The 1968 Jethro Tull song Ian Anderson wishes had a different guitarist: “It would have been a whole lot better”
The rock world that Jethro Tull had begun to dominate in the 1970s was a far cry from what the world knew in the 1950s.
With the smell of sociopolitical progress fresh in their nostrils, the hippie generation set a similar pace in the arts. In 1965, Bob Dylan “went electric”, blending the folk tradition with rock or electric blues for the first time in popular music. A colourful wave of change ensued through the remainder of the decade, leaving no stone unturned or combination untested. Among this era’s intrepid, genre-blending artists was the early British prog band Jethro Tull.
As their name, derived from that of an 18th-century English agricultural pioneer, suggests, Jethro Tull liked to celebrate history and tradition. How does that work in a progressive setting? You might ask. As a group of innovative musicians with eclectic taste, the band celebrated its most revered luminaries by repackaging traditional approaches in unconventional sound marriages.
Jethro Tull’s first stable lineup featured Ian Anderson on vocals and flute, Mick Abrahams on guitar, Glenn Cornick on bass, and Clive Bunker on the drums. The 1968 debut album, This Was, introduced a blues-jazz fusion sound, which the band soon built upon, incorporating influences in classical, hard rock and folk music as they established themselves among a vibrant generation of prog-rockers.
Part of what made Jethro Tull stand apart in this crowded field was their willingness to embrace contradiction. At a time when many bands were leaning fully into either heavy blues rock or ornate psychedelia, they found space somewhere in between, stitching together ideas that did not always seem immediately compatible. The flute, in particular, became a defining feature, not as a novelty but as a central voice that challenged the conventions of what a rock band could sound like. It gave their music a slightly unbalanced quality, something that kept it from settling too comfortably into any one category.
That sense of unpredictability extended to their songwriting approach. Rather than building tracks around familiar hooks or structures, they often allowed compositions to unfold in a more fluid, almost conversational way. There was a looseness to it, but never a lack of intent. Each shift in tone or texture felt considered, even when it caught the listener off guard. It was this balance between discipline and experimentation that laid the groundwork for everything that followed, giving Anderson the confidence to push further into uncharted territory.
While frontman Ian Anderson adored the blues more than anything, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters being two of his earliest idols, his talent as a flautist beckoned early innovation. In a 2018 feature with Rolling Stone, Anderson picked out ‘Beggar’s Farm’ as one of his favourite creations when reflecting on his work with Jethro Tull.
The track arrived on This Was and has since become a fan favourite from the band’s early catalogue. Anderson recalled the song as one of the first he ever wrote from scratch alongside Abrahams. “It was essentially a 12-bar-blues derived piece, but lyrically, it was a little unusual,” he said, noting the blues influence. “It was a relatively successful attempt to take the essence of black American blues and turn it into some middle-class white boy [sound].”
Anderson recalled the song’s crucial “jazzy feel”, which he achieved thanks to a newfound passion for the flute. When he wrote the song, he had only begun to learn the woodwind instrument but was proud of the finished product a few months on. “When we recorded it, it was about six months down the line, so it’d settled into something reasonably competent in regard to the recording,” he added.
Within his own capabilities, Anderson wouldn’t change much about the ‘Beggar’s Farm’. However, he has always dreamt that if his contemporary hero, Peter Green, reimagined the song, it would have been a true masterpiece. “He had this great knack of taking things that were essentially a blues piece and then turning them around into what was being referred to as ‘progressive rock’,” Anderson said of the late guitarist. “It was no longer just an imitative and rather implausible copying of black American folk blues. It was doing something else with it that I think was peculiarly British, really.”
Green, the accomplished guitarist of John Mayall’s Bluebreakers and later Fleetwood Mac fame, was endorsed by John Lennon and David Gilmour as one of his generation’s finest musicians. Anderson certainly concurs and believes Green could have made ‘Beggar’s Farm’ a “whole lot” better. “He just would have brought his particular touch to it,” the Jethro Tull frontman pursued. “He would have done the same kind of thing as he did with ‘Black Magic Woman’, which was a song that Fleetwood Mac used to do and then was covered successfully by Santana. So that’s what was behind that.”
It appears that Green’s English approach to the blues tradition influenced Anderson greatly during the creation of This Was. Sadly, we will never hear what ‘Beggar’s Farm’ would have sounded like as reimagined by Green. Perhaps, in a style akin to ‘Black Magic Woman’, the vocal delivery would be more intense and the guitar work more dynamic and edgy.
