippi Blues, Volume 3 (1936-1942)
DOCD-5671
199?
Robert Petway
1 - Catfish Blues
2 - Ride `Em on Down
3 - Rockin' Chair Blues
4 - My little Girl
5 - Let Me Be Your Boss
6 - Left My Baby Crying
7 - Sleepy Woman Blues
8 - Don't Go Down Baby
9 - Bertha Lee Blues
10 - Boogie Woogie Woman
11 - Hollow Log Blues
12 - In The Evening
13 - My Baby Left Me
14 - Cotton Pickin' Blues
Mississippi Mathilda
15 - A & V Blues
16 - Hard Working Woman
17 - Happy Home Blues
Sonny Boy Nelson
18 - Long tall Woman
19 - Low Down
20 - Lovin` Blues
21 - Street Walkin'
22 - If You Don't Believe I'm Leaving Baby
23 - Pony blues
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