Around 1960, Riverside Records issued one of the first country blues albums, a tribute to Blind Blake. In the notes to the album, the writer identified Blake's real name as Arthur Phelps, but gave no source for that last name. Obviously, the Riverside producers had not heard a copy of Paramount 12911, by Papa Charlie Jackson and Blind Blake, "Papa Charlie and Blind Blake Talk About It - Part 1," on which Papa Charlie asks Blake, "Blake, What is yo're right name?"

Without hesitating, Blake retorted, "My right name is Arthur Blake." That should have ended any controversy about Blake's last name, but it didn't. No record was ever issued under the name of Blind Arthur Phelps, even the Broadways were issued under the name Blind George Martin. Later the name Phelps was traced to a comment made by Blind Willie McTell in a 1951 Melody Maker article written by Ed Paterson. That lone comment by McTell continued to be used into the 1970s by various writers as a source for the Phelps name for Blake before falling into disuse.

Blake played in Chicago from around 1927 until 1932. His disappearance from Chicago has always been a mystery. At that time he was quite popular, recording almost 80 singles and also teaming with Paramount artists like Ma Rainey, Gus Cannon and Charlie Spand on records and playing at local clubs. But a careful check of Godrich, Dixon and Rye's fourth edition reveals that Blake never recorded during the months of December through February. One Grafton session they listed as held around January 1932 has been revised to November 1931 by the research of Alex van der Tuuk based upon recently discovered recordings by white Wisconsin dance bands with the dates they recorded.

Since Blake had grown up in the Florida/Georgia area and he gave clues to his origins on two records "Tampa Bound" and "Georgia Bound," we believe Blake simply went home to Florida for the wintertime to escape the bitter cold of Chicago and came back in the springtime to resume recording and playing show dates.

Daily passenger trains ran from Chicago to Jacksonville, where they met the daily New York to Miami specials. Miami and Tampa were both serious winter getaways for the well-to-do in the 1920s, and money was plentiful on the streets of Tampa and also St. Petersburg for a blind street musician not counting house parties on weekends for a man like Blake, who had a national recording reputation.

Blake had one final session in the spring of 1932 around April that featured two released titles: "Depression's Gone From Me Blues" backed with "Champagne Charlie Is My Name" on Pm 13137. After that, Blake could have simply gone back home to Florida as the Depression began to worsen. By the summer of 1932, Paramount was out of business.

In the 1927 "The Paramount Book of Blues" Blake's birthplace and home is given as Jacksonville, Florida. In the early 1970s researcher Stephen Calt wrote in album notes on behalf of himself, Nick Perls and Mike Stewart for Yazoo album 1013 "East Coast Blues 1926-1935" that Blake had once been a resident of Patterson, Georgia, and still had relatives in that small town in Pierce County near Brunswick. Jacksonville is some 35 miles south of Brunswick, the nearest big town to Patterson. Calt also wrote that Blake, according to Blind Gary Davis, was the victim of a hit-and-run in a northern city but it could not be documented. That information about the Patterson relatives was never followed up by any researcher.

Earlier in the late 1960s, Reverend Davis told his driver and guitar student, folk musician Roy Book Binder, that he heard that Blake was actually hit and killed by a streetcar around 135th Street in New York City sometimes in the 1930s. Several Chicago based musicians like Big Bill Broonzy, Blind John Davis, Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey told stories they had heard about where Blake may have died but no documents surfaced that could substantiate their information.

In 1996, Pete Whelan financed a trip for these two researchers to Georgia and Jacksonville with the understanding that if we solved the mystery of what happened to Blake where he died and how that he was to have an exclusive story for his 78 Quarterly publication. This is the story of that journey.

Friday St. Louis to Meridian

Joel is welcomed to the South with a speeding ticket in Arkansas because he's running late, so he skips Memphis entirely and instead eats dinner in Kosciusko, Mississippi, at "That Place for Fish," enjoying fried fish, hot sauce, pickles, onions, greens, slaw, and soggy corn. From Kosciusko to Philadelphia, the roads are narrow and pitch black, and his mind dwells on the three murdered civil rights workers in 1964. How do Philadelphians live that down?

