British Blues

The blues crossed the Atlantic as cargo: merchant seamen’s records, Chris Barber’s concert bookings (he brought Muddy Waters to England in 1958, electric guitar and all), and the skiffle craze that put cheap guitars in a million British hands. In the early sixties, London’s art schools and suburbs produced a generation of obsessives — Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies’s Blues Incorporated was the seedbed — who studied Chess and Chicago records with scholarly devotion (Richards 2010).

The Rolling Stones (named from a Muddy Waters song; formed when Mick Jagger met Keith Richards on a train platform carrying Chess LPs) took Chicago blues into the British charts — their 1964 cover of Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster,” a Howlin’ Wolf record, went to number one. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers became the academy (Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor); the Yardbirds bred three guitar heroes; Cream amplified the blues into arena scale, pointing at hard rock and heavy metal.

The irony was not lost on anyone: white English youths re-exported Black American music to white America, which had largely ignored its makers. But the traffic ran both ways — the British bands named their sources relentlessly, put Howlin’ Wolf on American television, and revived the careers of the Chess masters for integrated audiences. In the web, this node is the blues’ European beachhead, and the gateway (in future nodes) to hard rock and beyond.