Carolina, USA – Home Of Acoustic Blues Guitar
My favorite old blues men are mostly unsung heroes Strangely enough, these three artists were South Carolina based. Floyd Council, Pink Anderson (Pink Floyd borrowed their names) and Scrapper Blackwell.
Floyd Council wasn’t what you might call successful as an artist in his own right, but frequently played in studio recording sessions playing behind ‘celebrities’ like Blind Boy Fuller, another South Carolina blues man. His guitar was syncopated and could be described as a marriage between ragtime and a Texas blues style.
Pink Anderson (I don’t believe they ever played together or even met!) played ragtime guitar and performed in wandering medicine shows.
Scrapper Blackwell was an incredibly varied performer who wrote many classic pieces, like Blues Before Sunrise and Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.
His creation ‘Kokomo Blues’ was made famous by Robert Johnson by the title ‘Sweet Home Chicago’. Scrapper provided classics which were to provide inspiration for later masters of blues music.
Floyd Council (Born September 2, 1911 and died May 9th, 1976) became a well-known performer of the Piedmont ragtime blues sound, which was well liked all through that corner of America in the nineteen thirties.
He began playing the guitar professionally during the 1920s, performing with two brothers, Leo and Thomas Strowd calling themselves “The Chapel Hillbillies”. He also recorded at sessions with Blind Fuller during the thirties. His muscles became partially immobilized after he suffered a stroke in the nineteen sixties, but it was reported that his mind was not affected. However, he never recovered his playing talents.
Council passed away in 1976 after a heart attack, a little while after moving to Sanford, North Carolina.
Pink Anderson
Pink was born and raised in Greenville South Carolina. After training himself himself in some popular instruments, he started to play for Dr. Frank Kerr, who ran a little ‘business’ which operated under the name of the Indian Remedy Company in 1914 to entertain the crowds while Kerr sold his special ‘elixir’.
In the town of Spartanburg, Anderson Simeon “Blind Simmie” Dooley in 1916, who taught him how to play guitar – Pink already had some experience of performing in string bands. When Pink was not traveling in Dr Kerr’s medicine show, he and Dooley would perform at small parties?. ?
Heart problems was the major factor causing Anderson to stop traveling in 1957.
Suffering a stroke in 1954, which forced him to almost stop performing, and never again would he play with his old skill. He passed away in October 1974, of a heart attack at the age of 74. He is interred in Spartanburg, where he was born. Pink Anderson had a son, known as Little Pink Anderson, is a blues guitarist living in Vermillion, South Dakota.
Scrapper Blackwell
Born in Syracuse, Carolina, Scrapper Blackwell had fifteen brothers and sisters. Partly Cherokee Indian, he grew up and spent most of his life in Indianapolis. He was ‘christened’ with the familiar name, “Scrapper”, by his grandmother, due to his fiery ways. His Dad played the fiddle, but Scrapper taught himself how to play the guitar.
Even when he was a teenager, Blackwell worked as a part-time musician, traveling as far away as Chicago. He was a sullen man, generally keeping to himself and difficult to get along with. However, Blackwell put together a duo with pianist Leroy Carr, whom he ran across in Indiana in the 1920s, which was a productive working relationship.
Blackwell also made recordings on his own, which included “Kokomo Blues” which was transformed into “Old Kokomo Blues” (Kokomo Arnold) before being redone as “Sweet Home Chicago” by Robert Johnson. Scrapper and Carr toured throughout the mid-west states and through the South between 1928 to 1935 – stars of the blues scene, recording over one hundred tracks.
After Carr’s death, Scrapper went back to performing in the late 1950s and was recorded again in June 1958 by Colin C. Pomroy.
He was ready to restart his blues career when he was killed during a mugging in an alley in Indianapolis. He was 59. Even though the crime was never solved, police took into custody his neighbor for the murder. Scrapper Blackwell was buried in New Crown Cemetery, Indianapolis.
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