Fulton Allen (July 10, 1904[1] – February 13, 1941),[2] known as Blind Boy Fuller, was an American blues guitarist and singer.

Fuller was one of the most popular of the recorded Piedmont blues artists, along with Blind Blake, Josh White, and Buddy Moss.

He went to see a doctor in Charlotte who allegedly told him that he had ulcers behind his eyes, the original damage having been caused by some form of snow-blindness."

[3] By studying the records of country blues players like Blind Blake and live performances by Gary Davis, Allen became a formidable guitarist, playing on street corners and at house parties in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Danville, Virginia; and then Durham, North Carolina.

[6] To promote the records, Long credited Allen as Blind Boy Fuller and Washington as Bull City Red.

His style of singing was rough and direct, and his lyrics were explicit and uninhibited, drawing on every aspect of his experience as an underprivileged, blind black man on the streets—pawnshops, jailhouses, sickness, death—with an honesty that lacked sentimentality.

His imprisonment prevented him from performing in "From Spirituals to Swing", a concert produced by John Hammond in New York City that year.

[9] Fuller's repertoire included a number of popular double-entendre "hokum" songs, such as "I Want Some of Your Pie", "Truckin' My Blues Away" (1936) (the inspiration for Robert Crumb's "Keep On Truckin' " comic), "Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon", and "Get Your Yas Yas Out" (1938)[3] (adapted as Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out for the title of an album by the Rolling Stones), and the autobiographical "Big House Bound", about his time in prison.

He was criticised by some as a derivative musician, but his ability to fuse together elements of traditional and contemporary songs and reformulate them in his own performances attracted a broad audience.

[3] Because of his popularity, he may have been overexposed on records, but most of his songs stayed close to tradition, and much of his repertoire and style is kept alive by other Piedmont artists to this day.

[13] His influence is acknowledged by many rock artists whose styles draw from the blues, including the Rolling Stones, Rory Gallagher, Eric Clapton and others.