Charley Patton died surrounded by his family and the violent power structure he sang against barely noticed at all. Not a single word was printed to mark his passing in the same newspapers that devoted a hundred column inches to the marriage of a plain-faced rich girl to the closeted gay son of a planter. But the news hit the sharecropper bars and tenant houses like the death of Elvis, with the same undertone of a lost world slipping forever from view. He had given voice to the voiceless and provided the soundtrack for decades of Saturday nights. His was the kind of death that made everyone
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