Henry Sloan appears in blues history already formed -- no source names who shaped him. Born in Mississippi around 1870, he was farming near Bolton by 1900, then moved with the Patton family to the Dockery Plantation near Ruleville by 1904. There, over several years, he gave the teenage Charley Patton guitar instruction, the one fact every source agrees on and the reason he's remembered at all. What Sloan himself played is contested: researcher Joseph Scott says Gayle Dean Wardlow, co-author of the standard Patton biography King of the Delta Blues, "doesn't think Sloan even played blues music at all," and calls the repeated claim that he was first to set field hollers to guitar "absurd." His later life splits two ways: a possible move to Chicago, or census records placing him in West Memphis, Arkansas by 1920, tied by one genealogist to a 1948 death record. He never recorded.