52 weeks of blues

Scrapper Blackwell is an absolute but somewhat lesser known legend of blues guitar, perhaps because his a story is a lot different from most. He played a sophisticated, urban style, he came from a big city, was rich and famous immediately and he is recognised as the first guitar virtuoso and was the number one influence on the world changing Chicago style of blues.
Born as Francis Hillman Blackwell on February 21, 1903, in the town of Syracuse – he claims North Carolina, but there is no record of a town by that name in NC, though there is one in South Carolina. One of his parents was African American, the other was Cherokee, and they had 16 children – 8 boys and 8 girls. The family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana when Francis was a child, and he lived in the city for the rest of his life. Francis was a rough and tumble child. He was bow legged as a toddler and couldn’t walk, so he used to trip his brothers by tackling their legs and pulling them out from under the unfortunate sibling. His grandmother called him a “dirty little scrapper” and the name stuck.
The family were very musical – his father was a violinist and fiddle player, a brother played drums, a sister played piano, a few played guitar and all sang. Scrapper made his first guitar out of a cigar box and a mandolin neck. Music came naturally to him – he never had a single lesson – and he learnt to play by ear and sound alone. He had a natural intuition for rhythm and pitch, and would instinctively know which string to play to make the sound he wanted to make. He was a somewhat shy and introverted teen and young man. He didn’t play publicly, only for himself, his family and occasionally for neighbours.
Despite this, an Englishman who owned the local music store known now only by the name of Mr Guernsey had heard of Scrapper’s music. Mr Guernsey had also met a local pianist and singer, Leroy Carr, who had made name for himself in Indianapolis. Carr had a song called “How Long Blues” that Mr Guernsey thought could be a hit record – all it needed was some accompaniment to offset the deep tones of Carr’s piano playing. One day in 1928, Mr Guernsey and Leroy Carr decided to pay Scrapper a visit.
Scrapper worked as a moonshiner, producing and selling illegal corn liquor. At first he wasn’t interested in talking to Mr Guernsey, saying he had work to do, but Guernsey bought all the liquor Scrapper had. He introduced Leroy, and Leroy played his song. They asked if Scrapper would be interested in recording and he said no. The three drove around town for an hour, just chatting, and the next day Leroy returned alone and the two jammed and realised they had a pretty good sound. Leroy asked again if Scrapper was interested in recording and he said he was, but he refused to travel when Leroy explained that they would have to travel to Chicago to a recording studio.
Mr Guernsey arranged for a portable recording machine from Vocation Records to be sent to Indianapolis, and in June of 1928 Scrapper Blackwell was first recorded. “How Long, How Long Blues” was a piano and guitar duet, with Leroy singing in his crooning style, and became an instant and massive success. It reportedly sold over a million copies, and revolutionised popular music. At the time the ‘race records’ category was full of raw, country style blues and over the top vaudeville and hokum band numbers. Leroy and Scrapper’s music was soft, restrained, sophisticated and above all cool. Unlike the hard trodden life of the country blues, this was something never before heard in music: intelligent, refined blues and suited to an educated urban market.
In the same sessions, Scrapper also recorded a few solo tracks that were released under his own name. Among them was a moderate hit titled “Kokomo Blues”, which featured a verse in the typical AAB structure of a 12 bar: “Mmmm, baby don’t you want to go (repeated); Pack up your little suitcase, Papa’s going to Kokomo”. 5 years later, Kokomo Arnold blatantly stole it and had a big hit by renaming it to “Old Original Kokomo Blues”. 3 years after that, Robert Johnson changed a few lyrics and renamed it “Sweet Home Chicago”.
After the instant success of “How Long”, Scrapper was paid a flat $4000 (equivalent to around $55,000 in 2015) and received royalty cheques. He saw a future in music, said goodbye to the illegal alcohol and was persuaded to travel to Chicago to record. Over the next 6 years the duo recorded hit after hit – over 100 sides in all, and Scrapper played guitar on a variety of releases of other artists. They recorded songs in Chicago, New Orleans and New York with the biggest names in the business – including Josh White. Carr’s relaxed, crooner vocals, his barrel house piano with Scrappers lyrical jazz inspired melody lines over the top were at the leading edge of the new direction of music, and soon imitators followed. Nat King Cole developed a style heavily based on the duo and later Ray Charles began to imitate Leroy and Scrapper’s music. The great Muddy Waters heard “How Long” and was hooked, the first song he every learnt on the guitar was this, spending hours strumming along and trying to work out what Scrapper was doing. Leroy and Scrapper were best friends, regularly performing across several states, womanising and partying. And drinking.
In 1935, they had their last recording session on February 25, laying down 8 tracks, including the grim “Six Cold Feet in the Ground”. In the middle of the night two months later, April 29, 1935, Scrapper received a frantic phone call from one of Leroy’s female friends. Leroy Carr had collapsed and couldn’t be woken up. Scrapper quickly made his way to his friend’s house, where Leroy’s body was being loaded into an ambulance. He was dead at 30, caused by nephritis as a result of prolonged alcohol poisoning.
Scrapper was devastated. He returned to the studio in July of that year, to record with Frankie Black. One of the tracks they cut was “My Pal Blues (dedicated to the memory of Leroy Carr”. After that, he quit the music business, retuned to Indianapolis working as a manual labourer and disappeared.
In 1959, with the resurgence in interest in the roots of blues, blues fans and musicians Duncan P. Schiedt and Art Rosenbaum rediscovered Scrapper in Indianapolis. According to Rosenbaum, he first met Scrapper in 1958, after being told about a great guitar player by a friend of his. He arranged to meet the man, and when he did he found the man hadn’t owned a guitar for 15 years. After supplying him a guitar, the man refused to play, stating “you gotta get some bird food for the bird, before the bird sings… beer!” After supplying him with beer, Scrapper played like he had never left the music business. Rosenbaum didn’t know it at the time, but a friend later pointed out just who Scrapper Blackwell was.
Scrapper recorded an album worth of tracks in 1958, but the quality wasn’t good enough to be released (it was subsequently released in 1967). In 1960 he recorded again, and an album was released title “Scrapper Blackwell: Blues Before Sunrise”. In 1961, he recorded the album “Mr Scrapper’s Blues”, recorded in July in Indianapolis. It included “Goin’ Where the Monon Crosses the Yellow Dog” and his heartfelt version of “Nobody Knows You When You Are Down and Out” – which Eric Clapton would cover almost note for note on his Unplugged album. “Mr Scrapper’s Blues” was positively received by critics, and was poised to make Scrapper a massive success during the blues revival.
Early in the morning of October 6, 1962, Scrapper Blackwell was shot in the chest in an alley next to his house in Indianapolis. He was rushed to hospital, where he died the following day. A neighbour, Robert Beam, found Scrapper mortally wounded, called the police and was later arrested for the murder – he owned a gun the same calibre as the murder weapon. He was subsequently cleared, and the murder was ruled to be a mugging gone wrong. To this day, the murder of one of the most influential of all the blues legends remains unsolved. Scrapper is buried in New Crown Cemetery, Indianapolis.