Biography
Little is known about the identities of the musicians who performed as Blind Percy & His Blind Band, and doubts persist regarding whether blindness afflicted any or all of them. Josh White, a blues and folk performer, established himself as an authority on vocalists who carried the “Blind” prefix in their professional names after serving more than sixty such artists as a lead boy. One of those artists was the blues gospel singer Blind Joe Taggart, who, like the more widely recognized Blind Willie Johnson, frequently appeared and recorded alongside female accompanists. White maintained that Taggart suffered from cataracts yet retained partial vision. Under the pseudonym Blind Joe Amos, Taggart committed several secular blues performances to disc, and he is also suspected of having recorded “Pennsylvania Woman Blues” as Six Cylinder Smith. Substantial circumstantial evidence suggests that Six Cylinder Smith and Blind Percy were the same individual, prompting some observers to identify Blind Percy with Blind Joe Taggart, although this attribution remains contested among blues researchers.
Harmonica specialists regard Six Cylinder Smith, and by extension possibly Blind Percy, as among the scant practitioners of rack harmonica, the technique in which an instrument is suspended from a wire frame resting on the player’s shoulders in the manner employed by Bob Dylan. Traditional blues harmonica playing, by contrast, requires the musician to hold the instrument solely in the hands and to modify tone through intricate hand movements, actions precluded by a rack mount though not without the incidental risk of abrading the ear while positioning the device. No photographs of either Smith or Blind Percy survive; had any existed, contemporary image-analysis tools might have revealed telltale ear abrasions and thereby clarified both the players’ identities and the feasibility of simultaneous harmonica and guitar performance. White never confirmed that his former employer Taggart had performed as either Smith or Percy. Chicago blues guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson later recalled in an interview that guitar fundamentals had been imparted to him by “a man named Blind Percy,” thereby situating the artist, and potentially Six Cylinder Smith, in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s. Material recorded a decade earlier has been reissued both in anthologies devoted to Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas blues musicians and in compilations of Taggart’s work because of the unresolved questions of authorship. Among the selections credited to Blind Percy are “Coal River Blues” and “Fourteenth Street Blues.”
Harmonica specialists regard Six Cylinder Smith, and by extension possibly Blind Percy, as among the scant practitioners of rack harmonica, the technique in which an instrument is suspended from a wire frame resting on the player’s shoulders in the manner employed by Bob Dylan. Traditional blues harmonica playing, by contrast, requires the musician to hold the instrument solely in the hands and to modify tone through intricate hand movements, actions precluded by a rack mount though not without the incidental risk of abrading the ear while positioning the device. No photographs of either Smith or Blind Percy survive; had any existed, contemporary image-analysis tools might have revealed telltale ear abrasions and thereby clarified both the players’ identities and the feasibility of simultaneous harmonica and guitar performance. White never confirmed that his former employer Taggart had performed as either Smith or Percy. Chicago blues guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson later recalled in an interview that guitar fundamentals had been imparted to him by “a man named Blind Percy,” thereby situating the artist, and potentially Six Cylinder Smith, in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s. Material recorded a decade earlier has been reissued both in anthologies devoted to Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas blues musicians and in compilations of Taggart’s work because of the unresolved questions of authorship. Among the selections credited to Blind Percy are “Coal River Blues” and “Fourteenth Street Blues.”