Blind Blake, the blues legend who figures in Amazon Prime's 'Reacher,' wasn't buried in Georgia. He's buried just north of Milwaukee.

In the new Amazon Prime series "Reacher," the title character makes a stop in a small town in Georgia, saying he's looking for the grave of a blues legend named Blind Blake.

Unfortunately, Jack Reacher, played by Alan Ritchson, is about 1,000 miles off. He should have been looking in Glendale, just north of Milwaukee.

"Reacher," which launched to solid reviews on the streaming service Feb. 4, is based on crime-fiction master Lee Childs' first Jack Reacher novel, "Killing Floor." Published in 1997, it also was Childs' first published novel.

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In the book, Reacher, a blues fan and former military investigator, gets off a bus in the fictional town of Margrave, Georgia, because he remembers his brother telling him that Blind Blake, a blues singer and guitarist who made his mark in the late 1920s and early 1930s, had died there. Soon, Reacher is arrested and falsely accused of murder, in a case that turns out to be connected to a massive conspiracy involving counterfeit money and lots and lots of killing.

At the time the book was written, most of Blake's life, and his death, were a mystery, even to ardent blues fans. But in the 2010s, a group of researchers — Alex van der Tuuk, Bob Eagle, Rob Ford, Eric LeBlanc and Angela Mack, an Ozaukee County performing artist, music teacher and music historian — cracked the case.

(Their research was published on the SundayBlues.org website in June 2012; Mack also wrote up an account for OnMilwaukee.com in 2013.)

Born, according to some accounts, in Jacksonville, Florida, Blind Arthur Blake spent time in Chicago and in Milwaukee during his years recording for Paramount Records, the blues-centric label that operated in Ozaukee County in the 1920s and '30s. They were able to confirm through newspaper mentions, and a Milwaukee County coroner's report, that Blake died on Dec. 1, 1934, at Milwaukee County Emergency Hospital.

The cause of death was listed as pulmonary tuberculosis; Blake, who reportedly had not worked for more than two years, had been hospitalized with pneumonia earlier that year, according to the coroner's report.

Blake was 38.

His body is buried in Glen Oaks Cemetery, known then as Evergreen Cemetery, on Green Bay Avenue in Glendale.

Despite the new information — at least, new since Childs' novel was first published — "Reacher" sticks to the book's original narrative about Blake. What there is of it, anyway.

The eight-part series opens with Jack Reacher explaining he got off the bus in Margrave to check out Blake's grave. Except for a snippet of a Blake song played during a car drive, that's the last mention of the blues legend till the very end of the final episode, when Blake's "Police Dog Blues" plays over the ending and the closing credits.

So the real search for Blind Blake is still untapped material for a TV series.

Contact Chris Foran at chris.foran@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @cforan12.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Blind Blake, bluesman in 'Reacher,' buried in Milwaukee, not Georgia