Hot Wax: Scrapper Blackwell's Mr. Scrapper's Blues (1961/2025)

A brilliant self-taught guitarist, Francis Hillman “Scrapper” Blackwell was a popular star in the isolated blues world of the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Born in South Carolina, Blackwell moved to Indianapolis as a child, learned to play piano, and made his first guitar from a cigar box and wire. He was already venturing into Chicago to perform as a teenager alongside adult musicians. Known for having a quick temper (his grandmother allegedly gave him the “Scrapper” nickname), Blackwell developed a friendship with blues pianist Leroy Carr, who coaxed him into playing guitar on his 1928 recording of “How Long, How Long Blues,” which became a big hit for Vocalion Records.

Subsequent records by the duo like 1934’s “Mean Mistreater Mama” and “Blues Before Sunrise” were equally popular; Blackwell and Carr toured the country and recorded better than 100 sides together over seven years before their acrimonious break-up in 1935 (over money, naturally…). Blackwell also recorded several solo sides during his association with Vocalion, including the future blues standard “Kokomo Blues” (which was later re-worked by the legendary Robert Johnson as “Sweet Home Chicago”), “Down South Blues,” and “Hard Time Blues,” among a handful of other songs. After Carr’s 1935 death, Blackwell virtually disappeared from music for the next 20 years, until his “rediscovery” during the late 1950s folk-blues revival.

Scrapper Blackwell’s Mr. Scrapper’s Blues

After recording the 1960 album Blues Before Sunrise for the British 77 Records label, Blackwell signed with producer Kenneth Goldstein and the Bluesville Records label stateside. Recording in July 1961 in his hometown of Indianapolis with Goldstein and Arthur Rosenbaum producing, Blackwell laid down the ten songs that would become his enduring masterpiece, Mr. Scrapper’s Blues. Released by Bluesville in 1962, just months before the guitarist’s tragic murder in October of that year, Blackwell sings and plays guitar and piano on the tracks. Reissued on 180-gram vinyl by the recently resurrected Bluesville imprint, Mr. Scrapper’s Blues is an obscure, if important addition to the blues canon.

Although Blackwell isn’t as well-known as contemporaries like Charley Patton and Son House, one hearing of “Goin’ Where the Monon Crosses the Yellow Dog” will convince you that Scrapper, while maybe not in the same league as those legends, is nevertheless playing in the same ball park. With spry finger-pickin’ and his distinctive (though not entirely ‘distinct’) vocals, Blackwell delivers a spirited country-blues performance of the traditionally-based railroad song. His cover of the 1929 Bessie Smith hit “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” differs from Smith’s with a lower-key vocal performance and delicate fretwork in place of the horns, and sacrificing none of the original’s pathos.

Blues Before Sunrise

The instrumental “A Blues” displays Blackwell’s six-string dexterity on a jaunty lil’ fretboard romp, and he takes to the piano for “Little Girl Blues,” a mid-tempo blues tale similar to those he recorded with Carr decades ago. Blackwell’s tinkling keys show an instrumental proficiency that he seldom utilized. “Blues Before Sunrise” was a major 1934 hit for Blackwell and Carr; reimagined here without the pianist’s larger-than-life presence and instrumental prowess, the song remains a blues classic. Here it provides an extended showcase for Blackwell’s imaginative and fluid guitar lines, which offer various textures and patterns to the performance.

The whimsical “Little Boy Blue” is a nursery rhyme retrofitted to the blues, Blackwell’s sly sense of humor shining through his vocals atop his energetic and gymnastic guitarplay. The instrumental “E Blues” carries this lighthearted vibe forward with serpentine guitar licks and an undeniable fatback groove while another song from his longtime friendship with Carr, “Shady Lane,” offers a bit of nostalgia to the album, Blackwell’s earnest vocals supported by a laidback but deliberate guitar strum. Originally recorded in 1927, “Penal Farm Blues” was Blackwell’s first song cut to wax; with reflection better than three decades later, it has lost none of its mournful resignation with high lonesome vocals accompanying emotional fretwork.        

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Scrapper Blackwell is an unheralded talent well worth rediscovering 60+ years past his previous rediscovery. A skilled guitarist and pianist, Blackwell was a songster capable of interpreting a diverse range of material. Mr. Scrapper’s Blues was designed to introduce the guitarist to a new generation of music fans; instead, it became his swansong with his tragic death a few months after its release.

