Crate Diving At Home, Vol. 14

The British Blues Archives

Photo of author’s copy of “British Blues Archive Vol. 1”

It used to be harder to be a music nerd. To do research before the internet, you had to know people who knew stuff. There were, of course, newspapers like Rolling Stone which covered the rock scene, and there were album liner notes (if the artists provided them). That’s pretty thin pickings. If you lived in the burbs, as I did, there were not many sources of information beyond that.

I fell in love with Cream from the moment I first heard them. It took me years after that discovery to begin unraveling some of the history around that band and its members. The process led me down a lot of different trails, some of them leading back in time.

When I learned that the members of Cream considered themselves blues musicians first and foremost, it spurred me to learn much more about the blues. I had heard some of the original blues musicians — my parents had records by B.B. King and Big Mama Thornton among others. As a child, I had no idea about music categories or genres, but I never forgot the huge sound of their voices.

I read somewhere that two members of Cream had previously been in a group called the Bluesbreakers, led by a guy named John Mayall. That turned out to be a gold mine, though it took me more years to get just how important that band really was.

Mayall ran the Bluesbreakers for (I had to do the math here) 61 years, and during that time over 100 different musicians came and went. They included founders or key members of Cream, Blind Faith, Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, The Mothers of Invention, Renaissance, Journey, Jefferson Starship and several more.

Most of these musicians loved the blues, and aspired to play like the great American blues musicians such as B.B. King, Albert King, and Buddy Guy. In later years, the usual debate over cultural appropriation inevitably popped up, but here’s the thing: Blues had largely been kicked to the curb in America by the time the British Blues movement was in full swing.

The American blues musicians, B.B. King excepted, played for pocket change, endured brutal racism (even when they were headlining, they couldn’t use the same bathrooms as their white audiences), and rarely got recording contracts with mainstream labels. A lot of their songwriting credits and royalties were stolen.

Meanwhile, Black musicians were moving on to R&B and Motown. The blues almost died in the land of its birth.

The Brits kept it alive, and also helped drive its evolution into rock and roll. One of the triggers was an American blues and gospel singer, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had been a star in the 1940s but was largely forgotten by 1960. When she toured England in 1964, her concerts were attended by the likes of Clapton, Jeff Beck, and some of the Rolling Stones' founders (there were others, but they are not conclusively documented).

I’ve written about Sister Rosetta and her role in inventing Rock and Roll:

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Most of the British blues musicians were out of print by the time I started discovering them. Even well-known artists like Clapton and Savoy Brown, who had gone on to fame and fortune playing rock and roll, didn’t have any of their early material available in record stores.

Then I found this collection, “British Blues Archive,” and quickly hunted down all four volumes. They are now, in turn, out of print, but were reissued under a new name and imprint, “Blues Anytime.” They comprise tracks by a dozen different artists from the early 1960s, all of them playing and singing the blues or, in a couple of cases, experimenting with sounds that would become part of rock and roll.

Here is Volume 1. I have not found even one of these tracks on Spotify, but the full album is posted on YouTube, so this is what I can offer. The album is not broken up into single songs, but one of the comments lists all the timestamps in case you want to skip around.

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Postscript:

The Blues are not quite dead in the U.S. A handful of diehards are keeping it alive and even refining and expanding its repertoire. These include Gary Clark, Kingfish Ingram, John Mayer, Tedeschi-Trucks Band and Beth Hart. I’ve mentioned some of them in previous pieces, and wholeheartedly encourage you to check any of them out if you don’t already know them.