Scrapper Blackwell

This album by bluesman Scrapper Blackwell, recorded in July 1961 and released in '62, is the final act of an outstanding musician who was never fully appreciated during his lifetime. By 1961, the artistic glories he'd achieved between 1928 and 1935 as a member of the famous duo formed with Leroy Carr (piano and vocals) were already long in the past.

Similarly, the fine singles he cut as a solo artist during that same period failed to win any real audience appreciation. This led Blackwell to retire at the end of 1935, after having been one of the absolute leading figures of the first, extraordinary wave of male urban blues in the history of this musical genre.

He returned to the scene more than twenty years later, in 1958, on the crest of the folk and blues revival that would help open new, era-defining paths for modern music. Following a handful of interesting recordings, in 1961 he finally made the LP "Mr. Scrapper's Blues".

From the very start of his career, Francis Hillman "Scrapper" Blackwell (1904-1962) had been one of the greatest virtuosos of blues guitar, remaining forever tied to the instrument in its acoustic form. His is a classy piece of fingerpicking, achieved by bending the strings hard without ever sacrificing the cleanliness of the tone or the nimble flow of notes underpinning the vocals. The musician relies on the unmistakable eloquence of crisp, inventive phrasing, pleasingly intricate in feel. In his guitar playing, rhythm and melody sit in equal measure, in admirable dialogue with one another - a clear marker of the strand of blues his personal style drew on: East Coast blues (a subset of country blues).

Indeed, even back in the days of his successes alongside Leroy Carr, Blackwell favoured this expressive variant of country blues, rooted in the influence that ragtime and folk exerted on the blues spreading through the area between Georgia and Virginia in the early 1900s. This gave rise to a blues with a more dynamic sound, less dense, tense and dark than the style that developed around the Mississippi Delta. An interpretive approach that, previously softened by Carr's piano, resurfaces brilliantly in the guitar lines Blackwell displays on this solo LP.

"Mr. Scrapper's Blues" opens with an original piece ("Goin' Where The Monon Crosses The Yellow Dog"), a perfect example of this strand of blues that developed in the south-east of the United States. Staying true to blues tradition in terms of structure (verse-verse-chorus), the song highlights the album's two main sonic elements. The first is the dry, metallic bite of Blackwell's acoustic guitar: far from cold or mechanical, it is on the contrary deeply engaging, steeped in the sonic hues of the '30s that dominate his music. Worth noting are the melodic riffs, always rooted in blues, woven into the accompaniment to embellish the transitions between chorus and the next verse. These are masterstrokes grafted onto the continuity created by the musician's effective arpeggios, always striking a convincing balance between technique and clever melodic suggestion. The second element is the voice - soft, yet resolute, bearing the marks of a hard-lived life without ever losing the sensitivity that is undoubtedly its defining trait. Elsewhere on the tracklist we find other captivating blues numbers built along the same linear, direct lines (verse-verse-chorus) and sharing the same qualities as the song just described: "George Street Blues", "Blues Before Sunrise", "Shady Lane" (perhaps the album's high point) and "Penal Farm Blues", all dating from his years as part of the duo with Carr.

Blackwell's formative years had also exposed him to other musical genres, absorbed in Indianapolis (the city where he spent much of his youth). For this reason, the album allows itself a few limited but notable excursions into other traditional musical territories: folk blues, the aforementioned ragtime, and vaudeville. Standing out in this respect is a vaudeville-rooted number (vaudeville being the pop music of the early 1900s) made famous by Bessie Smith in 1929: "Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out".

Drawing occasionally on vaudeville standards and adapting them to one's own style was a practice not unknown among bluesmen of the '20s and '30s. Here, the smooth melodies of verse, bridge and chorus are kept intact, though filtered through the bluesy pulse of the guitar accompaniment.

"Little Boy Blue", on the other hand, is a delightful tribute to folk blues, another strand woven into Blackwell's musical makeup. The song's blues structure, otherwise straightforward (intro-verse-chorus), is arranged in a rhythmic, breezy, brisk fashion, precisely to recreate the mood of a certain strain of traditional American folk. On "Little Girl Blues" (a classically structured blues written for this LP) we find Blackwell on piano as well as vocals, proof of this Indiana musician's versatility. His piano playing isn't on a par, qualitatively, with his guitar work, yet the song stands as a thoroughly enjoyable variation, its melancholically sensual colours well realised.

Rounding out the album are two instrumentals: "A Blues" and "E Blues". Here the guitarist shows off his crystalline technique without using his voice, speaking instead through the strings of his instrument with eloquent immediacy. In doing so, he conjures up gripping guitar passages that explicitly underline the influence ragtime had on East Coast blues. Blackwell had already drawn on many of these blues virtuosities earlier in his career, and here, in these two original compositions, they are finally free to unfold without any constraints of time.

The album's lyrics (spanning roughly forty-five minutes across ten tracks) belong to the country blues tradition and lay bare various hardships tied to relationships and money. On this LP, rather unusually, the sung sections take up less space than the instrumental ones, leaving listeners room to reflect, carried along by the notes of these extended musical asides (occasionally drawn out a touch too long, but always handled with skill).

The solos, scattered throughout the LP, are built on single notes that hang suspended for a moment in their intensity, before unspooling once again along the evocative, winding paths traced by Blackwell's fingerpicking.

"Mr Scrapper's Blues" stands as the finest testament to this bluesman in his solo guise, a career brutally cut short by a gunshot suffered during a robbery in 1962 (the very year the LP was released). Once the echo of the blast that tore him away from any further recordings has faded, what lingers in the air is the stirring echo of the work we've presented here. A record that seems to tell the listener, with wistful candour, just how much more this artist deserved to be appreciated while he was still alive: we now have the chance to make amends for that, simply by listening.

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28/03/2026