Tag Archives: Blind Blake

“West Ashley Street,” sang the in 1927, was the only place you could “ever lose these awful Jacksonville Blues.” That same year,  recorded a mysterious ragtime blues guitarist named playing “Ashley Street Blues,” with singing, “I’m a heartbroken woman with the Ashley Street Blues.”  recorded another version of “Jacksonville Blues” in 1928. She was “red hot” in Atlanta, she sang, “But the man I love lives down in Jacksonville.” West Ashley was the central thoroughfare for , a mostly black town after the , a slave plantation earlier in the 19th century, and during Jacksonville’s brutal Jim Crow years, one …