CD Set 1 : 1951-1966 Skiffle, Folk, Rock’n’Roll and The British Blues Boom
Teenagers in post-war America weren’t particularly fond of folk, blues or country and western; that was the stuff that their parents liked. Yet to some of their counterparts in ration-book Britain, this music seemed to offer coded sonic messages from a vanishing but intriguing culture half a world away. Lonnie Donegan’s hit album ‘King of Skiffle’ engendered a craze among British teenagers for reproducing and even recording these sounds in their suburban bedrooms or provincial youth clubs, on cheap guitars and homemade instruments and with voices often yet to break. The skiffle sound spread like wildfire across the UK before its more discerning practitioners reverted, albeit with wary amplification, towards a more rock ‘n’ roll style, taking their fusion back to North America whence it had come, in a ‘British Invasion’.
Once peculiar only to black experience, blues hovered as distant thunder in mainstream pop. Indeed, ‘Lawdy Lawdy Blues’ by singing banjo-player Papa Charlie Jackson and topical ‘Backwater Blues’ – concerning a natural disaster – and ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’, both by Bessie Smith, sold by the ton in the mid-1920s in ‘race’ (or ‘sepia’) territories without figuring at all in the parallel dimension of white pop.
Though urbanised young blacks were to lose interest in the blues, music that their migrant parents still liked, to Britons, such discs were ‘something new and exciting’ according to Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records. In a sense, they were appreciating something Americans did not value’. Taking up the theme, Mick Jagger was to add ‘As far as white people were concerned – especially suburban kids – it was interesting because it was underclass music that they’d had no experience of – or, in fact, didn’t exist by the time they had got to it anyway, almost. It was disappearing. That culture was on its way out.’
As a sixth-former, Jagger was introduced to the blues during an afternoon round a soldier’s record-player at a US air base just outside Dartford. Similar Damascine moments affected other young Britons who were to make fortunes in the later 1960s when North American collegiate youth were likely to buy anything British labelled ‘heavy’, ‘progressive’ or – surely taking coals to Newcastle – ‘blues’ . In Uncle Sam’s baseball parks and concrete coliseums, Fleetwood Mac, Cream, Ten Years After, The Jeff Beck Group, Led Zeppelin at al would be giving ‘em blues standards like ‘Shake Your Money Maker’, ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, ‘Key To The Highway’ , ‘Rock Me Baby’, and, cut, dried and dissected for nigh on twenty long minutes to snowblinded applause on the ‘Live At The Fillmore’ half of Cream’s Wheels of Fire double-album, Howlin’ Wolf’s three-verse ‘Spoonful’.
Many of their composers earned little from such work-outs due to a lackadaisical attitude to business or, in the case of Little Willie John, dying of pneumonia shortly before Fleetwood Mac’s go at his ‘Need Your Love So Bad’ slipped into the UK Top Forty. Then there was Roy Hawkins’ ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, credited erroneously to someone else for B.B. King’s spectacular revival in 1969 (though rectified by the time Chicken Shack and then Chris Farlowe alighted on it) – and what about Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup expiring aged seventy in 1974, still awaiting fat cheques for Elvis Presley’s cracks at his ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘My Baby Left Me’?
Crudup’s ‘Mean Ol’ Frisco’ was brought to a wider world by Derek and the Dominoes, fronted by Eric Clapton after the sundering of Cream, whose Fresh Cream LP had contained interpretations of ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’ – attributed to Muddy Waters – ‘I’m So Glad’ from Skip James, and Robert Johnson’s ‘From Four Until Late’ – as its successor, million-selling Disraeli Gears had Blind Joe Reynolds’ ‘Outside Woman Blues’. One of its spin-off singles was ‘Strange Brew’, sprung from ancient ‘Hey Lawdy Mama’, which had reached Cream’s ears via a version by Junior Wells, sometime harmonica player for Muddy Waters who overhauled Junior’s ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ as ‘Messing With The Man’ (which was first issued by a British group when Horsham’s Beat Merchants used it as a 1964 B-side).
