The one singer Eric Clapton called impossible to emulate: “You lose something”
Eric Clapton is a quintessential guitar player. With a style that oozes the sensibilities of the blues forefathers before him, Clapton became a master of the genre and was responsible for the penning of many iconic riffs. But such is the depth of blues as a genre that the work of Clapton is but a small step in a stairway of greatness.
After a formative youth that put a steel-string Hoyer in his hands at an early age, Clapton would go on to study the intricacies of the instrument at great length. In fact, when he got to art school as an adolescent, he was regularly on the edge of expulsion for his continued practice of scales in the classroom. Within the peeling bricks of London’s art school, a relationship between guitars and Clapton was forged and would be ignited by the influx of blues records, that made their way across the Atlantic.
“I was listening to a lot of blues,” Clapton said of his early adolescence he said on Desert Island Discs, “As well as everything else you heard on Family Favourites. You’d hear the occasional Lead Belly song or Big Bill Broonzy or Check Berry, you know?”
But it was legendary blues artist Robert Johnson’s crossroad blues that flipped the switch. Clapton named it one of the “deepest of all the blues records in my life” and went on to describe Johnson as the “most disturbing and hardest to listen to of all the blues singers because it is such emotionally charged music. Although it may not sound like it to the uninitiated, it’s musically the most complicated style of blues playing there is, I think.”
Johnson was of course a product of the Delta Blues scene that emerged from Mississippi in the 1930s. It was a rich and colourful music scene that broke ground in the world of blues and platformed not only Robert Johnson but also Howlin Wolf. A powerhouse artist who crystallised the essence of blues rock and performed it with a voice that fellow bluesman Cub Koda said had the ability to “rock the house down to the foundation while simultaneously scaring its patrons out of its wits”.
He set out a legacy that not only informed Clapton, but struck him with fear. In 1994, he released his album From The Cradle which featured a string of covers, including the likes of Muddy Waters, Barbecue Bob and Freddie King. While Clapton felt comfortable doffing his cap to some of his blues predecessors, he made it clear in an interview with John Pidgeon that Howlin’ Wolf’s greatness was simply off limits.
“I’ve found that it’s impossible for me to sing a Howlin’ Wolf song on record, and for me to be convinced about it at the end of the day, unless I change it so much that it’s just not me doing a Howlin’ Wolf song, but then you lose something, because sometimes the songs aren’t strong enough without his actual presence” Clapton said.
He continued, “so a lot of them are combinations of what they meant to me from the time I first heard it – and like you said, I still get that feeling when I hear the song, when I start to do it – and what I’m able to bring to it, how much of it is adaptable to be mine”.