He arrives in Meridian and drives straight to Gayle Dean Wardlow's house. Gayle's not there, so Joel kills time until he arrives, then we spin records 'til way past midnight.

Saturday Meridian

We organize records, listen to more rarities, and pull a few duplicates to auction. Wardlow has the Confiners 45, excellent low-down stuff and 78 gems like Garfield Akers, Kid Bailey, Skip James, Charley Patton, Son House and many more.

Sunday Meridian to Georgia

We leave Meridian on a Sunday in May and head down Highway 80 through western Alabama, toward Selma and Montgomery, where the famed civil rights march took place in 1965. Gayle tells Joel that western Alabama was named the Black Belt for the color of its soil and that it had been great record canvassing country in the 1960s. He says that he found some great Paramounts and Gennetts there, including two late 12900s Blind Blakes. One of them was 12994, "Hard Pushing Papa."

As we pass through Uniontown, we see a funky little thrift store with hand-painted images. No one is home. As we are leaving, the owner hails us from his pickup truck. Yes, he has 78s: Patti Page and Nelson Riddle, as it turns out, hanging on nails on the wall in little piles of ten or so.

Thirty years earlier, Gayle had found a Tommy Johnson Victor, "Maggie Campbell Blues" (Victor 21409), in the same town by door-knocking, and on New Year's Day in 1967, he found an ultra-rare copy of Sam Collins' "Devil in the Lion's Den" (Gn 6181) in a beaten-down old shack. Uniontown had been a thriving cotton town in the 1920s and was 90 percent black an excellent place for race records which would have been sold by a furniture store uptown.

"Victrola records" is what Gayle asks about time and again. Joel can see the persistence with which he amassed his collection throughout the 1960s. We listen to some Blind Blake on the car tape player and to a tape Pete Whelan made for Joel. Gayle comments that some of those records are ones that Pete got from him.

We drive down through Dothan in southeast Alabama through a pouring rain and cross the Georgia line to Valdosta, where we grab a Motel 6 with palm trees. As we recount the day, Joel asks if Gayle had ever found any records in Selma, which had an enormous black population. Gayle said it had been just "too hot" to door-knock there after the 1964 civil rights confrontation on the bridge, when blacks were beaten by state troopers while trying to march to Montgomery. Gayle said he was afraid to be taken for a white civil rights worker and have to explain to white cops what he was doing in black sections of town. Then too, blacks would have been unlikely to trust a white man showing up at their door. There was too much tension and fear in the community.

Monday Valdosta

Gayle learned in his reporter days that a courthouse can have tons of information, so it was our first stop in Valdosta. The Greco-Roman cupola of the courthouse dominates, nay, IS the Valdosta skyline, as it must have been 80 years ago when Blake and others were playing these streets. The whites in the tax office regard us with skeptical bemusement. They summon Mrs. Crow, the black mailroom clerk who is a Northerner. She tells us she came south because her husband works for the railroad. She connects us by phone to her 85-year-old godmother, a Mrs. Baker, who knows nothing helpful.

She then directs us to a musician in his 80s who plays in front of a Dollar General store in a shopping center near the edge of town. He's not there today, but we learn his name is George Jackson but he plays the saxophone---not a guitar. We track down his house, several blocks away, but he's not home. It's getting hot and we are getting frustrated already. We wise crack about finding Paramounts. We fantasize about hypothetical reports we could release that we've found Blake, still alive at age 98.

Then we find a barber shop with three elderly black guys talking on a bench. outside the shop. Surprisingly, one of the three remembers as a young man seeing a blind bluesman on occasion on Saturdays, and he identifies our photo of Blake as the man he had seen. He knows nothing about the musician's origins.

The last stop in Valdosta is a senior citizens center in a 1960s school building. We miss the seniors, but make up a few "wanted posters" on the school Xerox machine with Blake's picture from the album we've been carrying.

