"Nobody don't know Naptown, baby like I know/I can grab me a ticket, stop by the Walker show." - Leroy Carr, "Naptown Blues"

His Life

Leroy Carr, born on March 27, 1905, was unlike most African-Americans of his generation in a very significant way: Carr was a city kid from day one. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a porter at Vanderbilt University. When Leroy was still quite young, his parents seperated; his mother brought him and his sister with her to Indianapolis, where Leroy spent most of his life. Today the three of them would be known as a single-parent household, but back then they were just another family who moved north, looking for a better life in Indianapolis. At the time, Indianapolis was the car capital of America and, as such, attracted a lot of people from the South, black and white, looking for work. Most car companies were based there, which is why the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built there instead of Detroit. The rise of Henry Ford's company slowed this influx greatly, though it is still going on today at a much reduced rate.

Very little is known about Carr's early life. It is known that after he taught himself to play piano at an early age, Carr quit school. He was apparently bitten by the travel bug; he joined a circus and the army. (Make your own joke, folks.) After his discharge from the service, Carr married and worked, briefly, as a bootlegger. By the mid-20's, Carr had quit his day job as a meat packer and was earning his living entirely by playing piano at dances and house parties on and around Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis. For many years, Indiana Avenue was a great place to hear jazz and blues, buy corn liquor, and get your head beat in (often all at once). It was probably at one of these parties or dances that Carr met part-time guitarist and full-time bootlegger Francis "Scrapper" Blackwell. The two probably played quite a bit as a duo before being noticed by talent scouts. Even their first recordings display a great feel and timing for each other that only comes through playing together for so long. Back then, Indiana Avenue had a reputation around the region for producing some great musicians, and word about Carr spread. His reputation grew to the point where he was playing outside of Indianapolis, throughout the Midwest and the upper South. Blackwell may have played these places with Carr, but possibly not. Scrapper considered music a sideline to his bootlegging at that time, and may not have wanted to give up his steady income to go to, say, Cincinnati or Louisville for a few days. So it's likely that Carr played these gigs solo or with local musicians.

By 1928, Carr and Blackwell's reputation in the region had grown to the point that they were approached by a talent scout for Vocalion to make a record in Indianapolis. Supposedly Blackwell was reluctant, and Leroy needed to use considerable persuasion to get him to agree. Their first session in the summer of that year produced How Long How Long Blues, a slow, introspective eight-bar blues about someone whose baby's left on a train. The song started to sell well everywhere blues records were available. How Long established Carr and Blackwell as the biggest male blues recording stars for the next eight years. And it still sounds like a great blues song; the year's other big piano-guitar hit, It's Tight Like That by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey, sounds like an old-fashioned novelty record in comparison. The success of How Long led to continued offers for the duo to record their lean, introspective blues even during the deepest parts of the depression when recording of race artists (outside of novelty and pop numbers) had all but stopped. The duo may have had their biggest hit with their first song, but Carr and Blackwell were not one-hit wonders. Songs like Naptown Blues, We're Gonna Rock, Corn Licker Blues, and others followed and sold well. This stream of hits established them as two of the most popular musicians in the juke joints in Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, and beyond, and Blackwell became largely sought-after as an accompanist.

Unfortuantely, one of the fringe benefits of those juke joints turned out to be an occupational hazard: bootleg whiskey, for which Carr had developed a real liking. Too much of a liking, in fact. From what Blackwell told Duncan Scheidt, and what others have remembered, Carr was probably an alcoholic (or well on his way there) by the time they recorded How Long, and definitely was addicted by the end of the '20s. One thing one notices in the following picture is that Carr is a fairly skinny guy compared to the medium-built Blackwell; Leroy doesn't look physically equipped to handle the years of substance abuse which he inflicted upon himself. The amazing thing is that all of his drinking homemade whiskey didn't seem to have much of an adverse affect on Carr's playing or songwriting for his last sessions. There is a cd available on Portrait (see below) compiled from songs that Leroy and Scrapper recorded for Vocalion in 1932 and 1934. Carr's singing sounds much more constricted on the later recordings but that is the only obvious sign of his slide into the bottle.

