Arthur Blake (1896 – December 1, 1934), known as Blind Blake, was an American blues and ragtime singer and guitarist. He is known for recordings he made for Paramount Records between 1926 and 1932.
Though so much of Arthur Blake’s story remains a mystery, recent research suggests that he was born in Newport News, Virginia, to Winter and Alice Blake, sometime between the years of 1890 and 1896. It is not known if Blake was born blind, but his disability would have made his life especially hard in early 20th century America. Busking, or playing music on street corners for tips, was often taken up by many a blind musician as an alternative to begging. Whether or not this is how Arthur got his start, his obvious talents proved adept at earning a living playing live music. Additional research suggests that Arthur lived a traveling musician’s life, with stories of him playing around Atlanta, Detroit, and even Bristol, Tennessee. But Blake’s main hub was Jacksonville, Florida, where he kept an apartment and learned to improvise his repertoire to wherever he was playing. Eventually, a talent scout recommended Blake to Wisconsin’s Paramount Records, where he would become one of the company’s biggest recording stars.
Blake took up a residence in an apartment at the corner of 31st Street and College Grove Avenue in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighbourhood, where he would have had easy access to both Paramount’s downtown recording studio and Bronzeville’s array of concert halls and dance clubs. On most Mondays the flat was the site of a swinging musical and drinking party, attended by some of the Southside’s finest bluesmen. In later years, one of the regular revellers, Little Brother Montgomery, reminisced about these gatherings: “We called them rehearsals. Usually we had them on Mondays when everyone was free. We’d all get together over at Blake’s place. Be a few piano players there—me, Charlie Spand, sometimes, Roosevelt Sykes.
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| Big Bill Broonzy |
Guitar players like Blake and maybe Tampa Red or Big Bill Broonzy. We’d drink moonshine and trade songs. Everyone was just like family.” Montgomery further remembered his host’s proficiency as a guitar player: “He kept good time and knew all the changes in all the popular songs back then. He would play it all and he was good in a band, too, but he mostly played blues and ragtime tunes. Blake loved the blues most. He always wanted us to play blues.” The style of guitar that Blake played wasn’t like the intense and emotionally-charged country blues of the Delta, but one of a ragtime dance style with a swinging beat. He was inventive, with a flair for improvisation. He could be subtle and understated or play with an ornate flourish. His extraordinarily fast and exciting three-finger picking technique used walking basses, boogie-woogie, and cross rhythms, as well as syncopated thumb rolls. Blind Blake was widely respected and admired by other guitar players; many tried to copy his style but with little success. Big Bill Broonzy, hearing Blake in person in the early 1920s, said of his guitar playing "He made it sound like every instrument in the band- saxophone, trombone, clarinets, bass fiddles, pianos- everything. I never had seed then and I haven't to this day yet seed no one that could take his natural fingers and pick as much guitar as Blind Blake."
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Paramount utilized Blake as a go-to session musician for several Paramount performers, but he remained an incredibly prolific solo artist. In addition to his guitar playing, Blake was also a charismatic singer and skilled lyricist, and several of his songs were no doubt popular with Bronzeville’s late night music scene. Blake seemed especially at home with the sexually suggestive hokum music, as proven by songs like “Diddie Wah Diddie” and “Too Tight Blues.” While there is an undeniable sense of joy in much of Blake’s music, he seems just as comfortable performing darker subject matter. In “Rope Stretching Blues,” Blake’s narrator kills an intruder and awaits an inevitable death sentence. In “Third Degree Blues,” Blake is detained and forced to confess to an unknown crime in rather Kafkaesque fashion. And there’s an unsettling grimness within such songs as “Early Morning Blues,” in which Blake sneers, “The day you dare to quit me, baby, that’s the day you die.” Yet Blake’s charm remains front and center throughout, giving these songs an eerie and ironic quality.
Blake’s pièce de résistance may very well be his euphoric boogie woogie instrumental “Hastings Street,” recorded in 1929 with Detroit piano legend Charlie Spand. Blake’s guitar effortlessly compliments Spand’s rolling piano, with Blake gleefully name-dropping streets from Detroit’s red light district. Altogether, Blake would make about 80 recordings for Paramount, but the recording industry was in serious trouble following the stock market crash of 1929. Records were increasingly seen as a luxury, especially when radio provided hours of music for free. To save on costs, Paramount moved its main recording studio from Chicago to their record pressing plant in Grafton, Wisconsin, where artists would record just a short distance from Paramount’s Port Washington headquarters.
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| Grafton Recording Studio |
Blake moved to the north side of Milwaukee, presumably to be closer to the new Grafton recording studio. He married Beatrice McGee in 1931, and the Blakes lived at 621 W. Brown St. (today the site of Beckum Park). But Paramount’s sales continued to plummet, and in this era we hear Blake experimenting with new sounds and styles, seemingly throwing whatever he could to the wall to see what might stick. Sometimes this meant recording formulaic re-treads of his earlier output or derivatives of other pop songs, but there were still glimpses of his brilliance. On his record “Miss Emma Liza,” (considered lost until a copy was found at a flea market in 2012), Blake channels Dixieland jazz and sings in a hilarious falsetto. On the record’s flip side, “Dissatisfied Blues,” he thunders out a “rapping” beat on his guitar. And in a recorded duet with Papa Charlie Jackson, we hear more of Blake’s trademark wit: “My name is Arthur Blake,” he smirks, “and I’m the Arthur of many things.”
But no recording at Paramount—no matter how transcendent—could stop what the Great Depression had wrought. Paramount closed its doors for good in 1932. The top brass in Port Washington went back to focusing on making furniture. And Arthur Blake’s career as a recording musician was over. When Paramount closed, it seemed that was the last anyone ever heard of Blind Blake. As the years passed and his recordings were rediscovered, rumours abounded about what ever became of this unique visionary. Reverend Gary Davis had said he heard Blake was killed after being run over by a streetcar. Others swore they saw him playing in the streets of Jacksonville years later. It wasn’t until 2011 when researchers discovered what we should have known all along: Arthur Blake had spent his final years in Milwaukee. And it is in Milwaukee where he spends eternity.
According to his wife after Paramount closed down Blake became unemployed and in failing health, In 1933 he was treated for three weeks at the County General Hospital due to pneumonia and never fully recovered after his release. In 1934, after many weeks of decline, Beatrice Blake summoned an ambulance. He had a pulmonary haemorrhage and died on the way to the Milwaukee County Emergency Hospital. The cause of death was listed as pulmonary tuberculosis. His death certificate stated he was 38 years old. He was buried in Glen Oaks Cemetery, in Glendale, Wisconsin in an unmarked grave. In 2012, Blake’s grave finally received a memorial headstone. The marker shows Blake’s smiling promotional portrait—the same image that graced so many Paramount ads nearly a century ago. Fans and admirers from around the world now make their pilgrimage to Milwaukee’s Glen Oaks (formerly Evergreen) Cemetery to pay their respects.
(Edited from Milwaukee Record & Kansas City Blues Society)
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