We head down Highway 84 for Waycross, a town that Barbecue Bob had sung about for Columbia Records in the late 1920s. It is closer to Patterson and might yield some answers. It is May, and the new growth on the smaller pine trees is like thousands of bright green fingers reaching skyward.

Amid the tall pines in Homerville on the way to Waycross, we find Jimbo's Log Kitchen "rated South Georgia's Best in BBQ," the sign proclaims, and it is superb: flavorful smoky pork (the "pit" is in plain view behind the cash register) with a terrific red sauce with a hint of heat and vinegar. A splash of Tabasco from the bottle provided on the table completes the treat. On one wall hangs an advertising likeness for a Tabasco bottle with a garlic head, a scallion, and a green pepper. The rest of the decor consists of iron skillets and old metal soda signs, including a great one for "Delaware Punch."

As we leave and drive, we can tell we are nearing the coast as wiregrass appears in the landscape along with egrets. We get a room at the Pinecrest Motel in Waycross and eat dinner at the Golden Corral (a Wardlow favorite). Joel gets a lesson in Victor records numbering, and that night we discuss the world's great record collections.

Tuesday Waycross

After breakfast, we cruise a black neighborhood. We find a church, but the minister is not home. A young man on the sidewalk points us to the Riverside Nursing Home, and we meet the young social worker, Windy Hill. She says to come back during visiting hours, four hours later. She points us to the senior center in a Quonset hut under the water tower. Gayle gives his pitch to the dozen seniors, three of whom are black, but evokes no response. He uses his favorite line that we are "modern day blues finders"--a reference to the Blues Brothers movie but the oldsters are oblivious. However, the center director points us to the Pierce County senior center in Blackshear, a small town perhaps 9 miles away toward Patterson where, we've been told by Calt's liner notes, Blake's relatives live.

At the senior center in Blackshear, the director knows the Blakes in Patterson. One of them used to work at the center, she says. She calls her and arranges for us to visit. We drive to Patterson and turn, as directed at the building that says "Pork Chop" on the front. Down the street, we find the nicely appointed yellow brick house where we find three elderly Blake sisters who spend their days watching soap operas. Mrs. James (born Mary Ellen Blake) is the spokesperson for the three and tells us the Blake's' roots were in the Silco and Woodbine communities both of which were near the Florida line.

Mrs. James tells us that her father, Sam Blake, was born in the late 1800s she thinks it was 1884--and died in 1934. He married her mother Emma in 1906 in Patterson and of their ten children, the three sisters are the only survivors. All had been born after 1906, and she, the youngest, was born in 1924.

She looks at our photo of Blind Blake and she jolts us. "He's a Blake, but Daddy never told us about him." She doesn't know whether Sam might have fathered Arthur before his marriage to her mother.

"He never mentioned him," she says. "But Daddy had a younger brother who ran away from home when he was eight years old. I can't remember his name. We had a fire in the 1940s, and our Bible and all the pictures of Daddy and Mama and his brother got burned up."

Then she says, "Wait a minute. I've got a picture of my brother William and his wife when he got married." She gets the photo of William, who died in 1982, and the resemblance to Blind Blake is unmistakable. Either they were half-brothers, or the runaway brother of Sam's is his father. If so, Sam and his brother must have looked very much alike. Mrs. James allows us to take the photo to a photo shop in Blackshear to have a copy negative made.

So, leaving the Blake sisters' house, we have a picture that clearly resembles Blake and we know that the ancestral home for the Blakes is in Silco. The notes to the Yazoo album were right, in a way. Some Blakes did live in Patterson, but they didn't know Blind Blake.

We eat lunch back at the "Pork Chop" on the corner: a fried chicken buffet with country veggies, sweet tea, and peach cobbler for only three dollars! Good, too. After lunch, we try to find Silco, which is not on the Georgia map we have, although Woodbine is. Today Google Maps shows it.

