“Where I belonged”: The artist who made Eric Clapton want to play guitar
From the moment he picked up his first guitar, Eric Clapton seemed destined to play the blues. Anyone can try to put together a decent shuffle and get started on a traditional 12-bar figure, but ‘Slowhand’ helped everyone see the power of what could be done when someone had teardrops in their heart and let them out whenever the music began. Then again, anyone fluent in the blues vocabulary knows that the long history of the genre began long before Cream or The Yardbirds even started.
Because listening to the different varieties of blues throughout rock history, Clapton could have been considered a footnote compared to the true pioneers of the genre. Everyone from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago blues had been playing their own tunes in America years before The Yardbirds even began, and when listening to Clapton’s style, it’s clear where he’s getting most of his ideas from.
While the guitar legend did agree with Keith Richards that Robert Johnson is in a class by himself, there’s also a bit of BB King in the way that he plays. Despite the blues legend favouring hanging on one note and soaking it up for as much emotion as it’s worth, Clapton isn’t too different when he goes for some extended solos, practically making his guitar sound like it’s crying out in pain whenever he played.
There was still a lot of room to explore in the genre. The blues scale might only have a few notes in it, but they sound completely different whenever everyone’s heart beats differently, and compared to the biggest artists of all time, the other Kings were no slouches either, with Albert King having his unique approach of playing the guitar left-handed without restringing everything.
But Freddie King was a bit of a different beast. While he got his start in Texas, his move to Chicago was pivotal to the blues scene as a whole, joining the ranks of Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy as some of the greatest guitarists to come out of that scene. Despite Clapton learning many of his best licks secondhand from other players, he was an instant convert when Freddie began playing.
There had been other blues players in England before, but Clapton felt something familiar in Freddie’s music that might him want to pick up a guitar himself, saying, “I was interested in the white rock ‘n’ rollers until I heard Freddie King – and then I was over the moon. I knew that was where I belonged – finally. That was serious, proper guitar playing, and I haven’t changed my mind ever since. I still listen to it, and I get the same boost now that I did then.”
If you listen to some of Cream’s best material, though, it’s not hard to see Clapton taking his style from Freddie almost verbatim. There are the occasional licks that stand out as unique Claptonian, but hearing him play that famous solo in ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ has the same smooth tone and conversational quality that you would find out of some of Freddie’s greatest pieces.
It would be easy to call Clapton a copycat for jacking his sound, but that was never how the greatest bluesmen thought about things. The whole point behind this music was taking what had come before and shaping it into something new, and as far as Clapton was concerned, he took the blues model of the 1960s and dipped the whole thing in acid.
