Featured Blues Artists: Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell

Leroy Carr (1905-1935)
Scrapper Blackwell (1903-1962)

Heroes of the Blues Trading Tee Card #8

Art by R. Crumb, Text by Stephen Calt

Leroy Carr, one of the first blues singers to use understated vocal delivery, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1905. Francis (Scrapper) Blackwell was born in 1903 and learned guitar in childhood, eventually developing a delicate vibrato blended with string-snapping. The Indianapolis-based team of Carr and Blackwell popularized the piano-guitar blues duet. They made more than one hundred sides between 1928 and Carr's death in 1935, including the famous "How Long Blues."

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