Likewise, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘How Many More Years’ would be rewritten as ‘How Many More Times’ for Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut album. By then, his ‘Sitting On Top Of The World’ had already been processed by Cream, whose three members had all passed through the ranks of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. From a 1966 Mayall album, ‘Steppin’ Out’ would be the final encore at Cream’s farewell bash at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968 – though other Bluesbreakers instrumentals they could have chosen were ‘Hideaway’ (of which the 1960 original by Freddie King had been both a blues and pop hit in the USA) and ‘Double Trouble’ from Otis Rush, whose solo on ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ would be copied note-for-note by Jimmy Page in 1969 on the first Led Zeppelin LP (as, nine years earlier, Elvis Presley had done to the vocal of Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’).
Further plunderings of Mississippi and Chicago motherlodes would include ‘Reconsider Baby’ and T-Bone Walker’s ‘Mean Old World’ by Chicken Shack; Sonny Boy Williamson II’s ‘Eyesight To The Blind’ (as ‘The Hawker’) for The Who’s Tommy rock opera; Elmore James-via-Tampa Red’s ‘It Hurts Me Too’ by Savoy Brown, and James’s own ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ by Fleetwood Mac. Another Mac showstopper was ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ from Robert Johnson. He also provisioned ‘Love In Vain’ for The Rolling Stones – whose Keith Richards was to avow that ‘if Robert had lived into the era of electric guitar, he’d have killed us all’.
Johnson’s ‘Cross Road Blues’ (as ‘Crossroads’) is among four extant tracks by Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce as part of The Powerhouse, a sudden sextet convened by pianist Ben Palmer with Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones and, from The Spencer Davis Group, Steve Winwood and drummer Pete York. Following a cursory rehearsal, tapes rolled for thirty ragged minutes in an otherwise deserted Marquee. From this, ‘Crossroads’ was to develop into a mainstay of Cream’s stage act.
Yet before any of Powerhouse or most other behemoths of blues in the Swinging Sixties had left the cradle, blues in Britain had meant crackling 78s such as ‘West End Blues’ by Louis Armstrong, and the underlying thrust of, say, ‘Chips Boogie Woogie’ by Woody Herman or ‘Blues For Dixie’ from Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. When blues was mentioned in Melody Maker‘s jazz pages, the usual frame of reference was Hoagy Carmichael (e.g. ‘Hong Kong Blues’), the swing sophistications of Ella Fitzgerald, Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Witherspoon, and, from further back, Sophie Tucker – actually a white entertainer in ‘blackface’ – Ma Rainey, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway and other blues-affiliated performers who inhabited a stylistic area bordered by gospel, jazz, hillbilly, showbiz evergreens, vaudeville and all manner of trace elements in North America’s cultural melting pot.
Blues of a more gutbucket nature – much of it derived from what came to be described as ‘skiffle’, i.e. the music of speakeasy and rent party jug bands of the US Depression – wasn’t to enter the equation in earnest until a British resurgence of traditional jazz. Early ensembles of this nature included The Merseysippi Jazz Band, The High Curley Stompers and The Avon Cities Jazz Band, but, in the context of this discussion, Middlesex’s Crane River ensemble is regarded as the first in the UK to contain a bona fide ‘skiffle’ combo, formed after cornetist Ken Colyer’s seaman brother Bill spotted Dan Burley’s Skiffle Boys in a Chicago bar, and featuring guitarist and vocalist Brownie McGhee.
So it was that the Crane River boys and, later, The Chris Barber Jazz Band – via The Washboard Wonders, a trio centred on Lonnie Donegan – and The High Curley Stompers (with Chas McDevitt as its Donegan) administered folk-blues such as ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Take This Hammer’, ‘Midnight Hour Blues’, ‘Boll Weevil Song’ and ‘Sportin’ Life Blues’, initially as a break from the front-line horns’ interweaving extemporisations of ‘Bill Bailey’, ‘Tiger Rag’, ‘Ida Sweet As Apple Cider’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now’ and so forth. For many, this interlude came to be the highlight of the show – so much so that Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’ was to be the single from the Barber unit’s ten-inch New Orleans Joys long-player in 1954.
