ABout the TRIO- and their new album: Naptown BLues

 So, where do you go after Muscle Shoals? After Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta? (Places we recorded our first two albums.)

Where do you go...after two internationally charting blues albums, a Blues Blast Music Award, a couple of #1 blues songs, radio play around the world, and enough unexpected musical good fortune to make grown men occasionally look at each other and ask, “How in the hell did all this happen?”

Apparently, you go home. And for Christopher Wyze & the Tellers, home is Indianapolis, Indiana. Naptown. And that brings us to the band’s new album: 

NAPTOWN BLUES — SONS OF LEROY CARR & SCRAPPER BLACKWELL

Eleven tracks. Three Indianapolis musicians. No drums. No percussion. A bunch of old songs that somehow don’t sound very old at all. And two nearly century-old Naptown bluesmen who started the whole thing.

But hang on. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

THE BAND THAT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE A BAND

Christopher Wyze & the Tellers began, more or less, as an experiment. Singer, harmonica player and longtime blues frontman Christopher Wyze had spent decades singing other people’s songs before finally deciding—rather late in the game, some might argue—to write a few of his own. A “few” became thirteen.

Those songs became the band’s 2024 debut album, Stuck in the Mud, recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and the Mississippi Delta. And then something funny happened. People listened to our music.

And radio programmers played it. Reviewers wrote about it. Blues fans streamed it. They bought our CDs. Songs charted in the U.S., UK, Europe, Australia, Canada and beyond. “Back to Clarksdale” hit #1 on the Roots Music Report blues song chart. Other singles landed high on iTunes blues charts around the world. Stuck in the Mud spent 42 weeks on the RMR Top 50 Blues Album chart, peaking at #2.

All this from a band that, at the time, had never played a live show together.

Yeah. We know. That seemed strange to us, too. So we fixed that.

We took the Tellers to Clarksdale, Mississippi, climbed onto the stage at the Juke Joint Chapel, a the Shack Up Inn, played a show, recorded the whole thing and filmed it for good measure. That became LIVE in CLARKSDALE. Another album release. More radio. More charting. More reviews. More people listening to the band. Fun!

And somewhere in the middle of all that Mississippi blues business, the road took an unexpected turn north. About 500 miles north, to be exact.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

The day before our Clarksdale show, we started talking about a song we all knew and decided, last minute, to preform and record it the next day. The song:  How Long – How Long Blues.

If you know the blues, you probably know the song. If you don’t know the song, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve heard some musical descendant of it.

Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell recorded How Long – How Long Blues in 1928. It became their breakthrough record and one of the defining blues recordings of its era. Over the decades, the song found its way into the repertoires of an extraordinary bunch of artists—Ray Charles, B.B. King, Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Dinah Washington, Lou Rawls, Tampa Red and 125+ more.

But here’s the part that really got us.

Carr and Blackwell didn’t record that song in Memphis. Or Nashville. They didn’t make it in Chicago. They made it in Indianapolis, our hometown.

And the more we talked about this, the stranger it seemed that we—and plenty of other people around Indianapolis—knew so little about them. Who were these guys? Why Indianapolis? Where did they record? What happened to these guy? And why hadn’t we been talking about the fact that two of the most influential blues musicians of the prewar era were Naptown musicians?

We started digging, kept digging. And before long, Leroy and Scrapper stopped feeling like names from a blues history book. They started feeling like fellow musicians from right here in town.

TWO NAPTOWN BLUESMEN

Leroy Carr came to Indianapolis as a boy in 1912 and lived for the rest of his short life here.

Francis Hillman “Scrapper” Blackwell arrived in Indianapolis as a small child and also made the city his lifelong home.

Carr played piano and sang. Blackwell played guitar, snd and even played a little piano. Together, they created something different, speaking bluesically. At a time when most recorded blues came from the rural South—Carr and Blackwell and their music had a city shine to them.

It was smoother. More conversational. Sophisticated without getting fancy. It had what author Elijah Wald called “a hip, urban club style.”

