Scrapper Blackwell

• Genre: Acoustic Blues
• Hometown: Indianapolis
• Scrapper Blackwell Website

About

Scrapper Blackwell is an important link to modern Urban Blues. He recorded throughout the late 1920s and '30s, most often with pianist Leroy Carr. The guitar style he developed, based around sophisticated single string-soloing, pointed the way for the guitar heroics that became a big part of most Electric Blues in the '40s and '50s. Blackwell recorded prolifically, cutting well over 100 singles, but at the end of the '30s he disappeared from music. He didn't reappear until the beginning of the blues revival in the early '60s, from which he surely would have benefited had he not been killed in a 1962 robbery attempt.

- Tom Heyman