You’d have had some search then to find anything wilder on the BBC Light Programme than Ken Sekora’s Jazz Club, Friday evening’s Radio Rhythm Club and infrequent spins of Waller, Carmichael and the odd hardcore blues between the unchained melodies, Mambo Italianos and doggies-in-the-window on Two-Way Family Favourites. Long before his ennoblement as ‘King of Skiffle’, Lonnie Donegan ‘first heard blues on Radio Rhythm Club, but there was very little on wax – or shellac as it was then – unless you count a lot of jazz records with blues titles. When I threw in my lot with the first professional English jazz outfit, named after Chris Barber – who, like me, was into Leadbelly – we incorporated blues into The Washboard Wonders’. The band also included a Bessie Smith-style ‘featured vocalist’ in Barber’s then-wife Ottilie Patterson, whose party pieces included ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’ and ‘Backwater Blues’.
A strong motivation for Alexis Korner – then awaiting his destiny as, arguably, ‘the father of British Blues’ – to join Barber too had been the acquisition of discs by Leadbelly, Leroy Carr, Big Bill Broonzy, the latter’s reputed half-brother Washboard Sam, Memphis Slim, Mississippi John Hurt and further Deep South veterans through Chris’s next-door-neighbour’s relations in New York. As Donegan’s deputy and then his replacement with Barber, Korner was probably the first Briton to try Muddy Waters’ ‘I Got My Mojo Working’, which became the blues movement’s anthem – though among close seconds were ‘Midnight Special’ and Ma Rainey’s ‘CC Rider’, available on this collection by, respectively, Big Bill Broonzy – whose approach owed much to that of Leroy Carr – and Ray Charles, whose appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1961 ‘was one of the greatest things’ schoolboy Gary Brooker felt he’d ever seen who, on returning to his native Southend, began to form The Paramounts, who later mutated into Procol Harum. The name was bestowed upon them by Guy Stevens, a British showbusiness jack-of-all trades – and a keen R& B record collector. ‘The Paramounts would go round his place once a week,’ remembered Gary, ‘he showed us a lot of obscure material and by the end of the evening we’d come out with ten new songs!’ Among these was ‘Chills And Fever’ from The Johnny Love Orchestra – alias Ron Dunbar, most renowned for co-writing Freda Payne’s 1970 million-seller ‘Band Of Gold’. The Paramounts’ ‘Chills And Fever’ mouldered in the vaults of EMI until issued on a CD retrospective, but it was the 1964 A-side vehicle whereby Tom Jones first troubled the world. He, like Brooker, was a huge Ray Charles fan – though he was unable to negotiate the 150 miles from his native Pontypridd to attend the pivotal Hammersmith Odeon show.
Broonzy’s London concert a decade earlier, however, has been pinpointed generally as British blues’ sluggish conception – although while in the US army, Howlin’ Wolf had been stationed in Lincolnshire in 1944 as Private Chester Burnett, and had done a turn for his GI buddies and civilian drinkers in a village pub, and Josh White had appeared for a week in 1947 as part of a variety presentation at the Chiswick Empire – where Alexis Korner, Lonnie Donegan and Chas McDevitt each wormed backstage to pay respects. In parenthesis, seventeen-year-old youth club leader John Mayall, having taught himself boogie-woogie piano, guitar and harmonica, made a debut with his blues trio at Manchester’s Bogeda Jazz Club in 1950.
White was to be granted his own eponymous television show on ITV – and, in 1957, Broonzy (with his then-novel twelve-string guitar) appeared on Six Five Special, a BBC television magazine that balanced pop with comedy, classical and ‘ethnic’ music and self-improvement features on sport and hobbies. Following a build-up by champion boxer Freddie Mills, Broonzy sang the emotional ‘Midnight Special’ – which was to surface as a set-work when skiffle spread across the kingdom like bubonic plague.
Like punk after it, anyone who’d mastered basic techniques could have a go – and the more do-it-yourself the sound, the better. No-one howled with derision at tea-chest bass, dustbin-lid cymbals, biscuit-tin snare drum and other devices constructed from household implements. Offering entertainment for as little as a round of fizzy drinks, there were hundreds of skifflers in every shire, thrashing that E-chord on digit-lacerating six-strings and singing through their noses about being on a chain gang, waking up in an empty bed or – as St. Louis Jimmy Oden had in ‘Goin’ Down Slow’ – lamenting a misspent youth. In back-of-beyond youth clubs with soft drinks, ping-pong and a presiding with-it vicar, they were as far removed as he could be from the plantations, the ghettos and the prejudice, and the stabbings, shootings and brawls that prompted the incarcerations of Bukka White, Son House and Leadbelly, who was behind bars in Louisiana when cultural archivist John A. Lomax ‘discovered’ him. Incidentally, Kelly Pace, composer of ‘Rock Island Line’, was then an inmate of a penitentiary in neighbouring Arkansas.