With a scarcity of solo recordings to catch the ears of young blues fans, Blackwell has largely remained in the shadows of obscurity. While we don’t know what he may have achieved in the years after this lone album, recorded better than 25 years after his previous sessions, Mr. Scrapper’s Blues is a fitting testament to Blackwell’s talents and unique blues sound. Grade: B+ (Bluesville Records/Craft Recordings, released May 16th, 2025)

Buy the vinyl from Amazon: Scrapper Blackwell’s Mr. Scrapper’s Blues

Hot Wax: Skip James’ Today! (1966/2024)

Born in 1902 in Bentonia, Mississippi – on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta region – Nehemiah “Skip” James was a contemporary of bluesmen like Charley Patton, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt, and a major influence on a young Robert Johnson, although he’s seldom spoken of with the same reverence afforded those legends. But James’ spine-chilling falsetto vocals and his unusual open D-minor guitar tuning created a sound unlike any other bluesman treading the boards of the Southern U.S. in the early 1920s, creating what is now arguably known as the “Bentonia School” style of blues.

James is said to have become enamored of the blues as a child after seeing local musician Henry Stuckey perform (sadly, no recordings of Stuckey have ever surfaced). His mother bought him a guitar for $2.50 and he picked up some technique from Stuckey and a little more from the brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims. John Hurt was also a major influence on the young musician as he worked to develop his own unique style. James was a natural musician, and he also took piano lessons – his only formal musical training – quitting after two sessions at $1.50 each, feeling that the fee was too much for the family budget.

Skip James’ Paramount Recordings

As a teenager, James worked in sawmills and on local levee and road construction crews, and he began travelling in the 1920s, picking up jobs as a laborer where he could, supplementing his income via less-reputable vocations as gambling and bootlegging. Returning to Bentonia in 1929, he became a street singer, and opened a school for aspiring blues musicians, offering guitar and piano lessons. In 1931, James auditioned for record store owner and Paramount Records talent scout H.C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi. James’ performance earned him a two-year contract with the label.

James travelled to Grafton, Wisconsin to record for Paramount, cutting at least 18 sides for the label (James is said to have remembered recording 26 songs in two days), including such now-classic blues standards as “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” “Devil Got My Woman,” “22-20 Blues” (the inspiration for Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues”), and “I’m So Glad.” Paramount released nine 78RPM records by James, which sold poorly due to the effects of the Great Depression. Today, James is considered one of the most significant pre-war blues artists and those 78s are scarcer than hen’s teeth, with only 15 records known to have survived.

Skip James Rediscovered

That was it for Skip James for better than three decades, the artist sinking into obscurity, seldom performing, and with no recordings known of from this period. James became the choir director for his father’s church, subsequently becoming an ordained Baptist minister. On a quest to rediscover the blues idols of their record collections, guitarists John Fahey, Bill Barth (The Insect Trust), and Henry Vestine (Canned Heat) tracked James down in 1964 to a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. Finding that his skills were intact, they convinced the reticent bluesman to return to his craft. Along with the parallel “rediscovery” of James’ contemporary Son House, the two men helped fuel the folk-blues revival of the 1960s.

James performed at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1964, his first moment onstage in over 30 years. Coaxed into the studio, James subsequently recorded albums for Fahey’s Takoma Records label, musicologist Richard K. Spottswood’s Melodeon Records, and for the legendary folk label, Vanguard Records. It was James’ two Vanguard albums, 1966’s Today! and 1968’s Devil Got My Woman, that provided many modern blues fans with their first hearing of the idiosyncratic bluesman. Along with his 1931 recordings for Paramount – reissued in the 1970s and ‘80s by labels like Spokane Records, Yazoo, and Biograph – these Vanguard releases represent James’ blues legacy.    

Skip James’ Today!

Recently-reissued with re-mastered sound and an all-around sonic upgrade, James’ Today! is the place to start for curious newcomers to what is one of the most original artists of the Delta blues era. Unlike its many cover versions, James’ contemporary reading of “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” (one of his earlier, Paramount sides) is slowed-down, deliberate, and absolutely menacing, the singer’s chilling vocals riding uneasily above filigree, finger-picked acoustic guitar. The newer “Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues,” inspired no doubt by James’ health issues at the time, is just as bracing as his earlier material, with high-lonesome vocals and gentle, yet intricate guitar picking. “Drunken Spree” is one of the jauntier revisitations of James’ early songs, the 1966 recording capturing his complex finger-picking and lower-register vocals.

By contrast, “Cherry Ball Blues” puts James’ falsetto vocals front and center, his haltering performance accompanied by delicate guitar licks. James’ cover of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell’s 1928 single “How Long” (a/k/a “How Long Blues”) showcases James’ not-inconsiderable piano skills with a jazzy mid-tempo arrangement that is both winsome and engaging, including a brief barrelhouse-styled solo. James’ piano-pounding on “All Night Long” hints at a New Orleans influence while “Cypress Grove” provides undeniable proof of the guitarist’s immense six-string skills. James’ “I’m So Glad” is an inspired spiritual whose origins likely pre-date the blues. The artist’s best-known song – due to an upbeat cover on Eric Clapton and Cream’s 1966 debut album, Fresh Cream – James’ short, sharp reading of the song is provided one of his most uplifting and spry vocal deliveries, accompanied by a simply mesmerizing and rapid-paced guitar strum.  

