Louisiana Country Blues: A Comparison with the Delta Country Style of Charley Patton and Followers: Mutual Influences

This chapter compares Louisiana country music with the Mississippi Delta country style of Charley Patton. The influence of the Mississippi Delta blues can be found in Louisiana through artists such as Robert Pete Williams and other rural performers. As if to emphasize the fragmented nature of the Louisiana blues scene, Williams did not start to assert himself until the blues revival years of the 1960s. Like Patton and Blind Lemon, he did have an individualistic style, as can be heard on his classic recording of “Prisoner's Talking Blues.” Williams was an intensely personal artist, an introvert lost in his own music. He was not the sort of man to influence young contemporaries, as Patton did in Mississippi. Indeed, it seems that there was no reciprocal influence from Louisiana to Mississippi.