The pair came together in 1928 thanks to an Indianapolis music shop owner and Vocalion Records dealer named J.E. Guernsey. According to Scrapper, Guernsey showed up with Leroy, introduced the two, had Carr play some piano (most likely in the music shop), and proposed that they make records together. Scrapper wasn’t exactly waiting around for his big break.

In fact, he initially wanted no part of traveling to Chicago for a recording session. He had other business interests. Bootleg liquor, apparently. Hey, it was 1928. So Guernsey came up with another idea. If Scrapper wouldn’t go to the recording machine, maybe the recording machine could come to Scrapper. And remarkably enough, it did.

Vocalion Records hauled portable recording equipment to Indianapolis and set up shop in a spare office of radio station WFBM in the Indianapolis Athletic Club Building. And on June 19, 1928, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell made their first records together there.

My Own Lonesome Blues, Kokomo Blues, Penal Farm Blues. And: How Long – How Long Blues.

That one changed everything. How Long – How Long Blues took off – sold a million copies at a time when only about 12 million households owned a record player. The song was released on Vocalion’s Race Records series. By the late 1920s, hundreds of thousands of black American households owned phonographs, and black listeners formed a large enough market that record companies aggressively produced and promoted “race records” specifically for them. 

So, by every measure, the record was one hell of a huge smash hit! And Carr and Blackwell took off with it. Over the next seven years they created one of the great catalogs of prewar blues—nearly 200 recorded sides, according to The Blues Foundation.

“Blues Before Sunrise.”  “Midnight Hour Blues.” “Prison Bound Blues.” And plenty more.

Scrapper’s “Kokomo Blues,” also recorded during those first Indianapolis sessions, traveled down another particularly interesting road. Eight years later, Robert Johnson reshaped some of that musical DNA into a little number you may have heard of: “Sweet Home Chicago.”

Not bad for a couple of guys from Naptown.

THE RECORD THAT FOLLOWED US HOME

Back in Clarksdale, we added performed and recorded How Long – How Long Blues. Then we (Chris Wyze, Gerry Murphy and John Boyle) packed everything up and drove home to Indianapolis. Leroy and Scrapper seemed to jump in the Ford Explorer with us.

On the trip back we listened.And once we got home,  John Boyle dug into Scrapper’s guitar work. Christopher kept crawling around inside their words, phrasing and melodies and their stories. And he started noodling on how to work a little harmonica into their act. Gerry Murphy started figuring out how these songs might work with our an acoustic bass, something Leroy and Scrap never recorded with.

And the deeper we got, the more obvious the next move became. We needed to make a record. Not a Leroy & Scrapper “greatest hits” record. Not some museum-piece re-creation “cover album” where everybody tries to become a Leroy & Scrapper tribute act. And definitely not an album designed to “improve” the originals.

We just wanted to take some Leroy and Scrapper songs we loved, get inside them, play them our way, and maybe introduce them to a few listeners who had never encountered our now blues heroes before.

One other thing became non-negotiable. We had to make the album in Indianapolis. Anything other place would have missed the point.

THREE GUYS. ELEVEN SONGS. NAPTOWN BLUES.

The Naptown Blues band is stripped down to three Indianapolis musicians:

• Christopher Wyze — vocals and harmonica
• Gerry Murphy — acoustic bass
• John Boyle III — acoustic, electric and slide guitars, plus a little Hammond organ on Midnight Hour Blues

That’s it. No drummer. No percussion section. No wall of studio players. No special effects. No auto tune. No AI. Carr and Blackwell didn’t need any of that. We figured we could survive without it, too.

We recorded and mixed at Postal Recording in downtown Indianapolis, with engineer Tyler Watkins. Postal occupies an old Indianapolis post office on Belmont Street. And here’s where things get wonderfully weird. The studio sits about two-and-a-half miles from the downtown building where Vocalion first recorded Leroy and Scrapper in 1928. And oh yeah, it’s even possible that Scrapper’s mail might been routed through that post office. Chilling. And cool.

Ninety-eight years later, three different Indianapolis blues musicians sat in an old Naptown building recording  Carr and Blackwell songs. You couldn’t script it much better.

