Pink Floyd And Other Carolina Blues Men

My preferred classic blues guitar players are mostly obscure musicians having their origins in Carolina - Floyd Council, Pink Anderson ( Pink Floyd took their names for their rock group in the sixties ) and Scrapper Blackwell.

Floyd Council wasn't very well recorded as a performer under his own name, but could be found playing in studio recording sessions playing behind well known blues players like Blind Boy Fuller, another South Carolina celebrity . Pink Anderson played ragtime guitar and played in wandering medicine shows.

Scrapper Blackwell was an highly varied guitar player who wrote many unforgettable pieces, such as Blues Before Sunrise and Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.

Floyd Council (Born September 2, 1911 and died May 9th , 1976) was a familiar performer of Piedmont ragtime blues music, which was well liked all through the south eastern region of America in the 1930s . He began his musical career in the nineteen twenties, playing with two brothers, Leo and Thomas Strowd and they called themselves "The Chapel Hillbillies". He additionally played in some sessions with Blind Fuller in the 30s . His muscles were partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke sometime in the sixties, but it seemed that his thoughts were still clear. However , he was never able to recover his playing ability. Floyd passed away in nineteen seventy six after a heart attack, just after going to reside in Sanford, NC.

Pink Anderson

Pink's birth place was in Greenville South Carolina. Having learned numerous instruments, he began to perform for Dr. Frank Kerr, who had a business called the Indian Remedy Company in nineteen fourteen to sing for the public while the doctor sold his special ' elixir '.

In the town of Spartanburg, Anderson encountered Simeon "Blind Simmie" Dooley in 1916, who showed him how to play blues guitar - Pink had prior experience of performing in string bands. When he was not working in Dr Kerr's medicine show , Dooley and Pink would entertain at small parties . Health problems eventually forced Anderson to retire from traveling in 1957 . He suffered a stroke in nineteen fifty four, which forced him to well-nigh stop playing guitar, and he would never again play with his old flair. He passed on October nineteen seventy four, when he had a heart attack when he was seventy four. He's interred in Spartanburg.

Scrapper Blackwell

Born in Syracuse, Carolina, Scrapper Blackwell has sixteen brothers and sisters. Part Cherokee, he was brought up and lived most of his life in Indianapolis. He was christened , "Scrapper", by his gran , because of his thorny nature. His father played the violin, but Scrapper taught himself how to play the guitar. Even when he was quite young , Scrapper worked part time, traveling up as far as as Chicago. He was a morose man, generally keeping to himself and difficult to relate to. Nonetheless, Blackwell founded a duo with piano player Leroy Carr, whom he met in Indiana in the 1920s, which was a productive working relationship. He also made records of his own, like "Kokomo Blues" which became "Old Kokomo Blues" (Kokomo Arnold) before it was transformed again into "Sweet Home Chicago" by Robert Johnson.

Blackwell and Carr traveled everywhere throughout the middle states and through the South from nineteen twenty eight to nineteen thirty five - they were the early stars of the blues scene, cutting more than one hundred tracks. When Leroy died, Blackwell started to perform again in the late 1950s and was recorded again in June 1958 by Colin C. Pomroy. He was going to restart his blues career when he was shot and killed during a robbery in an Indianapolis alley. He was fifty nine years old .


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Jim Bruce is a working blues man making a living playing blues guitar. His acoustic lessons are fast becoming the standard to reach for students wanting to lean how to play blues.