“It really turned me on”: The first blues artist Eric Clapton fell in love with
I really don’t think any of us can quite understand the effect that the blues had on mainstream music in the 1950s. Especially to the kids in the United Kingdom that it seemingly changed the life of. The blues was arguably the first wave of genuinely alternative music, one that came up not because a record label saw “dollar dollar bills y’all” in them but because the music was just so undeniably powerful that it had to be shared around. Sparking the careers of everyone from The Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton.
You’ve got to understand, when it came to youth culture, the 1950s were when everything was being worked out. The Second World War was a world-wide trauma fading into the background for most people, the economy was steadily growing and something had to be done with all these kids coming of age. Imagine being one of them.
Imagine the only music on the British charts seeming to be Perry Como, novelty records and the occasional Nat King Cole glimpse if you’re really lucky. Then seeing what Clapton saw when he was a teenager. In a BBC Radio One interview conducted in 1990, he was asked how he discovered the blues records that inspired him to pick up the guitar.
Eric Clapton’s response was “The fact is that I was I saw Big Bill Broonzy on TV and it knocked me out, I mean it’s a famous peace of footage now, of him in a French nightclub in black and white you know.” He went on to say this was a “a very, very interesting peace of film where he performs about four five songs. There’s lots of cigarette smoke and like it’s very seedy, but the atmosphere was unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to before, it really, it turned me on.”
Why was Eric Clapton so taken with the blues?
It’s interesting to look at the English charts at the time and then compare it to what Clapton is seeing here. I picked out a random singles chart from 1955 and found a top 20 with precisely one Black artist in it. It was Eartha Kitt, for the record, showing that stopped clocks can indeed be right twice a day. Even then, Kitt is an artist steeped in Hollywood glamour. The complete antithesis of a smoky, seedy bar made silent by a man who’s lived enough life for seventeen people howling his blues alone on stag
Eric Clapton talked about this very fact in the same interview, saying “It was a mystery to me, how the tuning was, or the style seemed to come out of nowhere, it obviously had roots in America going way back, there was nothing like it for me I’d ever seen before.” Thus, it’s no surprise that Broonzy would be so influential on not just Clapton, but on that whole generation of English rock guitar greats.
Keith Richards was obviously a devoted acolyte, saying that Broonzy “encapsulated everything I wanted to be”. Ray Davies of The Kinks said that Broonzy “seemed to come from a mythical world”. Tom Jones put a song of his on his list when he appeared on Desert Island Disks. Ronnie Wood was another acolyte of Broonzy, calling him one of his favourite guitar players.
Which all speaks to the power of Broonzy’s music even over half a century after his passing.
