Why? In God’s great name, why? Why did a bunch of white boys from the Home Counties feel qualified to express the miseries of poor black sharecroppers? What mystical allure did the twelve bar, three chord structure hold over a generation of slouching, greasy-haired, skinny blerks in loon pants?
To find the answer to this, we must go back, back … to the blood-soaked levées of Berks & Bucks in the mid ‘fifties, to portly, prematurely balding Cyril Davies, who met the only-very-slightly more charismatic Alexis Korner while they played for the rambunctious Chris Barber’s Jazz Band. This was jazz as in trad, dad; the music of choice for speccy young men in duffel coats and no girlfriends. To be fair, Korner did book the Genuine Article for his club, giving black blues artists a bit of the spotlight. But also in the interests of fairness, he did “sing the blues” himself. A mistake. The number of white Brits who have the necessary throat and lung equipment to sing the blues is … well, probably two. Or three. Alexis and Cyril shared a set of schoolboy adenoids for vocal chords (cf John Mayall), but that didn’t, unfortunately, stop them from » Continue Reading.