Leroy Carr
On June 19, 1928, in a hastily arranged Vocalion session in Indianapolis, Leroy Carr sat at a piano beside guitarist Scrapper Blackwell and cut "How Long, How Long Blues" — a record that sold in the hundreds of thousands and made him one of America's best-selling blues singers. Carr had taught himself piano as a teenager on the city's West Side barrelhouse circuit, then spent his early twenties drifting through a circus, the Army, and small-time bootlegging before Blackwell's guitar gave his songs a stage. Where his predecessors shouted to fill a room, Carr, aided by the new studio microphone, sang as if talking quietly to a friend — "a cool city dude carrying on a conversation," historian Elijah Wald later wrote. He recorded nearly 200 sides in seven years before dying of nephritis at 30, having quietly invented the smooth, urbane blues voice a generation would borrow.
Carr's own discography credits him as the sole author, but discographer R. Connor Montgomery found otherwise: "the song has its roots in earlier songs, such as Ida Cox and Papa Charlie Jackson's 'How Long, Daddy, How Long?'" — a 1925 Paramount side by classic-blues singer Ida Cox, backed by fellow Paramount artist Papa Charlie Jackson, whose floating "how long, daddy" refrain Carr lifted almost whole for the record that made him a star three years later. Vocalion's own label still credits Carr alone with the words and music; a rival discography site classifies his version flatly as a cover.
listen forCox belts the title line, holding nothing back — a classic-blues shout built for a room with no microphone, Jackson's strings driving hard underneath her voice. Carr's 1928 remake keeps the same "how long, how long" cry but drops the volume: he half-speaks it over his own even piano rolls while Blackwell answers in the single, unhurried guitar notes that became his signature. Same title, same aching question — but Carr's version is quieter, slower, and coaxes the listener in rather than commanding the room.