In February of 1935, Carr and Blackwell went back into the studio together for the last time. The last song Carr recorded was a solo number, the eerily prophetic Six Cold Feet in the Ground. Two months later, Vocalion came calling again, but Carr was dead because of complications of his alcoholism. Blackwell went into depression, recorded a few more sides, than gave up music altogether.

Recently, Leroy Carr's grave was rediscovered at the Floral Park Cemetary in Indianapolis. Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold, two local disc jockeys who release "best of" comedy albums twice a year for local charities, heard this and decided to help. They donated part of the proceeds from their Spring 1993 album, Laugh in the Fast Lane, which features Duke Tumatoe's cover of Naptown Blues, towards purchasing a headstone for Leroy Carr's grave. In a sense, it was fairly typical: on a cd filled with song and commercial parodies and on-the-air performances by standup comedians, Leroy Carr showed up again in his usual subtle and quiet way.

His Music

Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell were arguably the most popular and influential male blues artists from 1928 until Carr's death in 1935. In spite of this, the duo is quite underrated today, for several reasons. One, obviously, is that neither survived to be seen by the folk audiences of the sixties, though Blackwell almost made it. Another is that, unlike Robert Johnson, neither had cultivated an image which would lead to a legend surrounding them. Blackwell did not actively seek the limelight, and Carr's laidback songs and "get this man a beer" attitude at a houseparty didn't lend themselves to such an image. A third and far less obvious reason is that Carr and Blackwell did not live in Chicago.

Allow me to go on a not-too brief tangent. Many Americans tend to take what I call a "One Great Man" view of history, where things are linear and (borrowing a physics term) Newtonian. Thus, the blues was born in Mississippi, messed around in Memphis, then moved to Chicago. Henry Sloan taught the blues to Charlie Patton, who passed them on to Son House; he taught Robert Johnson, whose records were heard by Muddy Waters, who went to Chicago and influenced everyone who followed, particularly a black guitarist from St. Louis named Chuck Berry, who played songs that were not as bluesy as Muddy's but formed part of the bedrock of rock and roll. Along the way there are some interesting "diversions", such as Willie Brown, Johnny Shines, Albert King, Bo Diddley, and so on, but the main thrust of the history is this chain from Henry Sloan to Muddy Waters and beyond. However, when one starts to critically analyze this argument, it doesn't hold up; life tends to be more subtle, more "quantum", if you will. For one thing, it ignores blues from Texas and the East Coast and, therefore, bluesmen like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Count Basie, Jimmy Rushing (yes, I count them as bluesmen), Blind Boy Fuller, and T-Bone Walker, who was a tremendous influence on some Mississippian named Riley B. King. These men were each incredibly popular in their day and left their own marks on the blues. For another thing, this view doesn't take into account the influence of records, a tremendous oversight. Muddy Waters, for example, said the first song he remembers hearing and the first song he learned to play was Carr's How Long How Long Blues, learned off a phonograph. Robert Johnson, though definitely a Delta bluesman, was influenced by artists from outside of Mississippi; he absorbed Carr and Blackwell's music and grafted much of New Orleans' Lonnie Johnson's into his own songs. (And Lonnie Johnson made a lot of great music outside of blues.) Until recently, the importance of the artists outside the chain leading from Charlie Patton to Muddy were glossed over or, occaisionally and inexplicably, ignored. Fortunately this has changed, but many talented, popular, and/or influential bluesmen are still underrated or largely unknown.