The post office in Woodbine (a town some 10 miles north of the Georgia/Florida line) doesn't know of the existence of a community or town called Silco. Joel stops at a nice thrift store in a little pink house around the corner that turns out to be run by a black woman. She asks what he wants and he tells her, "78 rpm records, any black people in the area named Blake, and directions to Silco."

"No records," she tells him, and then she proceeds to get a Blake on the phone, but the person is too young and remembers nothing of a Blind Arthur. Then she give him directions to Silco: "Go back out route 40 the way you came in, past the flea market, and take the Greenville Road, a dirt road going off to the right."

We find Greenville Road, but it goes off to the left. We go all the way out it, at one point encountering a potentially iconic black snake slithering across it, and back, but find no Silco. Finally, we reach a group of dwellings, and Gayle goes to one and is told that Silco is down the road. We proceed for miles seeing nothing but the white sand road and surrounding pine forest with the occasional palm tree. Meanwhile, Joel pops one of the Blake tapes into the cassette player. We imagine a young Arthur leaving home at age eight, not in terror, but walking down this very road merrily whistling what would become "Diddie Wa Diddie."

Finally, we see a pickup truck approaching. The driver pulls over to let us by, and we stop beside him and inquire about Silco. "This IS Silco," he says. And so it turns out to be only a tiny white church amid the interminable pine trees. The driver is black, his name is Clifford Dawson, and his buddy, Roosevelt Scott, appears from inside the church. Yes, this is the ancestral home of the Blakes, they tell us. But none are left alive. Fred Blake, the last of them, died a few years back.

No, they are not personally aware of Blind Arthur. If we continue ahead, we will reach a blacktop road, they say. They say to turn on the next dirt road, and we will find a Blake. We continue down the sand road and come upon a small group of tiny weather beaten shacks, "residential Silco," where an older black man sits on his porch reading the Bible, his cat lolling in the sun. The sun filters through the pines, casting gleams on his face, and Joel approaches slowly trying to photograph the old man. But Gayle warns him that photos can easily startle potential informants if they do not know the stranger. The elderly man knows nothing of any Blakes. As we leave we wonder what he eats, and how and where he shops from this desolate area. His pickup truck is up on blocks.

Slightly further down the road, Gayle spies a weathered old sign in the middle of nowhere and calls it to Joel's attention. It reads, "Mack's Place Honey Dripper Whiskey Beer Wine" and is decorated with two-inch round yellow and red bumper reflectors. It may well date from the 1950s. Joel photographs it, and then liberates it from its post. It was a true work of art from years past when rural beer joints were common in the South.

Next, we find Coseborough Road, and a clean trailer home, where Fred Blake's daughter Freddie welcomes us. She knows nothing of Blind Arthur, but appreciates our purpose and asks to be informed of any results and to be sent a copy of the article we write. She refers us to Ruby Blake in Folkston, but we never have a chance to follow up that lead. Twenty or 30 years earlier we might have found important information in Silco, but those informants have died by the 1990s.

We head back to Woodbine and have a nice evening meal of meatloaf at the Courthouse Cafe, and then drive to Brunswick and find another Motel 8 outside of town. In southeastern Georgia and northern Florida, the pines and palms are covered with whiskers of Spanish moss.

Brunswick Wednesday

Brunswick is some 35 miles north of Jacksonville and has a fairly large black community. We go on the street, showing the photo of Blake, and find some older persons who remember a blind man playing there, but it could have been any blind singer. Then Gayle notices the name of a major street in the small town: Stonewall Street. Yes, one of Blake's first recordings was none other than "Stonewall Street Blues."

He probably sang the song when he played in Brunswick, or maybe he was singing about another Stonewall Street we later find in Jacksonville. Singing about a locally known site is always popular with a juke or street crowd.

At one point we split up, Gayle continuing the Blake search while Joel looks in all of the antique stores in town for records. He doesn't find much, except for a Sun Elvis 78 on pink vinyl that's to be locally auctioned. Gayle says it's probably a bootleg. We drive to Jekyll Island for a seafood dinner and find a room in Savannah.

