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.