Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: It’s astonishing, really, that the blues guitarist and bandleader John Mayall, who has just died, reached the age of 90. He had lived the life, playing and touring from the 1960s until the start of the 2020s. Almost all of his contemporaries had died younger.

Mayall and the different combinations of musicians that made up his Bluesbreakers was the secret ingredient that made the British blues boom of the 1960s as influential as it was. Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce met playing with Mayall before they decided to form Cream.

Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood played with Mayall before they started the original Fleetwood Mac, the biggest selling British blues band of the late 1960s. Mick Taylor passed through the Bluesbreakers before he joined the Rolling Stones. Mayall clearly had an eye for talent.

When I was a teenager, immersed in the British blues boom, his influence seemed to be everywhere. Certainly, a lot of my friends owned his 1965 Bluesbreakers record, which featured the young Eric Clapton.

And when Salut! Live editor Colin Randall saw Mayall play in the south of France in 2007, when the guitarist was 74, for “a solid session of what I like to call White Old Git blues,” the tracks from that album still caught the ear:

“The best bits were those based on that early Bluesbreakers record - "the Beano album" as Mayall puts its, in honour of the sleeve showing Eric Clapton sitting against a wall, engrossed in his comic. One of the most memorable tracks from then, Have You Heard, was last night's show-stealer.”

Another track from Bluesbreakers, Rambling on my Mind, was featured on Salut! Live as a Song of the Day when that series was still young. For me, that track was one of the first times I had heard of Robert Johnson.

But the records Mayall made in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the United States, after moving there from Britain, were also influential. They included titles such as Empty Room and Blues from Laurel Canyon.

Part of Mayall’s influence perhaps came from the fact that he came to professional music quite late. He had fought in the Korean War as a young British Army conscript—which inspired his song One Life to Live. When he came back, he went to art college in Manchester and played in a semi-professional band while working as a designer. (He would design his own record sleeves later on.)

Mayall was 30 by the time that the band leader Alexis Korner encouraged him to move to London and turn professional. Korner was just a few years older than Mayall, but was already at the heart of the London music scene, and he helped him to get gigs.

That age difference perhaps helped him to be a stabilising influence for younger guitarists such as Clapton and Green.

Another element came from his huge collection of records. In his elegantly crafted obituary of John Mayall, the music writer Richard Williams described it this way:

“He had come from Manchester to London in 1963 with a record collection that included Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and many other more obscure bluesmen and women. He and Alexis Korner, a man of similar vintage and tastes, encouraged their acolytes to share and absorb the music they loved.”

The Bluesbreakers toured with American blues musicians when they visited Britain, and covered their songs on their records. His 1969 record Turning Point, recorded in the US in 1969, has a song for J.B. Lenoir, who had died in a car crash in 1967. At the time, Lenoir was all but unknown outside of blues aficionados.

Mayall has popped up in the pages of Salut! Live quite a lot over the years. Reader Bill Stock shared an account of seeing Mayall play in 2017, already in his 80s:

“His multi-skilling abilities amazed me. On some numbers he played Roland or Hammond keyboards with his right hand, played a harmonica held again a microphone in his left hand while singing a few verses in between. He also played superb rhythm and lead guitars. No wonder he was made OBE for services to music.”

The Salut! Live editor, Colin Randall, has described how Johan Mayall’s music was part of his route into folk music in the 1960s:

“Everyone of my generation was aware of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, of course, and in particular the protest songs they made popular. Some popularity—though perhaps not too much—was important to our knowledge and appreciation.

“But we were also becoming aware of the blues, as played by British bands like John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. It may have been an imitation of the real, black thing but it sounded passably authentic to most of us and Mayall already seemed old enough to have acquired a certain credibility on that score alone.”

As Colin hints at here, it’s easy to assume now that the 1960s white blues boom in Britain was just an act of cultural appropriation, and at one level of course it was. But it was more complicated than that.

At the time, the blues were dying on their feet in the United States. Even great guitarists such as BB King and Howling Wolf found it hard to make a decent living. The British musicians who created an audience for the electric blues in Britain—with Alexis Korner, John Layall, and the jazzer Chris Barber in the forefront—made a market for them to tour, and re-kindled their reputations in the United States. Memorably, when the Rolling Stones visited Chicago for the first time and told journalists that they planned to visit Muddy Waters, the journalists asked, “Where is that?”.

Mayall talked about this to the journalist Ed Vulliamy in a profile piece for his 80th birthday:

“The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time,” Mayall says...

“It happened here, rather than in America, because at the time, the scene in America was racially segregated—over there, never the twain would meet.

‘In Europe, however—not just England—the black blues began to be heard by an audience that was not listening to them in America. We discovered Elmore James, Freddie King, JB Lenoir, and they spoke to our feelings, our life stories and that was it. Hooked.”

For me, certainly, those white British blues boys were a gateway that took me to Chicago’s electric blues and later to the country blues of the American South.  

And remember John Mayall this way, playing in 1967 with the band that became Fleetwood Mac.

John Mayall 1933-2024

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