Mick Hartley

A guy I used to know – a former neighbour – was a Blues obsessive, and a very decent guitar player. On hot summer days when both our back doors were open we’d often hear him banging away on some old Robert Johnson number (“Come On In My Kitchen” was a favourite, appropriately enough). I once asked him if he knew any Blind Blake. It turned out to be something of a sore point. “Drives me crazy,” he said. “I can’t figure out how he does it. I’ve been been trying to learn Southern Rag for years, but I can’t get it.”

Well now there’s another Blind Blake song for him to try out:

Blues lovers rejoice. A missing record by one of the genre’s most impressive and mysterious performers has been discovered, 76 years after it was first issued.

Night and Day Blues, backed by Sun to Sun by Florida guitarist Blind Blake, was recorded in 1932 by the then ailing Paramount company and issued in such minuscule quantities that copies of the fragile 78rpm record have eluded collectors until now.

Bought new by a woman who lived in Durham, Carolina, it stayed for years in an old steamer trunk full of other rare blues 78s. When the woman died in the 1960s the trunk passed to her son who kept it in his home at a Raleigh trailer park until he moved to sheltered housing last year. A telephone tip-off led to the record being acquired by reissue company Old Hat records, which plans to re-release it at some stage in the future. Meanwhile it has made samples of both sides available on its website, http://www.oldhatrecords.com.

Here’s the website where you can hear brief excerpts from the songs. And here’s the story of the trunk.

Blind Blake didn’t go in for the heartfelt personal songs that – in the Romantic version of the Blues story – characterise the Delta Blues. Robert Johnson was the main man for that: trading his soul for guitar skills at the crossroads, songs like Hellhound on my Trail, Me and The Devil Blues…. That’s why Johnson’s such a big deal in the way the Blues Story is usually told: tortured genius, deeply personal haunted lyrics of being trapped, being chased; then dead in his twenties. But this was far from typical: most blues singers of the period, like Blake, were trying to earn a living on the streets or in clubs. They played what they thought people wanted to hear from a diverse repertoire of popular tunes, including whatever might be the latest hits. In her book “In Search of the Blues“, Marybeth Hamilton describes how Alan Lomax was horrified when Leadbelly, the “primitive” ex-convict he paraded round the white folk clubs, kept wanting to play popular songs of the day. No no, he had to stick to the pure “authentic” old blues and field hollers that his audience expected to hear.

Many of the tracks we know of from Blind Blake are fairly lightweight stuff, tinged with vaudeville, like the old standard “He’s In the Jailhouse Now”, or “Diddie Wah Diddie”. Even the blues numbers, like “Police Dog Blues”, tend not to take themselves too seriously:

Well, his name is ‘Rambler’ and when he gets a chance;
His name is ‘Rambler’ and when he gets a chance;
He leaves his mark on everybody’s pants.

No, what you go to Blind Blake for is his phenomenal guitar technique. Everything he plays is touched with a ragtime feel, and it’s all played with an amazing fluidity. He really does, as the saying goes, make it sound easy. But as my ex-neighbour could tell you, it’s anything but. Search for Blind Blake on YouTube and you’ll get a load of home videos of pickers, all trying out their versions of Blake songs. Some of them are very good indeed, and you shudder at the thought of the hours spent in practice to get to that level of expertise, but none of them come close to the effortless Blake style.

Oddly enough, the new songs are more straightforwardly bluesy than usual for Blake. They could be by scores of bluesmen of the time. Until the guitar starts in, that is. Then it could only be him.

And the story may not end here:

Oh, and there is one final missing Blind Blake 78 to be found, Miss Emma Liza coupled with Dissatisfied Blues, which was recorded at the same session as Night and Day Blues. Start looking now.