Blind Blake

Blind Blake ranks among the towering presences in American music as one of its supreme blues guitarists while also serving as the chief architect of finger-style ragtime on six strings, the guitar’s counterpart to keyboard ragtime. He commanded the idiom with such authority that later players who adopted the approach have rarely approached the singular level he attained. Paramount Records featured him more often than any other blues guitarist in its race series, turning to the artist repeatedly because he outsold every other performer on the label. Before the company ceased operations in autumn 1932, he had cut seventy-nine documented sides issued under his own name and supplied accompaniments for additional Paramount sessions by Gus Cannon, Papa Charlie Jackson, Irene Scruggs, Ma Rainey, and Ida Cox, among others.

Despite his stature, fame, commercial success, and extensive discography, verifiable details about his life remain limited to statements he made on his own recordings. More than five decades of expert inquiry have uncovered nothing further that can be confirmed. Nearly everything asserted about him beyond those recordings consists of speculation, hearsay, defamation, or fabrication. One early claim identified him as Arthur Phelps, the name under which his entry appears in Sheldon Harris’s Blues Who’s Who; Blake himself refuted the notion on the 1929 release “Blind Arthur’s Breakdown,” declaring his name Arthur Blake. His brief shift into Geechee speech on “Southern Rag” prompted speculation that he originated in the Georgia Sea Islands and spoke Geechee natively, supposedly explaining an “uncomfortable negro dialect” heard on titles such as “Early Morning Blues,” yet his command of dialect proves unproblematic and the notion collapses under scrutiny.

Family ties place him in the Jacksonville, Florida vicinity, where he was probably born, though he may have spent his childhood in Georgia. He first appeared in Chicago during the mid-1920s. His birth year is placed between 1895 and 1897 on the evidence of the sole surviving photograph, taken at his initial Paramount session in August 1926, which depicts a man roughly thirty years old. Musicians who knew him personally recalled only an apparently bottomless thirst for liquor. No trustworthy record exists of his whereabouts after the final Paramount date in June 1932. Reports that he was murdered in Chicago soon afterward were disproved by thorough examination of local police records. The likeliest account holds that he returned to Jacksonville and survived a few additional years, with 1937 offered as a plausible year of death. In summer 1935 Mary Elizabeth Barnicle directed an Archive of Folk Song field trip through the region where he is thought to have resettled and searched for Black musicians without locating him.

Numerous sides by Blind Blake are now regarded as landmark early blues performances; among the most frequently cited are “Early Morning Blues,” “Too Tight,” “Skeedle Loo Doo Blues,” “That Will Never Happen No More,” “Southern Rag,” “Diddie Wa Diddie,” “Police Dog Blues,” “Playing Policy Blues,” and “Righteous Blues.” Several of his compositions have become enduring country-blues standards. Developments within Atlanta-based Piedmont blues indicate that his influence, transmitted even solely through recordings, proved substantial. Listeners invariably note the unaffected sincerity, mild spontaneous wit, and seemingly effortless execution of technically demanding finger-work that mark his work. Blind Blake should not be mistaken for Blake Higgs, the Bahamian calypso performer who also recorded under the name “Blind Blake.”