Scrapper Blackwell was best known for his work with pianist Leroy Carr during the early and mid-'30s, but he also recorded many solo sides between 1928 and 1935. A distinctive stylist whose work was closer to jazz than blues, Blackwell was an exceptional player with a technique, built around single-note picking, that anticipated the electric blues of the 1940s and 1950s. He abandoned music for more than 20 years after Carr's death in 1935, but re-emerged at the end of the 1950s and began his career anew, before his life was taken in an apparent robbery attempt.
Francis Hillman "Scrapper" Blackwell was of part-Cherokee Indian descent, one of 16 children born to Payton and Elizabeth Blackwell in Syracuse, NC.
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