TUE., SEPTEMBER 25, 2007
Post Spotlight to FacebookScrapper Blackwell: Standing in Blue Shadows
by John Morthland
Writing about Robert Johnson last month got me to thinking more about Scrapper Blackwell, which is admittedly a stretch not easily explained, but I make it anyhow. I think of Blackwell as the great lost blues guitarist. I first heard of him in the late '60s, when his colorful name jumped out of a Bob Dylan interview I read. Snapping up a copy of The Virtuoso Guitar of Scrapper Blackwell (Yazoo), I noted that he was from Indianapolis, most definitely not a blues mecca. But Scrapper made music, built around jazzy, single-string solos that anticipated T-Bone Walker and other electric guitar pioneers, unlike anyone else’s (except, to some extent, Lonnie Johnson). And who, by the way, was this Leroy Carr, pianist-singer on some of the tracks?
Francis Hillman “Scrapper” Blackwell, a gifted writer and delicate singer as well as a groundbreaking guitarist, still sounds great today. Rediscovered during the folk boom, he was just building up a head of steam on a second career when he was shot in the back and died in an Indianapolis alley in 1962. (The crime was never solved.) Maybe that prevented him from becoming better known, and from taking his rightful place alongside such other working rediscoveries of the folk era as Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Booker White. But there’s also the fact that Scrapper was, blueswise, a big-city sophisticate, always suspect among the urban folkies who deified hardscrabble rural artists.
Blackwell was born in 1903 in Syracuse, NC, he claimed, though no such town was ever found on a map (there is, however, a Syracuse, SC). He was one of eight boys and eight girls born to Cherokee-African-American parents, and the family relocated to Indianapolis when Scrapper was a child. In 1928, an Englishman recalled only as Mr. Guernsey, who ran a music store, somehow heard Scrapper play even though the guitarist rarely performed publicly. (He made his living by selling corn liquor.) Within days, Guernsey had paired Blackwell with Carr and made plans to record them, separately and as a duo. That first session yielded “How Long, How Long Blues,” with Carr singing lead, which was an immediate hit and went on to become a blues standard. Its success dwarfed Scrapper’s solo effort, even though “Kokomo Blues” is a remarkably fluid and moving performance in its own right. (Kokomo Arnold remade it a few years later as “Old Kokomo Blues,” which Robert Johnson then morphed into “Sweet Home Chicago.”) The die was cast; though Scrapper continued to periodically record solo, he became known primarily as superstar Carr’s accompanist.
Carr and Blackwell worked together with almost supernatural telepathy.
But that’s like calling Keith Richards Mick Jagger’s accompanist, for as their records show, Carr and Blackwell worked together with almost supernatural telepathy. Carr, who, like Blackwell, was born in the South (Nashville) but came to Indianapolis as a child, was a suave, bittersweet crooner whose style suggested not a trace of the cotton fields. His elementary, relaxed and rollicking piano provided the rhythmic underpinning for their records, while Scrapper embellished him by alternating chords with note-by-note lines; the bassline he supplied with his thumb was nearly as forceful as that of Carr’s piano, while his immaculate single-string solo lines stung and sometimes shimmered almost like a steel guitar, and he snapped his strings dramatically. Even with his tremendous rhythmic drive, everything he played was focused and to the point, clean and sublimely structured — yet for all his speed and dexterity, he never sacrificed passion. On “Barrelhouse Woman,” his sound is so hard and sharp-edged that you’ll swear he’s playing electric. He and Carr were not only the first and most popular of the guitar-piano blues duos that dominated the '30s, but the whole notion of the piano holding the music down while the guitar ran free became the basis for so much of the citified blues that followed, from Walker in L.A. to Robert Nighthawk and Muddy Waters in Chicago.
Between 1928 and 1935, when Carr died at age 30 of complications from his alcoholism, the team laid down more than 100 sides (and Blackwell also recorded a little with some lesser-knowns). They mostly cut straight blues like “Blues Before Sunrise” (“I’ve been sitting here thinking, with my mind a million miles away,” Carr sang, a line that Dylan, how you say, thefted for “Lonesome Day Blues” on Love and Theft), but there was also Irving Berlin’s “How About Me?” and delightful novelties like “Papa’s on the House Top” (which Dylan also echoed, on “Tombstone Blues”). “Sloppy Drunk Blues,” “(In the Evening) When the Sun Goes Down,” “Mean Mistreater Mama” and “I Believe I’ll Make a Change” have all been revived over and over by countless others.
