As a kid with no money for an instrument, Francis Hillman Blackwell built his first guitar out of a cigar box, scrap wood, and discarded wire. Born in 1903 in Syracuse, South Carolina, one of sixteen children, and raised in Indianapolis from the age of three, he earned the nickname Scrapper from his grandmother for his fiery temperament, taught himself guitar and piano, and was gigging as far away as Chicago while still a teenager. His 1928 partnership with pianist Leroy Carr produced How Long, How Long Blues, the biggest blues hit of that year, and helped define the polished, structured urban blues sound of the piano-guitar duo.

This episode traces how Blackwell’s solo recording Kokomo Blues was reworked by Kokomo Arnold and then Robert Johnson into Sweet Home Chicago, how he walked out on Vocalion in 1931 to force equal songwriting credit, and how a bitter final session with Carr in February 1935 ended a partnership that Carr’s death two months later made impossible to repair. It follows his two decades of odd jobs and obscurity in Indianapolis, his late-1950s rediscovery and new albums, and his unsolved murder in an Indianapolis alley in October 1962, just as a new generation was ready to hear him.

• How the piano-guitar duo of Carr and Blackwell worked mechanically, why urban blues differed from the loose, solitary Delta style, and how the pair recorded more than 100 sides between 1928 and 1935
• Kokomo Blues and the driving bass line that became the engine of Sweet Home Chicago
• Blackwell’s 1931 trip to record at Gennett in Richmond, Indiana, and how it pushed Vocalion executive Mayo Williams to grant him equal credit and billing
• The February 1935 Bluebird session walkout, Leroy Carr’s death from nephritis at age 30, and the tribute recording My Old Pal Blues
• His rediscovery, the albums Blues Before Sunrise and Mr. Scrapper’s Blues, Bob Dylan’s praise, and his 2024 induction into the Blues Hall of Fame