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Skip James’ Today! offers the best of both worlds – James’ early Paramount sides re-recorded by the artist and preserved with modern 1960s recording technology – as well as a scattering of new songs performed in James’ unyielding, undeniable personal style. James’ performances are sung with intensity and passion, attracting mid-‘60s folk-blues audiences like catnip. James followed up Today! with Devil Got My Woman, a similar collection of both old school and new material that would be James’ last recording before his death in 1969 from cancer.

Still, James’ legacy has only grown larger since his passing, with numerous repackaged albums released with often alarming frequency. Those prolific last five years of James’ life resulted in dozens of recordings and outtakes that have been sliced ‘n’ diced over the years to create numerous new titles (buyer beware!), while his various live performances from the 1960s have been similarly pillaged for profit. Today! stands as one of the crown jewels of James’ relatively sparse catalog of originals, serving as a stepping stone to the artist’s earlier recordings. Today! – along with Devil Got My Woman and Yazoo’s The Complete 1931 Session – are the basis for James’ reputation, and are essential additions to the collection of any avid blues fan.

Buy the album from Amazon: Skip James’ Today! 

Hot Wax: John Lee Hooker's Burning Hell (1964/2024)

In 1959, blues legend John Lee Hooker was at a crossroads in his career. The music industry was evolving from a singles-oriented medium towards full-length albums and “The Hook” was in danger of being left behind. Hooker had enjoyed a string of seven R&B charting singles circa 1948-1958, including five Top 10 hits like “Boogie Chillen’,” “Crawlin’ King Snake,” “Huckle Up Baby,” and “I’m In the Mood” (which also rose to #30 on the mainstream singles chart). These songs wrote the lexicon of the artist’s rhythm & blues saturated boogie-blues sound that he would pursue for the next 40+ years.

Hooker’s first bona fide album release was 1959’s I’m John Lee Hooker. Released by Vee Jay Records, it was a collection of seven previously-released singles and five newly-recorded tracks (a parallel album release, Chess Records’ House of the Blues, was comprised entirely of singles). Around this time, Riverside Records owner Bill Grauer traveled to Detroit with the idea of recording a new John Lee Hooker album consisting entirely of Leadbelly songs. Riverside was essentially a jazz label, so recording a blues artist of Hooker’s stature was an out-of-the-box notion, especially once Grauer discovered that John Lee had no idea of who Huddie Leadbetter was, and was unfamiliar with his music. Grauer quickly regrouped and produced sessions with Hooker and his acoustic guitar at the familiar United Sound Systems in Detroit where the artist had recorded several previous hits.

The core of Grauer’s brainstorm had merit, as acoustic-based “folk blues” artists were beginning to rise in popularity at the time. Long lost Mississippi Delta and Hill Country bluesmen like Fred McDowell, Skip James, and John Hurt were being “rediscovered” and shoved into studios to re-record their “old songs” before hitting the coffee house circuit and folk festival trail. Even Chicago blues stalwarts like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson were re-branded as authentic, acoustic-toting “folk blues” singers. Grauer left Detroit with enough songs on tape for two albums, the first of which was released in 1959 as The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker (quickly re-titled as The Folk Blues of John Lee Hooker). The second album arising from those Detroit sessions was Burning Hell, which wasn’t released until 1964 and then only in the U.K. by Fontana; Burning Hell wasn’t reissued on CD until 1994, and it’s been long out-of-print in any format.

John Lee Hooker’s Burning Hell

The first release from the newly-resurrected Bluesville Records label (part of the Craft Recordings family), Hooker’s Burning Hell is an often-overlooked entry in his massive and decades-spanning catalog of music. With a tracklist largely comprised of roughly half Hooker originals and the other half choice covers, Burning Hell showcases Hooker’s deep, fluid vocals laid across several styles of acoustic blues. The title track is a spry, Piedmont-styled morality tale with scrappy guitarplay and strong vocals but “Graveyard Blues” is a dour, Delta-styled dirge with intricate guitar patterns and Hooker’s sonorous, almost droning vocals. Hooker isn’t the deftest of string-pullers, especially when compared to contemporaries like Lonnie Johnson, Eddie Kirkland, or even his cousin Earl Hooker, but his performance here is simply mesmerizing.