Savannah Thursday

We cruise Savannah in the morning. It's a beautiful city. We stop for breakfast at a McDonalds (the unofficial senior center) in a black neighborhood, but no one there knows anything. We cover several nursing homes with no success, and get a major runaround at one. On our way back downtown, we encounter a terrific free gospel concert in a park and stop to listen. We've heard of a great soul food restaurant called Nita's. When we get there it's closed for repainting, but there are reviews in the window from "Bon Appetit" and "Vanity Fair," so apparently we've missed something great. We return to Brunswick to see a record collection, which turns out to be a major disappointment, eat a better seafood meal, then drive on to Jacksonville for the night. On the way we pass through Woodbine again, where an old guy at a gas station tells us his daughter is married to a Blake, and his partner tells us, what we had already spent a day pursuing: "The Blakes are in Silco."

Jacksonville Friday

In 1927 "The Paramount Book of Blues" biography under Blake's photo says he was born blind and came from Jacksonville. Obviously, the local Paramount dealer, Higgins Music Store on Ashley Street and Broad, had contacted Paramount about Blake's talent and recommended they record him and later another local female singer, Leola B. Wilson.

But Blake was a total unknown to Paramount, and the company would have probably required some kind of financial incentive to record him such as asking Higgins to take as many as 500 copies of his initial release, a technique that H. C. Speir said companies often did when recording unknown talent recommended by a dealer. At the least Higgins would have had to pay Blake's expenses to the session, though he would probably later be reimbursed by Paramount.

Blake went to Chicago in August and recorded "West Coast Blues/ Early Morning Blues" released on Pm 12387 and he was quickly called back to the studio by J. Mayo Williams, Paramount's recording director, in October because of strong sales. At that session he backed up Wilson on guitar behind four vocals (one of which was "Ashley Street Blues"!), according to Godrich, Dixon, and Rye. Then he re-recorded his first two songs---re-released on Pm 12387-- and four other titles.

Williams, in a 1971 interview with Calt for a series on Paramount for "78 Quarterly," also confirmed that Blake was sent to Paramount by a Jacksonville dealer. Remarkably, Paramount had found two best-sellers in less than a year in blind singers Blake and Lemon Jefferson.

Upon arriving in Jacksonville we head downtown to the black section. We seek out the area near the train station. Blind musicians always played around the depot, hoping for tips from passengers arriving and departing on the many trains running through Jacksonville daily on their way to Miami and New York City. But we find no cafes or barber shops where older black people might congregate. We need to find old-timers who were around in the 1930s, or the names of any old gamblers who might still be alive. Gayle had learned that gamblers and bootleggers always were present where bluesmen played.

In the mid-1990s, fellow researcher "Mack" McCormick of Houston told Gayle, in a long talk about blues, that he went to Jacksonville as early as 1972 looking for information on Blake based on the Paramount biography from 1927. McCormick said that he found persons who told him that Blake lived in an old black hotel and played daily on the streets in front of that establishment during the early 1930s.. But he also learned that Blake stayed there only a few years and left. No one knew where he went, nor did McCormick find an informant who could tell him any rumors of Blake's death in another locality.

For the rest of the day, we ask about Blake, using the Paramount promotion photo, but we find no one who recognizes the photo. Finally, we head to two senior centers. If anyone remembers Blake, it would be an elderly woman or man who, when they were young, had seen him on the streets playing music.

In the north side senior center, we show the photo of Blake to a crowd of women watching TV in a recreational room, asking if they had even seen him. Most of them say they are church women and never listened to blues.

But one lady, 87-year-old Doris Green, chimes in, "I remember that man. I used to see him on the street downtown on Saturdays. "Don't know what happened, but they said he was Blind Blake. He was down there close to Higgins Music store. That's where he was playing." She mentions a peg leg dancer as well. Another woman then confirms seeing Blake in the 1930s, during hard times, confirming what McCormick had discovered.

Those are the only informants who remember Blake. No one knows what happened to him or where he had eventually settled when he left town. We have no more leads to follow, and we are apparently 20 years too late to find an old bootlegger or gambler who would have remembered Blake.

