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4 unusual facts about Blind Blake


Arthur Blake

Blind Blake (birth name Arthur Blake; 1893-1933), US-American blues/ragtime singer and guitarist

Blind Blake

His complex and intricate finger picking has inspired Reverend Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, John Fahey, Ralph McTell, Leon Redbone and many others.

Blind Blake appears as a central theme in the plot line of Lee Child's 1997 Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor.

Some authors have written that in one recording he slipped into a Geechee or Gullah dialect, suggesting a connection in the Sea Islands.


Ari Eisinger

Ari Eisinger is a guitarist and singer from Pennsylvania, most noted as a proponent of Piedmont blues guitar from the 1920s-1930s, and as a significant authority on the music of the Rev. Gary Davis, Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, and Josh White amongst others.

Davey Graham

Though this open tuning was used decades earlier by such blues guitarists as Blind Blake and Charlie Patton (and by John Fahey on his 1958 record Blind Joe Death), Graham was one of the first guitarist from England to use it.


see also

Delia Green

One version, usually attributed to Blake Alphonso Higgs (the calypso singer also known as "Blind Blake"), is known as "Delia's Gone," and is explicitly told from her killer's point of view.