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MASTERS OF THE BLUES

LEROY CARR AND SCRAPPER BLACKWELL

By

Roger Bromley of the Nitecrawlers (Birmingham)

Leroy Carr

Alongside those fabulous female blues shouters the man who did more than most to drag down-home
blues out of the camps and cotton fields and into the
city was that somewhat forgotten ivory tickler and
bluesman Leroy Carr.

A really influential pianist of those early years, Leroy

Carr’s mellow, laid back, Hoosier style piano pointed
the way forward like a neon billboard sign on a coal
black night.

His sweet blues piano and laid back voice, backed up
by the jazzy licks of his guitar partner Scrapper
Blackwell became an early pattern for Nat King Cole,

Ray Charles, Amos Milburn and Jimmy Witherspoon,
while even Count Basie recorded some of his songs.

Leroy Carr was no typical bluesman. No
sharecropper out of the cotton fields, he’d been born
in Nashville and raised in the automobile city of
Indianapolis, he spoke pretty neat and always

dressed in a fancy suit and tie.

He’d learned to play piano as a boy but could only
play that old devil music when his mother wasn’t
around. So Leroy got itchy feet, quit school, and ran
away from home with a travelling circus troupe, then while still underage joined the army down in
Arizona.

But Leroy soon enough headed back to Indy, got himself married and found work in a meat packing

plant. Thing was Naptown was a stopping off point for Chicago and Detroit and Leroy took to touring
those jumping Indiana Avenue nightspots where Slick Jimmy Collins and the Harding brothers ruled
the roost. He got himself involved in trading a little corn whiskey and playing 88’s around the alleyway
dives and rent parties, it sure did beat meat packing, or at least it did till that bootlegging got him a
year down on the State Farm.

When Leroy got out he hooked up with guitar man Scrapper Blackwell and the two of them as well as

brewing hooch started playing music together. Blackwell’s jazzy guitar runs really complemented