Hooker’s cover of the Big Joe Williams’ classic “Baby Please Don’t Go” is provided an emotionally-charged performance that relies on the singer’s pleading vocals more than on his boogie-stomp fretwork. Ditto for his reading of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Smokestack Lightning” which substitutes soaring, almost falsetto vocals (well, as high as Hooker could go…) for The Wolf’s primal howl; combined with Hooker’s circular guitar strum, he creates a sort of melodic and enchanting tone poem. “You Live Your Life and I’ll Live Mine” is based on a standard blues scale with a few instrumental flourishes here and there as Hooker sings of his romantic woes while “Jackson, Tennessee” is afforded an up-tempo, loping guitar riff atop of which Hooker pounds out his Delta-dirty vox. Hooker’s jaunty “How Can You Do It?” is almost pop-styled with radio-friendly, intelligible vocals, an upbeat and melodic guitar line, and an undeniably sunny performance.

John Lee Hooker photo by Lawrence Shustak, courtesy of Riverside Records Archives

On the other hand, the odd bodkins Lightnin’ Hopkins cover “I Don’t Want No Woman If Her Hair Ain’t No Longer Than Mine” is an awkward talking blues with meandering guitar licks and disjointed vocals. Hooker’s “Blues For My Baby” pursues a similar theme, but with better results, his powerful vocal performance matched by bog-standard boogie-blues git licks with the occasional (and delightful) instrumental detour. Bluesmen and rock stars alike have covered Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key To the Highway” for decades but, for my money, Hooker’s reading is one of the best, with yearning vocals and a jazzy acoustic soundtrack. His reading of the Willie Dixon-penned “Natchez Fire” provides the song – originally recorded as “Natchez Burnin’” in 1956 by Howlin’ Wolf – with an eerie chill as his haunting vocals and arcane guitar playing mourn the true-life tragedy that took 200 lives at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi in 1940.   

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Looking at its history and provenance, Burning Hell is an odd choice to kick off the new era of Bluesville Records. Perhaps it was chosen because Hooker is a well-known artist among casual blues fans, as Burning Hell was never released previously by Bluesville. When Riverside impresario Bill Grauer passed away in 1963, the label’s catalog passed through the hands of ABC Records before being bought by Fantasy Records in 1972. Fantasy, in turn, was bought by Concord Records in 2004, forming the Concord Music Group. Bluesville Records was a subsidiary of the esteemed Prestige Records jazz label that also became part of CMG via its purchase by Fantasy in 1971…and that’s how you get a 1964 John Lee Hooker album on Riverside Records seeing reissue by Bluesville Records some 60 years later. *

There were a number of other choices for an inaugural Bluesville reissue, including long-forgotten but worthy flapjacks from Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lonnie Johnson, Scrapper Blackwell, Sonny Terry, Snooks Eaglin, and Pink Anderson (who inspired Pink Floyd’s band name). The minor cavil of its dubious status in the Bluesville label universe aside, this version of Burning Hell is nevertheless a godsend for hardcore blues fans and collectors. The packaging is hearty, with a thick cardboard sleeve, glossy laminated cover, and a padded, archival quality inner sleeve to cradle the vinyl. Little has been changed with the graphics, which are perfectly garish for the era, and the back cover includes Alan Bates’ insightful original liner notes. Cut from the original master tapes and pressed on black 180-gram vinyl, this Bluesville edition is the first time that this long-lost album has been released domestically on record.

In the end, however, it’s the music that counts, and Burning Hell showcases a different side of John Lee, his flirtation with “folk blues” opening new doors for his career as he entered the decade of the 1960s as a grizzled veteran. No less than six “folk”-oriented Hooker albums would be released just prior to, and shortly after Burning Hell for labels like Vee-Jay, Crown Records, Chess, and Kent Records, many of them constructed from vintage 1950s-era recordings. Hooker hit the summer folk festival circuit with aplomb, which helped carry him through the difficult ABC Records years to The Healer and his successful final chapter. With its raw vocals and wiry fretwork, Burning Hell isn’t the crown jewel of the massive John Lee Hooker catalog, but it represents a significant turning point in his career and is well worth rediscovery by both fans of the artist and blues fanatics alike. (Bluesville Records, reissued June 7th, 2024)

* For more on the Bluesville Records story, check out my interview with producer Scott Billington on the Rock and Roll Globe website!  

Many thanx to Charles Shaar Murray, and his wonderful John Lee Hooker biography Boogie Man, for info on the artist’s Riverside recordings...

Buy the LP from Amazon: John Lee Hooker’s Burning Hell

Also on That Devil Music:
John Lee Hooker’s The Healer review
John Lee Hooker’s The Modern, Chess & Veejay Singles Collection 1949-62 review