Yet, whether Vince Eager of Grantham’s Vagabonds, The Quarry Men’s John Lennon, future Trogg Chris Britton in The Hiccups, Spencer Davis of The Saints, Chris Farlowe in The John Henry Group, Van Morrison with The Sputniks, Crispian St. Peters from Swanley’s Hard Travellers and the nameless amalgam of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Dick Taylor and other Medway Towns teenagers, most hitmakers-in-waiting were more likely to acknowledge the second-hand influence of Donegan, who’d left the runway by coming within an ace of Number One with an overhaul of Papa Charlie Jackson’s ‘(Long Gone) Lost John’ after striking out on his own when ‘Rock Island Line’ spent months in the Top Twenty (albeit followed by a flop in an exhumation of Washboard Sam’s ‘Diggin’ My Potatoes’). Further hard listening to walking archive Leadbelly was evidenced in versions by Donegan and, second to him in the skiffle hierarchy, The Vipers of the work song, ‘Pick A Bale Of Cotton’, although Leadbelly seems to spit out every word during the only extant film we purportedly have of him. This footage also embraced ‘Take This Hammer’, revived in 1953 by Ken Colyer-as-skiffler with guitar and apposite toiling grunts supplied by Alexis Korner.
It was when Korner delivered this and Leadbelly’s ‘Leaving Blues’ in his own right when in Chris Barber’s employ that he wondered if a recital consisting entirely of blues was feasible. With harmonica blower and blues shouter Cyril Davies, who had a panel-beating business in South Harrow, he’d try to establish a ‘Blues and Barrelhouse’ club in a Soho pub, and, in September 1960, he would raise a derisive eyebrow on learning details about a Church hall in Putney hosting the inauguration of a ‘blues society’. It turned out that ‘opening night’ meant ‘final meeting’ as, aided by discs, its patrons had discussed how ‘interesting’ it all was, this Twisted Voice of the Underdog. Then, in a knowing, nodding kind of way, they sat through what was billed as ‘the debut of a fabulous new group, Benny Green’s Rhythm And Blues All Stars’, whilst blocking out the impure thought in the tacit question, ‘How could anyone like this stuff?’
Alexis knew all about Benny. He’d been a saxophonist in Lord Rockingham’s XI, the house band on Oh Boy!, the less pious ITV successor to Six-Five Special, and who functioned too as a music critic who was especially scathing about rock ‘n’ roll. He was also one of a caste with first refusal on more or less all London studio sessions as, to a lesser degree, were Korner and Cyril Davies since being asked to leave Chris Barber’s band, mainly because of their ceaseless and unsolicited attempts to impose a surfeit of their own stylistic determination upon the established status quo. Yet Chris wasn’t anti-blues, far from it, for, unlike others who merely acted as agents for tours, he financed the conservation of the form, and ensured that British experience of gen-u-ine black American blues needn’t be limited to mere records. In the teeth of advice to the contrary from the National Jazz Federation, he was ready to sustain monetary losses on such as the hour and a quarter of Muddy Waters in October 1958 at St. Pancras Town Hall (that fifteen-year-old Mick Jagger’s father wouldn’t permit him to attend) and on visits by other leading ‘songsters’ including Brownie McGhee (with Sonny Terry) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, represented here by 1945’s testifying ‘This Train’, dissolving outlines between gospel and blues.
Like ‘This Train’, ‘Stack O’ Lee’ was the common property of countless blues exponents. Ma Rainey and Mississippi John Hurt each released arrangements – though it first impinged on the British pop-picker on a Lonnie Donegan EP as ‘Stackalee’ , a spelling that disclosed its source, i.e. 1952’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-album retrospective of blues, folk and hillbilly from the late 1920s.
