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Scrapper was distraught, he went into the studio a few months later and cut six tracks with pianist
Dorothy Rice, including “My Old Pal Blues (Dedicated to the memory of Leroy Carr)” but things just

weren’t the same, so Scrapper quit the business, went back to Naptown and worked as a labourer in
the city asphalt plant, just occasionally playing at a party or juke if the mood took him.

He was drinking heavily “…fulla God damn alcohol man, done got drunk, fell in the middle of the
road” and he’d been out of work some time when blues researchers caught up with him and put him
back on stage, his voice a little shot, but his playing still sharp.

Scrapper Blackwell had even recorded a new album when his story screeched to a sudden fatal halt
one drunken moonshine Saturday in an alleyway behind 527 West Seventeenth where Scrapper took
two bullets to the chest.

He really had been some guitar player, but that corn whiskey was his downfall. It had gotten hold of
him and his old pal Carr a long time ago and it never did let go. Still, there were some fine tracks left
behind that signposted the way for a whole bunch of bluesmen that followed on, so for that alone

maybe the blues owes Scrapper Blackwell one final toast.