like Origin, RBF and Blues Classics. I wore them grey as I sat very late into many nights hunched over my guitar trying to work out how to play like Charley Patton or Son House. It wasn’t easy: those early re- issues of poor quality 78s badly remastered on crap vinyl didn’t give up their secrets easily. I’d been pretty pleased with my party-piece of Garfield Akers’ Cottonfield Blues until somebody pointed out what I’d failed to detect through the dense surface noise: that I’d been trying to reproduce not one guitar part but two!


Luckily a girlfriend had introduced me to folk clubs and their ‘floor spots’, which – it turned out – actually welcomed teenage twangers who absurdly thought they could somehow turn into geriatric Mississippi bluespersons. Other people elsewhere had their own blues journeys and epiphanies, but encountering them was a matter of luck. There was no internet: no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook. Just about the only regular noticeboard hinting at a ‘scene’ was the weekly Folk Forum in the Melody Maker.


And so it fell out that one Saturday night in 1966, arriving early at the Bristol Ballads & Blues to get a floor spot, I encoun- tered a hip-looking bloke wearing a fur coat and a sea-green satin shirt. He opened his guitar case to reveal a shiny National Tri- cone, which back then were iconic things only seen in 1930s photos of obscure blues- men. Crikey! Turned out he was Mike Coop- er (see fR 407), over from Reading to do a floor spot that might get him a gig (it did) and a dab hand at channeling Blind Boy Fuller. It was inevitable that we became pals.


As the circle of blues enthusiasts in Bris- tol grew and I’d even found a resonator gui- tar myself, I eventually approached the owner of the Bristol Troubadour (fR 400) to ask if we could run a monthly specialist country blues night, which began in Febru- ary 1967. Naturally Mike Cooper was the first guest and it was a resounding success. In those days, not only was it pre-YouTube but hardly anybody made records, so artists could get bookings simply on word-of-mouth recommendation from others. Mike had recently encountered a South London musi- cian called Dave Kelly who, he assured us, did a fine job on Fred McDowell, Robert


Johnson and John Lee Hooker material, so we took a chance and booked him unheard for the second meeting: he promptly blew everybody away.


And so it continued. Dave Kelly


had re commended his big sister Jo Ann (see fR 388), who was the first guest after our move to the pub. I met her at the station, somewhat taken aback by this slight blonde figure with round specs and a cheap guitar carrying bag. Being acoustic, the club didn’t need sound checks, so the first time I ever heard her was as she launched into Charley Patton’s Moon Going Down and stag- gered everybody with her raw power and intensity.


Word got out, recommenda- tions came in, and soon we were hosting The Panama Limited Jug Band, Simon Prager & Steve Rye, the teenage Missouri Compromise and many others. We were delighted when Alexis Korner offered to play to give support. Mike Cooper started a club in Reading and the Kellys opened one at Elephant & Cas- tle in London, so the network quickly spread. Enterprising Bristol record label Saydisc recorded many of the artists as they came down to our club and launched their new Matchbox imprint in the sum- mer of 1968 with a compilation titled Blues Like Showers Of Rain.


R


adio 1 DJ John Peel went over- board on it and many of us got sessions on his show and fea- tures in Melody Maker. Major label A&R scouts converged on the First National Blues Convention at Con- way Hall in London. Soon, Mike Cooper, both Kellys, myself and the Panama Limited all had major label debut album deals and more compilations got made.


I helped book a long national tour for Mississippi Fred McDowell (mostly from the payphone in the hall of the flat I’d briefly moved to in London’s Notting Hill!), and played support on quite a few dates with my Country Blues Band. Some nights on Fred’s tour were still in bigger folk clubs. In other parts of the country, particularly Leeds and South Shields, specialist blues clubs had sprung up too, each with great local artists – Steve Phillips in the former, Gordon Smith in the latter.


Looking back, I’m astonished to recall that all this had hap- pened while I was still only 21, and most of the audi- ences and the other English blues players were all around the same age (Cooper was positively ancient at 26!).


Jo Ann Kelly


In retrospect, that seems like where the folk clubs and blues began to part their ways. Blues briefly grew so big – it had migrated to the front page of the Melody Maker – that it acquired its own separate scene. At the same time, the bigger name songwriter/guitarists of the 1960s emigrated from the folk clubs to the college circuit. Many of those clubs


37 f Mike Cooper


then split into two dis-


tinct camps: those


determined to reject America and per- ceived commercialism and concentrate on local traditions, and those that became the early foundations for the alt.comedy cir- cuit. There was not much place for acoustic blues players in there, and many had to take to mainland Europe for their next decade’s bread and butter. Then it was anti-Thatcher protest, the Pogues, world music, Celto-mania and soon another gen- eration of folkies who never even knew that the blues had been so much part of the early furniture.


A compilation CD called Matchbox Days on Ace Records documents those early days (I’ve cannibalised its notes for part of this feature). On 1st October, Dave Kelly, Mike Cooper and myself share a gig at Folk House in Bristol to mark roughly 50 years since all that brief craziness began. Our combined ages will be 215, which is actually 27 more than the combined ages of elderly blues leg- ends Son House, Skip James and Bukka White were when they toured together 50 years ago this month on the1967 American Folk Blues Festival. Makes you think! F


Dave Kelly


Photo: David Harrison 1968


Photo: Colin Brooks 1968


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