During the sessions, we kept things fun, and loose. Play together. Don’t overthink it. Don’t polish every rough edge until there's no edge. Leave some fingerprints.

We recorded on old-school tape. We tried to do it the old-fashioned way— play and sing live and in one take. We did not succeed! Postal does have modern recording equipment. And, we’re not Leroy & Scrapper. But overdubs and fixes…we kept those to a minimum. When a tiny flaw showed up, the general rule became: unless it make sone of us hate ourselves (or one of the other guys), leave it alone.

NAPTOWN BLUES. WHAT’S ON THE RECORD?

You'll find ten Carr and Blackwell songs, plus one of our own musical detours, based on a Leroy and Scrapper original:

1. I’m Going Back to Tennessee
2. Naptown Blues
3. How Long – How Long Blues
4. The Truth About the Thing
5. My Own Lonesome Blues
6. Midnight Hour Blues
7. Kokomo Blues
8. Tired of Your Low Down Ways
9. You Got to Reap What You Sow
10. Prison Bound Blues
11. And, #11… Birthday in Jail...

 Good old  #11 is Christopher Wyze’s year-round reimagining of the 1929 Carr-Blackwell recording “Christmas in Jail – Ain’t That a Pain.”

Some of these tunes are famous. Some really ought to be. All of them gave us something new and cool to work on. 1928, new? Yup. Nearly a century after their recordings, Carr & Blackwell songs come chuck full of stuff that sounds new, fresh, relevant. And let's face it the human condition — e.g. blues songs — have not undergone a major update since Leroy and Scrapper stopped recording in 1935. 

WHY “NAPTOWN BLUES”?

“Naptown” – that’s Indianapolis’ old Jazz-era  nickname. Carr himself used it. In his 1929 song Naptown Blues, he sings about coming to Naptown, having some fun and stopping by a show at the Walker Theater on Indiana Avenue. The Walker was real…still is. Indiana Avenue was real. And still is. And the contributions of two Naptown musicians to the ongoing story of the blues was — and still is — very real.

Maybe we have a little Naptown chip on our shoulders. Maybe Leroy and Scrapper did. We sort of feel like Leroy and Scrapper’s Naptown spent too much time standing off to the side while places like Chicago, Memphis and the Mississippi Delta understandably occupied center stage. We love those places. Heck, we made our first album in Muscle Shoals and the Delta and our second one in Clarksdale. But we love Naptown, too. And this time, we wanted to shine a little light on our home.

Naptown Blues is our way of putting Leroy Carr, Scrapper Blackwell and Indianapolis back into the picture. Not because they need us to make them important. They already are. We just want more people to know about this place and those guys.

AND HERE WE ARE

Just a few short years ago, Christopher Wyze & the Tellers didn’t exist. Then came Stuck in the Mud. And LIVE in CLARKSDALE. Thaings have changed a bunch and we're grateful for that. We’re also still slightly tickled by the whole thing. 

And now the road has brought us somewhere we probably should have expected all along: Back home, to the city where Christopher Wyze, John Boyle III and Gerry Murphy met, live and make music. 

To the city where Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell met. Where they made their first records. Where How Long – How Long Blues first went onto a recording disc. Where both men lived. Where both men died. And where both men remain buried today. We're talking Naptown.

Almost 100 years separate their recordings from ours. About two-and-a-half miles separate the Indianapolis studios where Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell….and Christopher Wyze and the two Tellers recorded. Musically? The distance doesn’t feel very far at all.

We made NAPTOWN BLUES  because these songs are too good to leave sitting quietly in history. And because Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell deserve to be heard. We made it because Indianapolis (Naptown, dammit!) has a blues story worth telling.

And yeah…we made it because playing these songs is a hell of a lot of fun.

So here they are. Eleven songs. Three Naptown musicians. (Plus two more if you count Leroy and Scrapper, the Indianapolis blues legends who we feel looking over  our shoulders.) And one hometown record.

Christopher Wyze & the Tellers present: NAPTOWN BLUES.