Music historians consider Leroy Carr perhaps the most influential male blues artist of the early 20th century, yet his recording career lasted only seven years and he was dead at 30. Born in Nashville around 1904 or 1905 to a Vanderbilt laborer and a domestic worker, Carr moved to Indianapolis during the Great Migration, taught himself piano, dropped out of high school, traveled with a circus, served in the Army, worked in a meatpacking plant and did a year in the Indiana State Penitentiary for bootlegging. This episode explores how that rugged life produced the smoothest sound in the blues.

We break down the legendary partnership with guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, the 1928 Vocalion hit How Long, How Long Blues, and the run of classics like Papa’s on the House Top, When the Sun Goes Down, Blues Before Sunrise, Midnight Hour Blues and Hurry Down Sunshine. We also confront the alcoholism that shadowed his success, the final Chicago session on February 25, 1935, when Blackwell stormed out and Carr recorded Six Cold Feet in the Ground alone, and his death from nephritis two months later.

• Why Carr’s steady piano and laid-back croon forged a third path between vaudeville belters like Bessie Smith and country pickers like Blind Lemon Jefferson
• How the microphone and the speakeasy dance floor shaped an intimate, conversational vocal style
• The tragic paradox of a nightlife economy that fueled both his fame and his addiction
• His 1982 Blues Hall of Fame induction and his influence on Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, T-Bone Walker and Count Basie
• Covers by Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, Lonnie Donegan and Eric Clapton