Alexis Korner: The forgotten pioneer who launched blues rock in Britain
The fabled story of the first encounter between a young Mick Jagger and a young Keith Richards (if you can imagine such a thing as a young Keith Richards) goes that they met on a train platform in Dartford, where the former caught the latter’s eye because of the records he had bundled under his arm, one from Chuck Berry and one by Muddy Waters.
As Richards wrote of the encounter in the foreword to Robert Gordon’s superlatively brilliant Muddy Waters biography, “I heard Muddy through Mick Jagger. I met him on a train around 1961. He had a Chuck Berry record and The Best of Muddy Waters. I was going to mug the guy for Chuck Berry because I wasn’t familiar with Muddy. We started talking, went round his house, and he played me Muddy, and I said, ‘Wow. Again’.”
But while it might have been Mick Jagger who turned Richards on to the incomparable sounds of Waters, there was another, less celebrated figure, who pushed the whole blues scene in Britain forward.
In his excellent new book, What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan, Steven Rings writes that genre histories are “inseparable from the histories of the people who predominantly make and consume the music. The Chicago urban blues, for example, is a music of the urban Black working class, the sound of musicians who relocated to Chicago during the Great Migration. They brought with them the musical traditions of the southern, rural blues but modified them – through amplification and a host of smaller performative details – to suit noisy urban spaces like bars and clubs”.
By the time the blues was amplified in the bars and clubs of Chicago’s South Side, it was already removed from its origins in the fields of the rural southern deltas and plantations. A lot of the history of the genre and the people who played it was further stripped away when the music made its way across the Atlantic and found a home in the hearts of the white working class of Great Britain.
With the blues having no natural origin in the British musical landscape, it would make sense then for the genre to have been introduced to, or at least popularised with, the players on these shores by a musician from abroad. Curiously, though, it was a man of Greek and Austrian origin, born in Paris in 1928, whose family moved him around from France and Switzerland, then into North Africa, before finally landing in London at the start of the Second World War, who popularised the format in the streets and bars of London, and, subsequently, on the rest of the country, too.
“Alexis Korner? Without his help in the very early days of the Stones, first off, he was the only guy that had a gig going, and we all wanted to play with him”, Richards said in 2003, adding, “He was, I mean, I don’t know if he’d like this term, but the ‘grandfather of the British blues’.”
Korner’s own love of American music, and specifically the music of the American South, led him to the 78s that he stole from Shepherd’s Bush Market, with one of the first discs that “vanished into the saddlebags of my bicycle”, as he put it, being Jimmy Yancey’s 1939 boogie-woogie piece ‘Slow & Easy Blues’, a song that is neither slow, nor easy to play. He would listen to the song repeatedly during the German air raids, and later remembered that after he heard Yancey’s playing, “from then on all I wanted to do was play the blues”.
He developed a keen ear for the finer music being made on the other side of the pond and, as such, was subsequently in a good position to pick out the best players he heard closer to home, as well. As Richards continued in his praise of the ‘grandfather of British blues’, he noted that Korner was relentless in finding and clubbing together the “right musicians”, to surround himself with a crowd of mixed voices, including Richards and co.
In 1954, Korner opened up his own blues club, alongside harmonica player Cyril Davies, in London’s Soho, called The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club. As well as playing to the people himself alongside his own band, he also promoted and encouraged local musicians and imported the real deal, even booking Muddy Waters, already a legend by then, to perform at the club in 1958.
Korner and Davies went on to form the band Blues Incorporated, who for a time boasted musicians like Charlie Watts, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce amongst their ranks and would regularly draw the attentions of young and hopeful musicians like Eric Burdon, Ronnie Wood, John Mayall, Brian Jones, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and plenty of other budding players who would go on to become the really recognised faces of the British blues scene in Korner’s stead.
By the time that he opened up a second London club in 1962, the popularity of Black American music was coming to dominate the London scene, in part, thanks to his tireless promotion of African American music, and also in his bringing together so many young and excitable British talents, as well as sharing his passion for the music in every way possible. Speaking to his part in making it all a reality, Korner was introduced in a segment on the BBC’s Jazz Club programme in the early ’60s as “a man who’s well known to you all as a broadcaster, compere of disc shows and purveyor of odd snippets of knowledge on other programmes”.
At that point in time, it seems that he would have been a household name anywhere in Britain that had an interest in the blues, but he has since been superseded in the collective consciousness by the kids that he so inspired, just like any number of Black musicians from America’s rural south or from the south side of Chicago, who laid the building blocks of not only the modern blues, but of all the contemporary music that we get to enjoy today.
