Search - Leroy Carr :: Complete Recorded Works 1 (1928-29)

The most artful, fun, & free flowing music of the blues era

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 04/27/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"While the less than intelligent yearn for Robert Johnson as a blues god, Robert Johnson yearned to sound like Leroy Carr and his guitar accompanyist Scrapper Blackwell who is heard on each of these sides. Carr's graceful, smooth, romantic, and witty singing and lyrics, the sweet but solid rhythm of his piano, and the way his piano talked with Blackwell's guitar thrilled the blues people and the blues audience not just for the short years they recorded before Carr drank himself to death, but ever since. Blues players were recording and rerecording and trying to sound like Carr down to the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s. Carr's been largely forgotten among non blues people, and is nearly unknown among the white post folk music followers of "guitar legends" who would like to believe bluesmen were all illiterate guitar playing sharecroppers from the depths of Mississippi. Carr sounds bright, urbane, schooled and intelligent, if a bit too well marinated as the years went on.However, when the blues was a live music, listened to by black people all over the country, a music that crowded dance floors, and may times good in bars and clubs where WE live, this man's approach to blues was what everyone wanted. Enough of this history! Leroy Carr and Scrapper play great music, sometimes even majestic music like How Long Blues here. How Long is one of the great classics of the blues done by everyone from Bob Wills to Count Basie from Dinah Washington to Josh White. There are versions number 2 and 3 because even in the short time covered by this volume, the blues people, not white guys into guitar licks, but the ancestral folk of the blues, could not get enough of that record. They needed more and more.
This is the real blues, the most artful, fun, and free flowing music of the real blues era."