Trans Atlantic Blues.

Ask a typical British blues fan who the best blues band playing today is and he’s likely to answer that it’s Fleetwood Mac or John Mayal Ask him what he thinks of B.B. King or Butterfield, and his answer is likely to be that they have a couple of nice sould bands. The attitude reflected in these two answers is significant in that it is indicative of the attitude of most fans of the “blues revival” in Britain, that is, that the blues as a musical form ended its development in America in 1956 with the coming of commercial soul music and rock and roll, not to be revived again until the emergence of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers (although pushed along by the early Rolling Stones, Pretty Things, Downliners Sect and Yardbirds). This attitude is as parochial as the attitude in Americans that the British often attack—that you have to be black to play the blues.

The fallacy in the British belief is that the blues didn’t really die in 1956, it only appeared to die, and the thing which almost killed it was its own monotony. The years after World War II brought large scale migration of blacks from the South to the industrial centers of the North. They took factory jobs and settled into the slum ghettos. Many of these men had played blues in the South for extra money and it seemed only natural for them to continue playing in the bars of the North. But the new location exposed them to both larger black audiences and also a new white audience. So the scenes in several cities, especially Chicago, began to thrive. Many of the musicians found they could afford to quit their factory jobs and play full time; and many of the bars found it not only profitable, but, in fact necessary to provide entertainment seven days a week. But most of these men were self-taught musicians. They could only play what they’d learned and there were only a few good examples to follow. Consequently, many (if not most of them) sounded disturbingly similar—both to each other and within their own repertories. Soon, much of the audience saw that the music was stagnating, that monotony was only breeding more monotony, and began to look elsewhere for their music. Much of the unsophisticated segments of this audience turned to the more commercial, and more accessible, soul groups that were now emerging, while the more sophisticated segment, including most of the whites, turned their interest almost exclusively to the new jazz forms that were emerging. Most of the bluesmen went back to the factories, gigging only on weekends, and the scenes almost everywhere except Chicago virtually died. Only the best of the bluesmen survived. B. B. King and Bobby Bland toured constantly, and occasionally made the R&B charts with a record. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and a few others, continued to play and record in Chicago, but even that was dying. The white kids now had Elvis and Buddy Holly, and rock music—a music that, even if it wasn’t any “good” at least was theirs; and the black kids had soul—a gospel based musical form which stressed the ability to sing over the ability to play. And ask any kid if it ain’t easier to sing than it is to learn to play.