The song that got Eric Clapton hooked on music: “It was really hardcore blues”
There’s something almost sacred about the moment a childhood fascination with music transforms into a full-blown love for it. That shift—when your taste in music becomes your own, no longer just the soundtrack of your parents’ record collection or whatever happens to be playing on the radio—is a rite of passage. The gateway into that vast musical universe varies for everyone. For much of the 1960s generation of British music legends, it started with skiffle, then led to the blues, and eventually, rock ‘n’ roll. Eric Clapton, however, skipped the first step entirely and went straight to the good stuff.
Let’s be real: the popularity of skiffle music is kind of baffling. Sure, every teen craze has its fair share of cringe—from poodle skirts to Roblox—but the fact that Lonnie Donegan squawking about being a “Gamblin’ Man” briefly became a mainstream phenomenon is a truly perplexing twist in music history. Perhaps, though, skiffle’s appeal wasn’t so much about the music itself as it was about introducing Britain’s youth to the sheer joy of playing music with their peers.
After all, you’ve got to hand it to the genre, there’s something pretty punk about the whole thing. I mean, what’s more DIY than using your mum’s washboard as a makeshift drum kit? Looking at the early adopters of skiffle – like The Quarrymen and Jimmy Page – it’s clear that it’s a starting point to something bigger and better, but some people didn’t need that starting point. In an interview with Uncut, Clapton said of the genre, “We all loved skiffle. But that was coming from a fairly safe place.”
Instead, Clapton found his calling directly and from a very unlikely source. One of his childhood favourites was a radio show by the name of Uncle Mac’s Children’s Hour, and in the same interview, he talked about how a chance encounter with a particular song kickstarted the great musical love of his life.
He says: “One of the big haunting musical memories from those days for me is an instrumental by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee called ‘Whoopin’ and Holerin’’. That was Uncle Mac… …he was playing that. Which is bizarre, isn’t it? It was regarded as a novelty record but it was really hardcore blues.”
For decades now, most children’s entertainment has been as processed and packaged as American cheese and about as natural to boot. From time to time, though, something real shines through the way it did for Clapton back in the late 1950s. This exposure to it was so early that, the way Clapton puts it, “I didn’t know it was called the blues.” However, it set him on the path he’d follow for the rest of his life.
Discovering ‘Whoopin’ and Holerin’’ led Clapton almost directly to Big Bill Broonzy, one of the godfathers of blues guitar—an artist revered by everyone from Ronnie Wood to Muddy Waters. So, next time your little cousin starts rambling about whatever it is kids these days are getting up in arms over, maybe pay a little attention. The thing itself might not seem like much, but you never know what it could inspire.
