The only blues song to go number one in the UK
Life in Britain in the 1950s was a tough slog. Decimated by the scourge of the Second World War, the youth of the day grew up amid destruction and decay. Strangely, new technologies were also simultaneously expanding the world. Horizons rose beyond the rubble to America, where the blues were booming.
This music seemed to mean more than the mere pretty melodies of British jazz bands. It was raw and vivid. As Brian Johnson comically told Far Out, when he was a child, his first reaction to hearing the likes of Big Bill Broonzy was simply, “Whaaat the fuck”. These giants from afar came crackling over the radio, sounding off like a beacon of hope.
The blues became a big hit on British soil as a result. Contrary to what some might derive from the name of the genre, the reason for this is because it offered hope. As Wynton Marsalis said, just as everything was spawned from the blues, everything comes out in it too; “Joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.”
However, by and large, it offered hope to the generation who were searching for it the most. In the UK, the blues became a youth culture movement—one of the first youth culture movements, in fact, in history. This meant that its buzz was not matched by commercial success. Parents still held the family purse and they were still happy with big band swing.
What was the first blues number one in the UK?
But the passion among the youth was still fervent enough for it to be played constantly on certain radio stations, and groups like The Rolling Stones were set up as a result, hoping to emulate their American heroes. However, usually when these groups were signed up, they were told that the blues might be hip, but ‘it doesn’t sell over here’.
Alas, the Rolling Stones were bold enough to figure that the times may have changed. Surely, the kids who had been raised in awe of Sister Rosetta Tharpe were now old enough to buy singles in their own right. “No one has ever done a blues record for a single in England,” the band’s bassist, Bill Wyman, recalls them being told. “It’s the worst thing. Like they said to Ray Charles, ‘Don’t do a country album because it will destroy you, and it was the greatest thing he ever did’. Well, when we did ‘Little Red Rooster’, they said, ‘You’re going to kill yourself’. It came out on the Friday, and on the Monday it was number one.”
In Wyman’s view, it was Brian Jones’ signature blues slide sound that put them on that important mantle. It was new and different in an era when nobody knew that newness and difference were what people wanted. “He was brilliant. He was a brilliant musician. He shocked everyone with the quality of his playing,” the former Stones man adds. Jones was the Svengali behind it all, steadfastly shaping his vision of blues purity, revivified for a new, radical era.
The band had delivered on the promise that the blues first prognosticated when it came crackling through on the radio—the kids of the day had risen from the rubble with something to call their own. So, in an instant, the blues went from a cultural sensation that labels were wary of backing, to the Stones putting out an old standard in the shape of ‘Little Red Rooster’ and proving that it had a profound following.
What was the last blues number one in the UK?
But it is not without irony that the second that the blues proved youth culture was a bona fide boom, it also proved that the youth could create a culture of their own. So, the groups who would become British Invasion bands instantly went from imitating the sound of the States to trying to create something new. The blues was blended with everything else that the kids drew inspiration from, and instantly, a new sound was created.
This places ‘Little Red Rooster’ in the strange position of being the first and only blues number one in the UK—the beginning of a revolution and a realisation of a new one, all in a matter of moments. Hope had arrived, and it fostered a new future.
