Come Home Charley Patton

For Come Home Charley Patton, Ralph Lemon journeyed the mythic roads of migration, visiting the sites of lynchings, following the paths of civil rights marches, and meeting the descendants of early blues musicians. The resulting performance is guided by the voices of James Baldwin and blues musician Charley Patton, using narrative, documentary video footage (filmed by daughter Chelsea Lemon Fetzer), and a sound score grounded in Delta blues. Lemon questions notions of personal memory, history, and one’s sense of home through powerful performances with a montage of stories, song, and movement, as if evoking the spirits of old buck dancers. Come home Charley Patton is a formidable finale for The Geography Trilogy, a rich, transcendent performance, and a historically-charged meditation on memory in America.