I have an embarrassing confession. When it came to the blues, as a teenager and into my 20s, I preferred the white guys with electric guitars rather than the originators of the art form.
This really makes me feel awkward now. I suppose I needed to mature and get a wider vision of the music in order to fully appreciate it.
That began to happen when I bought Muddy Waters ‘Can’t Get No Grindin’ which I loved and gradually acquired his entire catalog. At that point I must have been in my mid-20s and it marked a shift in my attitude. I began to listen to Buddy Guy and saw where Clapton had got his vibe from. One of the Volunteer Jam albums had a live version of The Thrill Is Gone by B.B. King which was absolutely magnificent and that led me back down to his early 60s stuff
And of course, I soon learned that the loud electric guitar was just inspired by Freddie King or Magic Sam or maybe Albert King, whose late 60s albums were quintessential.
I suppose I thought the original music was just a scratchy acoustic thing and that didn’t interest me, a kid raised on Ritchie Blackmore’s feedback. But that was just a narrowness of vision. Once I learned that Led Zeppelin had taken ‘inspiration’ from Howlin Wolf’s version of Killing Floor by Willie Dixon for The Lemon Song and Whole Lotta Love had its roots in a Muddy Waters tune, I started to see that the blues world was bigger and wider than I had imagined.
My way into acoustic blues was via Rory Gallagher and to a lesser extent Bonnie Raitt. And once you’ve had your eyes opened, it’s a big wide world and it wasn’t long until I was buying early 1960’s copies of Sun House and Bukka White albums.
This route through music is probably not unique for my generation. I mean, I had most of the British Blues boom albums before I had virtually any original blues. In fairness, as a kid in the northeast of England, we just weren’t exposed to the original blues people and their music. So maybe it was less rejection and more exclusion.
As an art form, I think this century has brought so many great blues-based artists to the fore from Joe Bonamassa, to Samantha Fish to Joanne Shaw Taylor and many many more, not least the Tedeschi Trucks Band. For old geezers like me these people give me hope that auto-tuning and AI generated music tries to take away.