‘Stack O’ Lee’ was first immortalised on disc by Frank Hutchison, a bottleneck guitarist and mouth-organist, raised in West Virginia when Queen Victoria was still alive, and thought to be the first white musician to record country blues. As such, he was also responsible too for the template of ‘Cumberland Gap’, which in 1957’s chilly spring, was a Donegan Number One.
That summer, Lonnie did it again with a double-A-side, ‘Putting On The Style’ – and ‘Gamblin’ Man’ from the canon of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl minstrel who was also the wellspring of ‘Grand Coolie Dam’, another Donegan chart strike – and a characteristically unpolished rendering of the century-old blues, ‘Boll Weevil Song’, addressing the locust-like insect that infested the cotton-growing regions below the Mason-Dixon line throughout the 1920s.
It was also in the inventory of Leadbelly and then Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who lent one-man-band Jesse Fuller a bohemian seal of approval by reviving his ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ magnum opus in 1961. Along with Guthrie, Dylan, Pete Seeger, Peter-Paul-and-Mary and Fred Gerlach, Elliot helped popularise centuries-old ‘Gallows Pole’, rendered as ‘The Gallis Pole’ by Leadbelly prior to its updating on 1970’s Led Zeppelin III and later surfaced as an idol of Greenwich Village, the vibrant New York district that had teemed with poets, painters and musicians since the 1840s – and where the civil rights movement was fusing with folk to be labelled ‘protest’.
Over the Atlantic, it manifested itself most conspicuously in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As well as the expected ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’, its marches were soundtracked by items popular in the folk clubs where the more junior demonstrators might unwind afterwards. Most of them were students, weekend dropouts and ‘young people’ (as opposed to ‘youths’) who might have dressed down for the occasion in frayed jeans, Jesus sandals, holey pullover, carefully tousled hair and CND badge while Guthrie, Leadbelly or the first Bob Dylan LP was warming up the Dansette record-player.
More erudite vinyl treasures were obtainable through haunting outlets like Carey’s Swing Shop in Streatham, Birmingham’s Diskery, Violet May’s in Sheffield, Plymouth’s Hot Record Shop and a Belfast bicycle shop with a sideline in a similarly vast spectrum of relevant vinyl merchandise from North America. Often, enthusiasts entered such premises not so much to buy anything, but to initiate lively discussions and air increasingly more encyclopaedic knowledge about not only the Wolves, Waterses and Sonny Boys, but the obscurer likes of Bill ‘Jazz’ Gillum and Blind Joe Reynolds and, prior to his international emergence in the later 1960s, Buddy Guy, whose ‘I Got My Eyes On You’/ ‘First Time I Met The Blues’ 45 on Chicago’s Chess label was all you could purchase by him in 1960 as two earlier efforts had been for a company that had gone into liquidation the previous year.
The spiral into blues dependency often became breakneck, leading to expeditions to Manchester, Birmingham and London to catch this or that jet-lagged Mississippi delta legend – sometimes with several on the same bill as instanced by 1965’s value-for-money American Folk Blues Festival package with Mississippi Fred McDowell, Dr. Isaiah Ross – whose ‘Cat Squirrel’ instrumental would surface on albums by Cream, Jethro Tull, J.B. Lenoir, Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Boyd, Big Mama Thornton, John Lee Hooker and lesser lights. There was also much falling out of bed at 5 a.m. to catch a half-hour blues show on the American Forces Network, transmitted principally from occupied Germany.
AFN’s broadcasting of certain ‘redneck’ country-and-western artists was acceptable too – for what else was C&W then if not white-trash blues? The example on this collection is ‘Tobacco Road’ (later, the signature tune of The Nashville Teens) from the pen of Nashville tunesmith John D. Loudermilk, whose efforts were motivated by his desire to ‘tell the world how the guy in the filling station feels’.
Conversely, Chuck Berry’s first smash, 1955’s ‘Maybelline’, owed as much to C&W as blues. So did ‘Downbound Train’, a B-side later that year, in which the Devil crops up as the engineer with a brimstone lamp, sulphur fumes and other terrifying images flooding a passenger’s tipsy musings. In Britain, it was covered in all-acoustic manner by Ken Colyer, now hedging his bets with a skiffle four-piece as well as his trad band.
