In the Summer of 1930, Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown and Louise Johnson drove from Mississippi to Wisconsin to make records for the Paramount race label. The session produced important contributions to America’s Blues culture, but the car journey was also a capsule of social history. The different characters, their relationships and temperaments provoked tensions that needed to be settled with bare fists as well as music. Malcolm Noble, who hosts a weekly Blues hour on local radio, has dug deep into Delta history to discover what this important recording session says about the American South on the cusp of the depressed 1930s. In this series of podcasts, he reads extracts from his study of A Blues Session in Wisconsin (published October 2021).