We take one last ride downtown toward a black section, and Gayle spots the type of house that he favored in his old days of record canvassing. He tells Joel, "See that older house there on the corner with the flower pots on the porch and the flowers growing in the yard? That's the kind of house where I always used to find old records."

Joel asks "Why?"

"I learned that an older woman would often have lived there for a long time and taken good care of her house," he explains. "She'd been living there long enough to have bought records in the 1920s and kept them. When people moved, they threw their records away most of the time. When they stay a long time, they put out flowers in the yard and put pots on the porch."

Joel says, "Why don't we give it a try? Maybe she's still got some records."

Gayle says, "Okay, let's see what's happened after all these years."

He had found that the words "I buy" always registered with the person who answered the door, and these musicians were names that they remember: Bessie, Lemon, Carr, and Rainey were the James Brown, Ray Charles, and B. B. King of their days.

She says, "I've got some old records. Wait a minute and let me get them." Could it be possible to find some jewels this late 70 years later? It would be a miracle. But our hopes are soon dashed. The pile of 78s is by white artists that the lady had gotten from a white home where she had worked.

Gayle tells Joel, "Well, it could have been a great find, 20 or 30 years ago. It's just too late to find anything by door-knocking. If they show up anywhere now, it's at an antique store. If you're lucky."

It's time to leave Jacksonville and head back to Mississippi. We've been successful in finding the Blake sisters and the photo of their brother William, who was either a half-brother of Blind Blake or a nephew of his father's brother who ran away from home at age eight. Unfortunately, as Mrs. James said, all photos of the family, including her father and his parents, were lost in a fire that consumed their house in the 1940s.

Where Blake was born and died will continue to be one of blues' most challenging mysteries. We've used every possible technique we could think of to solve the mystery and have failed. Perhaps some mysteries are better left unsolved, as they add to the legend of one of the greatest musicians/songwriters/singers and stylists of the 20th Century.

Wardlow's Search for a Death Certificate

As early as the mid-1990s, I filed for a death certificate with both Florida and Georgia for Arthur Blake, using five-year intervals of the 1930s as the dates of death. Neither state found any document for an Arthur Blake that matched up with a birth date of around 1900 and was born in or near Jacksonville, as the 1927 "The Paramount Book of Blues" had stated.

In 2007, after many years of wondering about Blind Gary Davis' remarks to a young Roy Book Binder that Blake was hit by a streetcar and killed around 135th Street in the 1930s, I filed for a death certificate using the name Arthur Blake for Manhattan. New York City had five different boroughs where it kept individual records on births and deaths. I gave the years 1934 to 1938 as years to search, since cities or states will only search for a 5-year period.

With high hopes, I waited for the mystery to be solved. Disappointment. The answer came back negative. No certificate existed on a Blake for those years. I did not try the years from 1938 to 1941 but later searched those years on the Ancestry.com website. I also searched that site for a Blake death certificate for Florida and Georgia, and then the entire country and one did not exist. An Arthur Blake died in 1932 near Daytona Beach, but he was born in 1870 and he was white. There was no certificate for an Arthur Blake in New York State matching the birth years of around 1900 or a death before World War II.

A similar check for an Arthur Phelps born in Georgia or Florida around 1900 with a death before or after World War II produced no significant possibilities, not even in New York City in the 1930s.

Earlier in the 1990s, Ben Windham of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a newspaper editor and record collector, found a source inside Social Security (before they made their death records public) and turned up an Arthur Blake born in Georgia around 1900 who died in that same state in 1946. It looked very promising until his informant double-checked and found that the deceased was white. Just another dead end.

What happened to Blake is only conjecture. As a blind man, he was an easy mark for a robbery or murder in some obscure location, and he was totally dependent upon someone to lead him and be his bodyguard in places he played where violence often occurred.

Perhaps he was found dead and simply listed as a John Doe by authorities who found no identification on the body. As far as is known he had no driver's license or Social Security card. Calt had checked with the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York City back in the early 1970s, and they had no Blake to whom they had ever issued an ID for travel on trains or buses.