On the jazz club network, the more precious of its patrons put up with skifflers as long as they didn’t venture too far into out-and-out pop. Yet although trad was in the ascendant – its toot-tooting soon to penetrate the hit parade – many skiffle players who were contemplating whether or not to donate their Donegan seventy-eights to jumble sales, backslid, via wary amplification, to rock ‘n’ roll – ‘a more commercial form of skiffle,’ shrugged the authors of 1960’s sniffy A Guide To Popular Music, compiled by staff at Decca, one of the country’s four major record companies.
Planting feet in both camps was a self-financed single by Spencer Davis’s Saints in its coupling of ‘Midnight Special’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘Oh Boy!’. Furthermore, after ‘Stack O’ Lee’ – retitled ‘Stagger Lee’ and rejuvenated with a rock ‘n’ roll beat – was a US smash for Lloyd Price in 1959, perhaps north London console boffin Joe Meek sniffed the wind too by overhauling ‘San Francisco Blues’ in like manner as a 1963 A-side for a Burr Bailey and, slightly more lucratively, ‘Diggin’ My Potatoes’ as Heinz’s UK chart farewell.
Going the whole hog, Meek had attempted to chase another protégé, Michael Cox’s 1960 Top Ten strike ‘Angela Jones’ – a John D. Loudermilk opus – with ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, another by Chuck Berry whose cult celebrity had been boosted, as it had been with Leadbelly before him, by a jail term that put a temporary halt to his career.
In fiction, conditions in prison might have sparked off the insurrection rammed home by The Robins in ‘Riot In Cell Block Number 9’, which borrowed the suspensory riff from Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. It was copied in Britain by Wee Willie Harris, bruited by his manager as our very own Jerry Lee Lewis, while Roy Young from Oxford, was attempting to corner the Little Richard market – ‘easily the hardest to carry off,’ judged his pal, Adam Faith. ‘if you didn’t happen to be Little Richard’.
Young shied away from emulating Richard on vinyl, but former Royal College of Church Music chorister Dickie Pride – whose onstage convulsions were to earn him the nickname ‘The Sheik Of Shake’ – was first seen by the country at large, plugging his 1959 cover of the Georgia Peach’s ‘Slippin’ And Slidin” on TV, having recognised that heisting US pop was how you gave yourself the best chance of being elevated from the dusty boards of a skiffle club to ‘scream circuit’ package tours and a slot on Oh Boy!. On the wireless, these could sound virtually identical to the originals – though among exceptions were comedian Charlie Drake’s ‘Sea Cruise’ from Little Richard associate Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and his Clowns-via–white collegian Frankie Ford (which resulted from his replacement of Smith’s erased vocal over the instrumental backing).
Ford made hay while Chuck Berry was doing time, Little Richard was lost to the Church, Buddy Holly was dead – and baby snatching Jerry Lee Lewis had been hounded from this sceptre’d isle less than a week into his maiden tour here. As a barometer of his popularity prior to this upset, it was thought prudent to contract two substitute headliners, Chas McDevitt and Terry Wayne, a sixteen-year-old Londoner, who’d been on Six-Five Special. His latest release had coupled ‘Your True Love’ and walking-pace ‘Matchbox’ – items that also happened to constitute both sides of a recent single by Carl Perkins, whose previous offering, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, had been eclipsed by that of Elvis Presley, partly because, for female fans, the happily-married father-of-three was disadvantaged by the King’s bachelor status.
You could sing like a nightingale or make a guitar talk, but if you were old enough to be a wedded dad or be on the cusp of baldness, obesity and other ravages of age, how could you expect to checkmate a younger, tougher, sexier rival? Nevertheless, for all the achievements of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, The Paramounts, The Troggs, The Spencer Davis Group and other striplings arisen from skiffle – and, next, those of Fleetwood, Mac, Chicken Shack, Cream, Led Zeppelin and all the rest of them, it would be none other than grizzled Alexis Korner, well into his thirties, who’d epitomise a high water mark in British blues when he led the resident band on the ITV children’s series, Five O’Clock Club. Decades on, the memory of glove-puppet compere Pussy Cat Willum introducing Korner’s gritty ‘CC Rider’ isn’t easy to forget.
