⁷Charley Patton (1891–1934) was one of the ‘Fathers of the Delta blues’ (for biographical references, see e.g. Robert Santelli: The Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia, London: Pavilion, 1994. Patton’s life style follows all the cliches for a ‘blues man’: he was raw and bullyish, enjoyed a good fight, drank heavily, allegedly had eight wives and spent time in prison. His guitar style and song technique had an enormous influence on virtually every blues musicians in the following generation, and is both directly and indirectly a model for Dylan’s own blues style. Patton’s ‘High Water Everywhere’ is a long description of the flood, even this a topic that Dylan has treated earlier, e.g. in ‘Crash on the Levee’ and the parodic ‘The Big Flood’, both from the 1967 Basement Tapes).