f36 The Blues Roll Off
Fifty years on, Ian Anderson takes a personal look back at the folk blues boom that emerged from the UK folk clubs of the late 1960s.
I
t’s strange, when you think about it. In the glory years of the UK’s post- war folk revival, one of the most ubiquitous types of music was blues, as acknowledged in the name of one of the first and most influential clubs from the mid-1950s, London’s Ballads & Blues.
Were he still with us, Bob Copper would happily enthuse to you about how he bought blues 78s by the likes of Sleepy John Estes in the 1930s and felt an immediate link between this music and the southern English folk that ran through his family’s veins. Talk to many of the founding figures of English folk guitar accompaniment like Martin Carthy and they’ll all acknowledge that blues techniques and tunings were an important element in its early evolution from the late 1950s, when players like Big Bill Broonzy would visit and be influential. And of course it was the key creative ele- ment for many important players of the 1960s like Davey Graham, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn.
If you look through the guest pro- grammes and residents lists of many of the folk clubs of the 1960s, you will find lots of blues players or people who included a fair amount in their repertoires. Possibly as many as might do Irish tunes, topical songs or sea shanties back then. If you showed up at a folk club to do a floor spot, per- haps with
the express intention of getting a gig, and announced that you were a blues player, no eyebrows would be raised. It was normal (or as ‘normal’ as anything that went on in folk clubs!) and if you were good you might well get booked.
The current generation on the English
folk scene – those in their teens, twenties and thirties – may well be surprised by this information. Because these days you could go to your local folk club all year round – not that there are more than a tiny fraction of the many hundreds that existed five decades ago – or to a folk festival every weekend through the season, and with the odd exception of a Martin Simpson or Wizz Jones, you will hardly hear any blues being played, and virtually none from young artists.
I’ve been trying to put a finger on exactly when or why everything changed. There was a time when even the guitar itself fell somewhat out of favour in the folk world, partly because of its association with singer/songwriters, and there was a similar rejection of American music as a reaction against that country’s cultural swamping of many art forms. And let’s face it, some of the blues lyrics that people used unthinkingly to sing were full of alien cultural references, not to mention appallingly sexist. Those aspects may have become a turn-off, though it was hardly something that a bit of conscious folk processing (and accent rever- sion) couldn’t deal with. And more recently, certain people have been known to get very angsty about ‘cultural appropriation’…
But sales of acoustic guitars have reportedly been booming again in recent years and American old-time traditional music has gained new respect, enthusiasm and following on the folk scene (look no further than this issue’s cover-featured artists). Blues, though, has not made any comeback. ‘Ameri- cana’ may be a buzzword but it seems almost entirely to be applied to white American music with its associated check shirts, baseball caps, hipster beards and banjos. ‘The blues roll on’ was an oft-used title back in the day, but in the folk world it seems like the blues rolled off a cliff…
Ian Anderson
As the post-Dylan mid-1960s were the height of mass success for folk music in Britain, it’s hardly surprising that there have been a lot of 50th anniversaries of things lately, and folk blues is no exception.
It’s 50 years since some monthly nights which friends and I had started at the Bristol Troubadour grew into a separate club called Folk Blues Bristol & West, first meeting in a city centre pub called the Old Duke, and eventually moving to the Full Moon in (now ultra-hip) Stokes Croft as it kept outgrowing its premises. This was the first club in Britain outside London – possibly outside Soho – to strictly specialise in country blues since Alex- is Korner & Cyril Davies ran their Barrelhouse in the ’50s, and it became a catalyst and influential focal point for a national country blues boom over the next couple of years.
I have very little idea how other people found their way into this obscure, esoteric music but – as we all slowly began to discover – it turned out that there were other pock- ets of fanatical interest all over the country.
I
n my case, as a young teenager in Weston-super-Mare, a chance hear- ing of a Muddy Waters record led me to the Swahili, the local art school students’ favourite coffee bar, which housed a den of beatniks and bearded gui- tar twangers and a lot of gold-dust LPs. Tips and conversations turned me on to books by Paul Oliver and Sam Charters in the local library, and to specialist magazines and columns in the weekly music papers. Once I was old enough to convincingly sneak into the back room of the pub across the road I discovered the weekend sessions centred on a local blues guitar playing guru nick- named Beetle, who had mastered the Big Bill Broonzy style while fronting a ’50s skif- fle group that had reputedly appeared on Six Five Special. I watched and listened and went home to learn on the box I’d bought from a summer holiday job clearing tables in Littlewoods’ cafeteria.
By the age of seventeen I’d decided to skip the notion of university and left home for good, living in a garret in Bristol and able to soak up all the live music going on, both locally (Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams and the inspiring Fred McDowell on the earlier American Folk Blues Festival tours, Jesse Fuller at the Corn Exchange, Spi- der John Koerner at a folk club, and much more) and on numerous hitch-hiked trips to London and elsewhere.
On London visits I’d found Dobell’s
and Collett’s record shops: on a trip to Ply- mouth I’d located Pete Russell’s Hot Record Store, which did mail order. So with hints and tips from Blues Unlimited and Jazz Journal, I’d impulse-bought imported re- issue albums on small, collector-run labels
Photo: David Harrison 1968
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
