Warning! SPOILERS for Reacher season 1.
In the Reacher TV show, an old blues musician is discussed, and while the story might seem apocryphal, Blind Blake was a real musician with a rich history. Lee Child, the mind behind Jack Reacher, is a big blues fan and has gone as far as to collaborate with the band Naked Blue to release an album with the title “Just The Clothes On My Back,” which is inspired by the Jack Reacher stories. This helps to explain why the Reacher TV series includes so much reference to the genre, but the Blind Blake story is more complicated than it appears.
In Reacher episode 1, “Welcome To Margrave,” Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) is arrested and charged with murder shortly after arriving in the town of Margrave, Georgia. When he is questioned as to why he is in Margrave carrying minimal possessions, he claims that it is because he remembered his brother, Joe Reacher, telling him that the blues musician Blind Blake might have died there. While the police don’t believe him, it’s his genuine reason for being there and he asks around town during the season looking to learn more about Blind Blake’s life and death.
Reacher season 1 is based on Lee Child’s 1997 Jack Reacher novel Killing Floor and the Blind Blake plot is lifted directly from its pages. In fact, the book goes a little deeper with Blind Blake’s final resting place having significance for the Reachers in the final moments of the novel. Blind Blake is an important figure in blues history, but the story of his own life and death was a matter of some debate and legend for a long time. Here’s how much of the story of Blind Blake in Reacher is true, and what really happened to the man.
Who Was Reacher's Blind Blake?
The music career of Blind Blake alluded to in Reacher is accurate. Blind Blake lived in the early part of the twentieth century and was an accomplished blues guitarist and singer, known for his distinctive ragtime style and is credited with helping to establish the Piedmont Blues style of playing. The written history of the path that Blind Blake took into his music career is sketchy at best. Contemporary blues musician Big Bill Broonzy claims that he had heard Blind Blake playing his guitar in the early 1920s, and in 1926 Blake began making his first recordings with Paramount Records. He was prolific and recorded around 80 tracks with the company (the exact number is disputed, with the final track attributed to him being a point of debate) from 1926 through to 1932 when Paramount Records went bankrupt.
Blind Blake’s blues recordings sold well and his particular fingerpicking guitar style went on to influence and inspire a wealth of other blues and folk musicians. Blind Blake has remained an important name within the music world. On his 1992 album, Bob Dylan covered Blind Blake’s song “You Gonna Quit Me Blues,” dropping the word “Blues” from the title of his cover. One of Blind Blake’s most well-known songs “Police Dog Blues,” which has been covered by many artists, including Hugh Laurie, is featured in Reacher, first as a cover of the song playing on the radio in Reacher episode 2, “First Dance,” and Blind Blake’s original recording the plays over the credits of the final episode of Reacher season 1.
Why Does Reacher Think That Blind Blake Died In Margrave?
In Lee Child’s original Killing Floor and in the Reacher TV series, Jack Reacher believes that Blind Blake might have died in Margrave, Georgia. He never gets confirmation that this is true, but an old barber that he visits claims that his sister once played with Blind Blake in a field near Margrave. In the original book, Reacher requests that this be the location where his brother’s ashes be scattered after the funeral. However, Margrave, Georgia is a fictional town, so it is unlikely that the real Blind Blake ever went near the place.
When Lee Child wrote Killing Floor in 1997, most of the history around Blind Blake was a combination of hearsay and legend with no documentation to prove any of it. The promotional materials created by Paramount Records during his music career advertised that Blake was born blind and had been born in Jacksonville, Florida. Indeed, Blake seems to have gone to Jacksonville several times in his life and have lived there at times, especially during the winter when his home in Chicago was too cold for his liking, and reports suggest that he played outside a hotel in Jacksonville in the 1930s.
In 1931, Blake was married to Beatrice McGee but after his final recording in 1932 nothing else was known of his life or death, with rumors floating around that he had been murdered or otherwise died violently. The blues and gospel singer Reverend Gary Davis claimed that he had been told that Blind Blake had been hit by a streetcar in 1934, while Big Bill Broonzy suspected that he had fallen down drunk in Chicago and frozen to death. There has even been debate over his name, with another contemporary of Blake’s, Blind Willie McTell, claiming that his name was Arthur Phelps (a claim that did not stand up to scrutiny). This was all that was known about Blind Blake’s death when Lee Child wrote Killing Floor, so the idea that Reacher was tracking down one more possible lead for how the blues player might have died worked for the context of the book.
What Really Happened To Blind Blake?
The Blind Blake story in the Reacher TV series becomes a bit of a problem in 2022 because new details of the history of Blind Blake came to light between the writing of the novel and the release of the TV series. In 2011, Alex van der Tuuk and his fellow researchers discovered and published a series of documents about Blind Blake’s life in the journal Blues & Rhythm. These included a death certificate that revealed that Blind Blake’s real name was Arthur Blake, and he had been born in Newport News, Virginia, not Jacksonville. It also provided his cause of death as pulmonary tuberculosis on December 1, 1934, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Blind Blake is buried in Glen Oaks Cemetery in Glendale, Wisconsin.
The decision to keep Reacher’s reason for going to Margrave in Reacher the same as in the book might seem strange when the true history behind Blind Blake is now known. However, while Blind Blake definitely did not die in Margrave, it still works for the story. Reacher spends his time on the road and traveling light and has been out of touch with Joe for an extended period of time. Given that the truth about Blind Blake’s death is not widely known outside of those who look into it, it is entirely believable that Jack Reacher had never heard about it, and his appearance in Margrave on a whim at the start of Reacher can still hold up - as long as no one ever Googles it for him.