Biography
Josh White asserted that he had served as lead boy for more than sixty different blind blues singers, although he added that genuine blindness was not universal among them. Cataracts left Blind Joe Taggart with eyesight well above the legal threshold, for instance. Any conversation about Six Cylinder Smith, the blues musician active across the Texas-Louisiana-Arkansas region, invariably references Taggart. Several Yazoo and Wolf anthologies include Smith’s forthright “Pennsylvania Woman Blues,” which sets forth his views on the women of Pennsylvania. Because Taggart’s name surfaces wherever Smith appears, numerous blues researchers have concluded the two were identical; counter-evidence nevertheless exists. White recounted lengthy tales of Taggart’s cruelty yet never hinted at additional identities. An alias typically enabled a bluesman to record extra sides beyond an existing contract rather than to indulge any split personality. Taggart may therefore have cut secular material as Smith while continuing to be recognized, under his established name, as a gospel-blues singer in the manner of Blind Willie Johnson; a track such as “Pennsylvania Woman Blues” would have clashed with that preacherly persona. White confirmed that Taggart also recorded under the name Blind Joe Amos, yet the identity of Six Cylinder Smith stays unresolved. Paramount sides cut in the late 1920s and early 1930s only intensify the uncertainty. Blues harmonica technique normally requires the instrument to be cupped in both hands, leaving none free for additional instruments. The rack-harmonica style—associated chiefly with Bob Dylan—rarely appears on blues discs. Jesse Fuller constitutes the chief exception, mounting harmonica and kazoo on a shoulder rack while operating further instruments with his feet. Some listeners regard Six Cylinder Smith as another such exception and therefore hear the Paramount recordings as solo performances in which Smith plays every instrument himself; if accurate, this would place him among the earliest blues harmonica players, albeit far from the best-known of his era. Far more biographical detail survives for contemporaries such as Dr. Humphrey Bates and Noah Lewis than for Smith, whose reputation among fans rests largely on admiration for his colorful name. Other commentators hear the same sides as duets between Smith and Taggart, while still others attribute them entirely to Taggart and therefore credit him with rack-harmonica skill despite the absence of any such evidence on discs issued under his “Blind” pseudonym. Substantial documentation indicates that the recordings credited to Blind Percy or Blind Percy & His Blind Band were actually made by Smith, although scholars have not equated Taggart with Blind Percy. The booking-agent character portrayed by Woody Allen in Broadway Danny Rose might have found room on his roster for Blind Percy & His Blind Band alongside the one-armed xylophone player; the inevitable jokes—“Can they sight-read?”—write themselves. Listeners convinced they can solve the puzzle are invited to examine the same compilations with eyes shut.