Scott Dunbar

Born in 1904 as the son of a former slave, Scott Dunbar made his living as a fishing guide while living his entire life in Lake Mary near Natchez in Wilkenson County, Mississippi. Although he never ventured more than one hundred miles from that home, he earned solid local recognition throughout his part of the state. Most blues performers of the era worked fish fries, picnic dances, rent parties, and juke joints, yet Dunbar concentrated instead on white audiences in the immediate Lake Mary area. He taught himself to play and, at age eight, constructed his first instrument—a guitar-like device he bowed like a fiddle—from wire fragments and a cigar box; two years later his father supplied a conventional guitar. Fiddle player Old Lee Baker gave him his initial professional engagement, and from Baker plus other veteran musicians Dunbar absorbed the bulk of his repertoire, filling the rest from phonograph records or his own invention. Illiteracy kept him from consulting chord diagrams, yet his music stayed elemental and unrefined without ever sounding amateurish, carrying audible traces of Mississippi Fred McDowell, Skip James, and Charley Patton. After more than fifty years as a musician he committed to tape only enough material for a single album, From Lake Mary, recorded for Ahura Mazda in 1972 before a small audience; Fat Possum reissued the recording in 2000. Scott Dunbar died in 1994.