Слепой Блейк: Жизнь и музыка блюзового гитариста

American blues singer and guitarist (1896–1934)
the Bahamian musician also known as Blind Blake

Blake recorded about 80 tracks for Paramount Records from 1926 to 1932. He was one of the most accomplished guitarists of his genre and played a diverse range of material. He is best known for his distinctive guitar playing, which was comparable in sound and style to ragtime piano. He may have lived in Jacksonville, going to Chicago for his recording sessions. According to van der Tuuk et al., he returned to Florida for the winter. In the 1930s he was reported to be playing in front of a Jacksonville hotel. and his records sold well. His first solo record was "Early Morning Blues", with "West Coast Blues" on the B side. Both are considered excellent examples of his ragtime based guitar style and were prototypes for the burgeoning Piedmont blues. Blake made his last recordings in 1932; his career ended with Paramount's bankruptcy. Champagne Charlie Is My Name' does not sound like Blake's playing or singing." His complex and intricate fingerpicking inspired Reverend Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, Arlen Roth, John Fahey, Ralph McTell, David Bromberg, Leon Redbone and many others. 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." The track "You Gonna Quit Me" from Bob Dylan's 1992 album Good as I Been to You is a cover of Blind Blake's "You Gonna Quit Me Blues."

Blake married Beatrice McGee around 1931. In the following year he made his final recording at the Paramount headquarters, in Grafton, Wisconsin, just before the label went out of business.

For decades nothing was known of him after this point, and it was rumored that he met with a violent death. Reverend Gary Davis heard he had been hit by a streetcar in 1934 and Big Bill Broonzy thought that he had frozen to death after falling over drunk during a Chicago blizzard and was too overweight to get back up. The research of van der Tuuk et al. suggests that Blake stayed in Wisconsin, living in Milwaukee's Brewer's Hill neighborhood, where Paramount boarded many of its artists. He seems not to have found work as a musician. In April 1933, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and never fully recovered. On December 1, 1934, after three weeks of decline, Beatrice Blake summoned an ambulance. He had a pulmonary hemorrhage and died on the way to the hospital. The cause of death was listed as pulmonary tuberculosis. He was buried in Glen Oaks Cemetery, in Glendale, Wisconsin in a previously unmarked grave.

Blake figures in the plot of Lee Child's first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor (1997), and there are references to him in Child's 2011 prequel, The Affair. Reference to Blake is made again in The Sentinel (2020), written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew Child, when Jack Reacher is on the lookout for venues in Nashville, 'where Blind Blake could have played'. Blake's original recording of "Diddy Wah Diddy" is referenced on the cover of Robert Crumb's Zap Comix #1.

"Blind Blake" and his song "Police Dog Blues" appear in Reacher, Season 1, the TV series based on Lee Child's novel, Killing Floor. The main character Jack Reacher (a blues lover) arrives at the fictional town of Margrave, Georgia looking for some trace of Blake.