That said, I believe that being based in Indianapolis probably hurt the later reputations of Carr and Blackwell. Chicago tends to ignore and/or belittle its nearest big-city neighbors. Lest anyone think this is sour grapes, this shows up in sports, newscasts, and so on, not just music. (For example, in 1994, it wasn't so much that the Indiana Pacers won the NBA Central Division title over the Bulls, it was just that Michael Jordan was too busy playing baseball to lead The Bulls to another NBA crown.) Chicago has a blues history going as far back as Indianapolis and St. Louis, and a far deeper one, especially if one uses numbers of records as a gauge. Chicago is the city most associated with blues, and for good reason. However, the blues scenes in St. Louis and Indianapolis went through long periods of being ignored by record companies for various reasons, which has never really happened in Chicago since Tampa Red recorded the fifty-seventh version of Tight Like That. Most of the race labels in America before the Depression, or at least the most active and/or most important, were based in Chicago or had offices there. Even during the deepest parts of the Depression, there were record companies in Chicago who were willing to record some blues. (In fact, Carr and Blackwell recorded primarily in Chicago after 1930, since there was no company in Indianapolis at the time who would or could record them.) Therefore, there is a continuous recorded history of Chicago blues which does not exist for St. Louis and Indianapolis, so artists from those cities tend to get lost in the shuffle. The upshot of this is that even today, when regionalism has been largely erased, it is still far easier to find literature about and recordings of journeymen from Chicago playing the same old thing than it is to find anything on Carr and Blackwell, two truly original, popular, and influential artists who are far too often ignored.

Ultimately, though, all of this talk of how we perceive history, though important, teaches us more about ourselves than the music. And the music makes the talk quickly fade. More than sixty years later, the music of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell still sound like great blues records while some of their popular contemporaries sound horribly old-fashioned. Part of this is because Carr and Blackwell worked so well together. Blackwell was a self-taught guitar virtuoso who helped to take blues guitar to another level. Carr was hardly a dazzling pianist, but his simple, bass-oriented accompaniment freed Blackwell's guitar, which in itself compensated for any of Carr's shortcomings as an instrumentalist. Another reason their music still grabs our attention is because the songs themselves are are well-written and superbly performed. The duo wrote and recorded some great blues songs in their eight year run: How Long How Long Blues, Naptown Blues, Mean Mistreater Mama, Blues before Sunrise, and more. And unlike many musicians who share a long-term association, their music never really became overly redundant. Part of it, of course, is the great songs, but they also changed pace, playing the occaisional hokum and uptempo numbers along with their signature slow blues. And they didn't play exclusively with each other, which may have kept the partnership fresh.

Another reason for their appeal today is that How Long How Long Blues, and to a lesser extent It's Tight Like That, ushered in the era of city blues. It's Tight Like That sounds fairly rural in spite of the two men who recorded it, but How Long was something entirely different. For one thing, its popularity led talent scouts to look for blues artists in cities as well as backwoods locations. But the song also sounded the epitome of urban cool to rural blacks like Muddy Waters and Johnny Shines. Blackwell's clean, piercing lead guitar was another world from Charlie Patton (and from Tampa Red as well). Carr's understated, sad, introspective playing and singing set him apart from barrelhouse power players like Pine Top Smith and boogie woogie speed demons like Pete Johnson and Meade Lux Lewis. But perhaps most importantly, Carr and Blackwell influenced many bluesmen whom we consider giants in the business, which keeps their sound, however transmuted, familiar to us.

It can be argued that, from the release How Long until Carr's death in 1935, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell were the most popular men in the blues. They were every bit as popular and influential as Blind Lemon Jefferson. Many later bluesman from all across the nation listed Jefferson's music as an influence; nearly as many were touched by Carr and Blackwell's. And it wasn't just bluesmen in the Midwest and mid-South, where Carr and Blackwell regularly played. Musicians as diverse as the blues itself have covered their songs. T-Bone Walker did a wonderful cover of How Long; Memphis Slim really made We're Gonna Rock live up to its title; jazz great Wes Montgomery recorded a really kicking version of Naptown Blues; Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing recorded some great covers of Carr and Blackwell songs; and Piedmont bluesman Archie Edwards was influenced by Carr and Blackwell enough to still perform a cover or two to this day.

