BRITISH BLUES BOOM

With the death of John Mayall in July, we lost one of the architects of the 60s blues boom that not only transformed Britain's music scene but restored America's blues guitar pioneers to their rightful place on the world's great stages. Here we trace the story of the grass-roots movement that gave birth to rock itself

- Denny llett,Jamie Dickson

The recent passing of the ‘godfather of British blues’, John Mayall, marks the closing of an extraordinary chapter in British music history. His 1966 album, Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, was a pivotal moment between the initial blues scene that produced The Rolling Stones, Manfred Mann and The Yardbirds and the post-blues boom era of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac.

But how did the blues arrive in the UK in the first place and what made so many young musicians fall under its spell to the point that it changed the make-up and sound of music throughout the world?

To answer these questions we need to travel back to the late 1930s where, in the United States, an interest in early jazz and blues pioneers began to gather momentum. Both genres, still intrinsically linked at that point, had evolved at a startling rate since the birth of the recording industry. Pop music of the day was ruled by a combination of swing-era big bands and balladeers, or ‘crooners’ such as Bing Crosby. Blues had somewhat fallen behind and continued to be sold almost exclusively to black record buyers. However, a young generation of white fans were discovering the music through the work of white musicians that had absorbed the style of those early black innovators.

This so-called ‘revivalist’ movement was primarily led by father-and-son ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax who travelled throughout the US (and many other countries) gathering ‘field recordings’ and interviews with as many folk and blues musicians as they could find. Their work, heroic as it turned out, was an attempt to create a timeline linking music harking back to slavery with the pop music of the day.