Yet I find myself returning more often to Blackwell’s smaller body of solo work — the incredulous vocals and biting guitar on both parts of “Trouble Blues,” the high guitar cries and stony stoicism of “Blue Day Blues,” the wobbly roll and tumble of “Penal Farm Blues,” the gutsy guitar work on “Down South Blues,” the way he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, or maybe on his guitar, on “Hard Time Blues.” Ever the sideman no matter how much he resented it, Blackwell quit recording soon after Carr died, though he still played a bit around Indianapolis. Rediscovered by producer Art Rosenbaum in ’58, he cut the reflective Mr. Scrapper’s Blues, which featured a knowing and harrowing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” His guitar skills remained undiminished. How sad, then, that his story had to end there. Yet what a joy that we still have access to nearly every record he ever made.
Francis Hillman “Scrapper” Blackwell, a gifted writer and delicate singer as well as a groundbreaking guitarist, still sounds great today. Rediscovered during the folk boom, he was just building up a head of steam on a second career when he was shot in the back and died in an Indianapolis alley in 1962. (The crime was never solved.) Maybe that prevented him from becoming better known, and from taking his rightful place alongside such other working rediscoveries of the folk era as Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Booker White. But there’s also the fact that Scrapper was, blueswise, a big-city sophisticate, always suspect among the urban folkies who deified hardscrabble rural artists.
Blackwell was born in 1903 in Syracuse, NC, he claimed, though no such town was ever found on a map (there is, however, a Syracuse, SC). He was one of eight boys and eight girls born to Cherokee-African-American parents, and the family relocated to Indianapolis when Scrapper was a child. In 1928, an Englishman recalled only as Mr. Guernsey, who ran a music store, somehow heard Scrapper play even though the guitarist rarely performed publicly. (He made his living by selling corn liquor.) Within days, Guernsey had paired Blackwell with Carr and made plans to record them, separately and as a duo. That first session yielded “How Long, How Long Blues,” with Carr singing lead, which was an immediate hit and went on to become a blues standard. Its success dwarfed Scrapper’s solo effort, even though “Kokomo Blues” is a remarkably fluid and moving performance in its own right. (Kokomo Arnold remade it a few years later as “Old Kokomo Blues,” which Robert Johnson then morphed into “Sweet Home Chicago.”) The die was cast; though Scrapper continued to periodically record solo, he became known primarily as superstar Carr’s accompanist.
But that’s like calling Keith Richards Mick Jagger’s accompanist, for as their records show, Carr and Blackwell worked together with almost supernatural telepathy. Carr, who, like Blackwell, was born in the South (Nashville) but came to Indianapolis as a child, was a suave, bittersweet crooner whose style suggested not a trace of the cotton fields. His elementary, relaxed and rollicking piano provided the rhythmic underpinning for their records, while Scrapper embellished him by alternating chords with note-by-note lines; the bassline he supplied with his thumb was nearly as forceful as that of Carr’s piano, while his immaculate single-string solo lines stung and sometimes shimmered almost like a steel guitar, and he snapped his strings dramatically. Even with his tremendous rhythmic drive, everything he played was focused and to the point, clean and sublimely structured — yet for all his speed and dexterity, he never sacrificed passion. On “Barrelhouse Woman,” his sound is so hard and sharp-edged that you’ll swear he’s playing electric. He and Carr were not only the first and most popular of the guitar-piano blues duos that dominated the '30s, but the whole notion of the piano holding the music down while the guitar ran free became the basis for so much of the citified blues that followed, from Walker in L.A. to Robert Nighthawk and Muddy Waters in Chicago.
Between 1928 and 1935, when Carr died at age 30 of complications from his alcoholism, the team laid down more than 100 sides (and Blackwell also recorded a little with some lesser-knowns). They mostly cut straight blues like “Blues Before Sunrise” (“I’ve been sitting here thinking, with my mind a million miles away,” Carr sang, a line that Dylan, how you say, thefted for “Lonesome Day Blues” on Love and Theft), but there was also Irving Berlin’s “How About Me?” and delightful novelties like “Papa’s on the House Top” (which Dylan also echoed, on “Tombstone Blues”). “Sloppy Drunk Blues,” “(In the Evening) When the Sun Goes Down,” “Mean Mistreater Mama” and “I Believe I’ll Make a Change” have all been revived over and over by countless others.
Yet I find myself returning more often to Blackwell’s smaller body of solo work — the incredulous vocals and biting guitar on both parts of “Trouble Blues,” the high guitar cries and stony stoicism of “Blue Day Blues,” the wobbly roll and tumble of “Penal Farm Blues,” the gutsy guitar work on “Down South Blues,” the way he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, or maybe on his guitar, on “Hard Time Blues.” Ever the sideman no matter how much he resented it, Blackwell quit recording soon after Carr died, though he still played a bit around Indianapolis. Rediscovered by producer Art Rosenbaum in ’58, he cut the reflective Mr. Scrapper’s Blues, which featured a knowing and harrowing “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” His guitar skills remained undiminished. How sad, then, that his story had to end there. Yet what a joy that we still have access to nearly every record he ever made.
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