If this was the case he would have been buried in a pauper's graveyard, presuming his death occurred in a city big enough to have one. There is also the possibility that he died of alcoholism and was quietly buried without the involvement of any officials. Authorities and funeral homes always called the coroner or a county registrar to register deaths they handled.

Interestingly, one of the two icons of country blues styles Lemon Jefferson, who definitely died in Chicago was a death certificate mystery until recently when a document on him was found in Chicago under the name of George Jefferson after 40 years of searching by numerous researchers. The certificate was published in a new English magazine Frog Blues and Jazz Annual in 2010. For almost 50 years Cook County and Illinois State officials missed finding a document because it was not under the name of Lemon Jefferson, including this researcher who sent for one in 1966.

With Paramount out of business by the summer of 1932, and his formative years having been spent playing in Florida in places like Tampa ("Tampa Bound") and Jacksonville, Blake had no reason to return to Chicago as the Depression deepened.

The years 1932 and 1933 were desperate ones for record companies just trying to remain in business. Those companies that emerged from the Depression's worst years in 1934 and started recording again were primarily located in New York City a reason for Blake to go there and try to get another record contract. That would have placed him in Harlem, where the Reverend Davis said he heard Blake had been killed.

Some of the country blues artists who had been successful sellers before the depression such as Charley Patton, Texas Alexander, The Mississippi Sheiks, Bo Carter, Papa Charlie Jackson, Memphis Minnie and Blind Willie McTell, both of whom also had a 1933 session, were recorded again in 1934.

Where Blake died and was buried will remain one of blues music's most mysterious challenges: one that has stymied the best of researchers since the 1960s. Regardless, we still have the music of the finest ragtime guitarists/bluesmen/songwriters of the 20th century.

POSTSCRIPT

After reading a draft of this article Alex van der Tuuk of the Netherlands ran a check of New York City newspapers for any information on a blind musician being struck or killed by a street car in the 1930s. Surprisingly, he found the following one sentence in a Benton Harbor, Michigan daily newspaper, the News-Palladium dated May 13, 1938 by syndicated columnist C. B. Driscoll in a column under "New York Day By Day."

"A blind musician, depending upon his cane and knowledge of the city, walked off a subway platform downtown one day last winter, and was instantly killed by an incoming train."

Checking Driscoll's name on the internet I discovered that he was a columnist syndicated daily from New York by the McNaught Syndicate to more than 400 newspapers. Why Driscoll used information that was five to six months old in May is not known unless some news event about subway safety or the death of another blind person occurred around the May 13 date that encouraged him to resurrect the musician's subway death.

The information should have been in one of New York's daily papers when it originally occurred since a blind man killed by a subway train was newsworthy. So I suggested to Joel who was a subscriber to the "New York Times" that he search for the story using certain headlines such as Blind Man Killed By Subway Train and others. Hopefully, he would find the original story and it would name the victim. Would it be Blind Blake? That was our hope.

There was no death certificate on Blake in New York City when I filed for one in 2007 which included the winter of 1937 or 1938. If it was Blake, and he had no ID on him, then his body was taken to the city morgue and he was simply listed as a John Doe. If the victim had identification on his person and it was not Blake, then a death certificate was filed under that person's name.

However, it was the closest information to Blind Gary Davis' story that Blake was killed by a streetcar that he told Book Binder. But this man was killed in the downtown area, according to the one sentence report by Driscoll and not around 135th street where Reverend Davis heard the accident occurred.

Then we hit another dead end. Joel's search found the original story in the "Times" but it was dated December 30, 1936 and part of the headline indeed said: Blind Musician, Groping in Subway, Miscounts Steps, Is Killed by Train 34-Year-Old Accordion Player Was on Way Home to Wife and 3 Children . BLIND MAN KILLED BY SUBWAY TRAIN.

The short story identified the victim as Oscar England and said he was killed instantly at the B. M. T. Union Square Station when his body was wedged between a northbound express and the concrete platform.

