51�Թ�

“By the time my grandfather, Eddie, took the family back down south to sharecrop, all of those kids were city kids,” he said.

The records of the Freedmen’s Bureau contain marriage certificates, labor contracts, and sharecropping agreements; since many former slaveholders ended up contracting with former slaves to sharecrop on their land, this could be a clue to a connection.

After that he pulled himself together, and when the chance came along to lease and sharecrop a hundred acres from a big strawberry grower up north in Santa Clara Valley he took it.

Beyond the allure of Patton’s music for Pops, Mr. Kot writes, “there was the symbolism of what he represented: a free man who didn’t have to sharecrop to eat, who could come and go as he pleased, making records and playing for people in far-off towns.”

Where I grew up, everyone was either a sharecrop farmer or working in unskilled jobs in the oil industry.