A style of popular music that flourished during the 1960s. It originated in and is particularly associated with Britain, and depends on the electric guitar with its blues-pentatonic scale patterns and propensity for sudden shifts of movement between anguished held, bent notes and sudden runs. It attempted to counter the banality of the hit-parade material and of rock and roll (which by the early 1960s had lost its power to surprise) by retrieving what was felt to be emotionally more ‘authentic’ blues material. It was thus originally an underground movement originating in the London blues revival, itself an outgrowth of the trad jazz movement headed by Chris Barber. The blues revival was centred on clubs booked by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, namely Wardour Street’s Roundhouse (from 1955) and West London’s Ealing Club (from 1962). By the early 1960s other clubs were popular: the Scene and the Flamingo in Central London and the Crawdaddy in Richmond.
Korner’s venues hosted a variety of touring musicians, from Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Otis Spann to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Waters had been playing electric blues since the early 1950s, but British audiences initially wanted only the ‘authentic’ acoustic style on his first visit in 1958. Korner’s Blues Incorporated (formed in 1962) was an important training ground for many of the most significant musicians of this phase. The clubs were frequented by listeners bored with the trad jazz scene, and by art school musicians who would become crucial to British rhythm and blues: the nascent Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Yardbirds, Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe, John Baldry, Graham Bond, John Mayall and Jimmy Page. These developed a close-knit circuit that included Elton John, Rod Stewart, Peter Green, John McLaughlin and Eric Clapton.
Clapton’s early career epitomizes the changes of style which accompanied the development of blues-rock. With the Yardbirds he had worked with Sonny Boy Williamson ‘II’ in 1963 (as had the Animals in Tyneside), but he left them in 1965 after they switched from rhythm and blues towards pop and psychedelia. Playing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers (1966), he covered material by Little Walter, Ray Charles and even Robert Johnson, before forming Cream (later in 1966) with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Although they covered songs from Delta blues singers, Clapton’s now extended solos helped develop progressive rock.
Blues-rock was still current in 1968 – both Led Zeppelin (Atl., 1969) and Fleetwood Mac’s Mr Wonderful (Col., 1968) included material by Willie Dixon – but this phase was ending. While Georgie Fame went into cabaret and big bands, Baldry, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac (without Peter Green) eventually went into pop, and Led Zeppelin and Cream developed rock. By the mid-1960s, some white US musicians, of a slightly younger generation, were making much use of similar blues material: Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield (who developed through jamming with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush from about 1963), Canned Heat, Roy Buchanan, Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Chicago scene focussed on Steve Miller and Johnny Winter. The popularity of artists such as Robert Cray in the 1980s suggests that this style, like any other, can be made amenable to revival.
Blues Unlimited (1963–)
R. Middleton: Pop Music and the Blues (London, 1972), 186–210
B. Brunning: Blues: the British Connection (Poole, 1986)
D. Hatch and S. Millward: From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music (Manchester, 1987), 99–110, 135–40
A.F. Moore: Rock, the Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock (Milton Keynes, 1993), 62–77
H. Shapiro: Alexis Korner (London, 1996)
ALLAN F. MOORE