Their influence as musicians, though, was probably strongest and more typical in Robert Johnson. Johnson had many and diverse influences: Peetie Wheatstraw (himself influenced by Carr and Blackwell), Skip James, Son House, Carr and Blackwell, Lonnie Johnson, and the unrecorded Ike Zinnerman. Johnson was influenced by these artists in different ways: Wheatstraw provided the image, House the tradition of the Delta and an intense style of playing, Zinnerman played an unknown role, and large parts of the recordings of Lonnie Johnson and Skip James were more or less grafted whole into Johnson's records. Carr and Blackwell, however, provided a much more subtle and pervasive influence. Their touch can be heard behind most of Johnson's songs. Occaisionally it will flash to the fore (as on Love in Vain, or compare Carr's Rocks in My Bed to Johnson's Stones in My Passway). Mostly, though, Carr's influence is there providing part of the bedrock of a sound heard the world over.

Recommended Listening

Finding music by Leroy Carr often takes some looking, but it's well worth the effort. There are two cds that are quite good. If you find one, get it while you can. If you have a choice, I recommend starting with Blues Before Sunrise (RK 44122) on Portrait. It has sixteen songs that the duo cut for Vocalion from 1932 to 1934, including three with Piedmont bluesman Josh White. Most are in the sad, introspective style that only they can do, though there are some uptempo numbers as well. Since the songs are from later in Carr's recording career, you don't get How Long or Naptown Blues; still, it's a great disk. Another good one is Naptown Blues on Yazoo. I've told you about my experience with this cd on my Scrapper Blackwell page, so I won't repeat it here. I do know that Carr and Blackwell made great records, and the folks at Shanachie/Yazoo do a fine job on reissues, and I think it's a good cd, so I cautiously recommend it.

Document Records has released the complete recordings of Leroy Carr on six compact discs. I have managed to find (and buy) the complete set, finally. When first listening to the cds, I was prepared to get bored hearing the same two artists over and over again for seven hours, but I was pleasantly surprised. Partly this is because the duo had a knack for writing great songs, but they also recorded quite a variety of music as well. Some of this may have been due to outside forces: Blackwell and Carr recorded through the deepest part of the Depression (probably so Vocalion could keep their contract valid), and uptempo and hokum numbers were the order of the day. Carr even recorded a couple pop tunes (and one of which, to me, sounds like one of the old Irish ballads my great-aunt used to sing). But beyond that, the two had more variety in their blues than is readily apparent, changing tempos, mixing up the interplay between their guitar and piano, and using some now-standard but then-new imagery in their lyrics. Also, one will hear one of their songs that was later used as the basis for another, more famous song. (Rocks in My Bed becoming Robert Johnson's Stones in My Pathway, for example.) The discs are up to Document's usual high standards for sound quality, and I would wholeheartedly recommend them to someone who has gotten into Carr and Blackwell's music and would like to find more. However, six cds is a heavy investment for a casual fan or someone who hasn't heard the duo.

Bibliography
The following are the written resources I used in creating this page. Those with a are the ones I recommend.

Bastin, Bruce. Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition of the Southeast. The University of Illinois Press, 1986 (ISBN 0-252-06521-2).

Barlow, William. Looking Up at Down. Temple University Press, 1989 (ISBN 0-87722-583-4).

Calt, Stephen. I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. 1994 (ISBN 0-306-80579-0).

Charters, Samuel B. The Country Blues. Da Capo Press, 1975 (ISBN 0-306-80014-4).

Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. Hyperion, 1995 (ISBN 0-7868-6052-9).

Harris, Sheldon. Blues Who's Who. DaCapo Press, 1979 (ISBN 0-306-80155-8).

Hentoff, Nat. Liner notes to Leroy Carr: Blues before Sunrise (Portrait RK 44122).

Herzhaft, Gerard. Encyclopedia of the Blues. The University of Arkansas Press, 1992 (ISBN 1-55728-253-6).

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. Penguin, 1982 (ISBN 0-14-006223-8).

Santelli, Robert. The Big book of the Blues. Penguin, 1993 (ISBN 0 14 01.5939 8).

Titon, Jeff Todd. Early Downhome Blues. University of North Carolina Press, 1994 (ISBN 0-8078-2170-5).