Could Reverend Davis who did not move to Harlem until 1941, according to Book Binder, have heard the story about Blake being killed by a streetcar in Harlem that had become co-mingled with that of the blind musician killed by the subway train. We don't have the answer to that question nor do we have an answer to the other statement made by Reverend Davis that Blake was the victim of a hit and run that Calt wrote about in his Yazoo notes.

Meanwhile, in yet another recent development, a young Tampa blues researcher/writer Jason Rewald. who writes for tdblues.com found an elderly 90 plus-year-old-man man John Princeton called "Old Pops" at a black Baptist church in Jacksonville. He told Rewald that as a youth between 10 and 15-years old, he was traveling with his father, a migrant mill worker, towards Atlanta.

In a city or town south of Atlanta, the elderly man said they came upon an accident scene where a blind musician had just been killed by a streetcar. Princeton did not hear the name of the victim nor can he remember the exact town in which the accident occurred. The most logical choice is Macon, some 100 miles below Atlanta that had streetcars in the 1920s and 30s. So did Augusta, but it is to the east of Atlanta. He also said he had heard of Blind Blake while living in Jacksonville.

No death certificate exists on Arthur Blake in the state of Georgia and Reverend Davis never lived in that state, but he did say Blake died in a streetcar accident. He spent most of his music years in Durham, North Carolina, before moving to New York State. Unfortunately, white newspapers in the South did not carry stories about black deaths during segregated years and Rewald does not know the exact location of the accident.

However, using the database NewsBank, I checked four daily Georgia newspapers in Macon, Augusta, Milledgeville, and Savannah, first using the name Arthur Blake and keywords blind musician, then blind man killed in streetcar accident. None had a news story under those headlines or used Blake's name in a story. The two Atlanta dailies, the Constitution and Journal, were not available on the database.

The fact that a witness came upon the scene of a streetcar accident that killed a blind musician is intriguing, but unfortunately there has been no way yet for Rewald to document the death without knowing the exact location where it occurred. Local authorities were at the scene, the elderly man told him, and they would have filed a death certificate if the musician had any identification on his body. If not, he would have been listed as a John Doe and no certificate would have been filed.

Could the story of the streetcar death in Georgia have reached all the way to Harlem and later become the cornerstone of the story that Reverend Davis heard about Blake being killed there by a streetcar. The odds are astronomical that two blind street musicians--one of them thought to be Blake--- were both killed by streetcars in the 1930s in two different states.

However, the story that would have traveled by word of mouth in the black community did not reach nearby Atlanta for some unknown reasons as Blind Willie McTell who was interviewed for the 1951 Melody Maker article only mentioned Blake's real name as Arthur Phelps among many musicians he had known in Georgia. He never mentioned the streetcar accident.

Nor did his widow Kate recall Blake being killed in Georgia to researcher David Evans when he interviewed her and published her recollections about McTell's life in two Blues Unlimited issues BU 126 and 127 in 1977.

She told Evans she and Blind Willie first met Blake at the 81 Theatre in Atlanta in the early 1930s and later McTell brought Blake from Florida to play with him in Atlanta. She said that was before she and McTell married in 1934.

Until some document surfaces that shows where Blake died, we simply have no proof of when or where it happened. The most logical answer is his death was listed as a John Doe---when no death certificate is filed--- if it was investigated by authorities in either the South or the North. If not, he was buried privately and his death was never reported to the county registrar of births and deaths.

Special thanks to Alex van der Tuuk of the Netherlands for making his file of information on Blake available for this article including the original 1951 Melody Maker article by Ed Paterson and finding the reference to the blind musician in Driscoll's 1938 column. Also thanks to Jason Rewald for sharing his information on the elderly Jacksonville man who came upon the streetcar accident in Georgia. Students Christian Avent and Joshua McDaniel of the University of North Carolina at Ashville have an excellent biography of Blake including the many rumors of his death at http://toto.lib.unca.edu/sounds/piedmontblues/blindblake.html