Blind Boy Fuller

Fulton Allen, known as Blind Boy Fuller, was the most commercially successful and prolific Piedmont blues artist of the late 1930s. Based in Durham, North Carolina, he recorded over 120 sides for ARC/Vocalion and Decca between 1935 and 1940, featuring a driving ragtime-influenced fingerpicking style and bawdy, good-humored lyrics. His recordings of 'Step It Up and Go,' 'Truckin' My Blues Away,' and 'Rag, Mama, Rag' were popular jukebox hits across the Southeast. He was managed and recorded by J.B. Long, who also discovered Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee through Fuller's circle. His guitar style represented the Piedmont tradition at its most commercially accessible, and his influence on the Durham-area blues scene was so dominant that Brownie McGhee initially recorded as 'Blind Boy Fuller No. 2' after Fuller's death from kidney failure in 1941.