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Liner notes by Alan Clayson, courtesy Nick Duckett
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The CD Set Contents
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DISC ONE SKIFFLE, FOLK, ROCK’N’ROLL |
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Title |
Artist |
Date of Recording |
UK Release Date & Catalogue # |
|
1. Downbound Train |
Chuck Berry |
1955 |
Jul 1956 London HLU 8275 |
|
2. Rock Island Line |
Leadbelly |
1947 |
1951 Folkways FP14 |
|
3. Long Gone Lost John |
Papa Charlie Jackson |
1928 |
UK release unknown |
|
4. See See Rider |
Ray Charles |
1950 |
UK release unknown |
|
5. Tobacco Road |
John D. Loudermilk |
1960 |
Jan 1960 Columbia 41562 US |
|
6. Backwater Blues |
Bessie Smith |
1927 |
UK release unknown |
|
7. Leaving Blues |
Leadbelly |
1947 |
1951 Folkways FP14 |
|
8. Midnight Hour Blues |
Leroy Carr |
1932 |
1964 CBS BPG 62206 |
|
9. Sportin’ Life Blues |
Brownie McGhee |
1946 |
UK release unknown |
|
10. Cumberland Gap |
Frank Hutchison |
1928 |
UK release unknown |
|
11. Matchbox |
Carl Perkins |
1957 |
Apr 1957 London HLS 8408 |
|
12. This Train |
Sister Rosetta Tharpe |
1945 |
UK release unknown |
|
13. Riot In Cell Block No. 9 |
The Robins |
1954 |
UK release unknown |
|
14. Ain’t Nobody’s Business |
Jimmy Witherspoon |
1949 |
UK release unknown |
|
15. Slippin’ And Slidin’ |
Little Richard |
1956 |
Feb 1957 London EP 1071 |
|
16. Sea Cruise |
Huey ‘Piano’ Smith |
1958 |
Mar 1959 London 8850 (Frankie Ford) |
|
17. Sweet Little Sixteen |
Chuck Berry |
1957 |
Feb 1958 London HLM 8585 |
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18. Midnight Special |
Big Bill Broonzy |
1935 |
1961 Storyville 45053 |
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19. Pick a Bale of Cotton |
Leadbelly |
1947 |
1950 Folkways FP4 |
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20. San Francisco Bay Blues |
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott |
1961 |
1957 77 LP1 |
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21. Stack O’Lee |
Mississippi John Hurt |
1928 |
UK release unknown |
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22. Boll Weevil Song |
Woody Guthrie |
2006 |
UK release unknown |
|
23. Take This Hammer |
Leadbelly |
1947 |
1950 Folkways FP4 |
|
24. Diggin My Potatoes |
Washboard Sam |
1939 |
UK release unknown |
|
25. Going Down Slow |
Jimmy Cotton |
1962 |
Sep 1962 Columbia SEG 8189 |
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26. Chills And Fever |
Johnny Love & His Orchestra |
1960 |
UK release unknown |
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27. Rock Island Line |
Kelly Pace |
1934 |
UK release unknown |
|
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DISC TWO BRITISH BLUES BOOM |
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Title |
Artist |
Date of Recording |
UK Release Date & Catalogue # |
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1. Cat Squirrel |
Dr. Isaiah Ross |
1959 |
1966 Bounty BY 6020 |
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2. Shake Your Money Maker |
Elmore James |
1961 |
1964 Sue ILP 918 |
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3. Spoonful |
Howlin’ Wolf |
1960 |
July 1963 Pye NPL 28030 |
|
4. Steppin’ Out |
Memphis Slim |
1959 |
1969 Joy 143 |
|
5. Messin’ With The Kid |
Junior Wells |
1960 |
UK release unknown |
|
6. Hide Away |
Freddie King |
1960 |
June 1961 Parlophone 4777 |
|
7. Rollin’ And Tumblin’ |
Muddy Waters |
1950 |
1965 Chess CRL 4515 |
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8. Gallis Pole |
Leadbelly |
1939 |
1965 Presto PRE 689 |
|
9. Mean Ol’ Frisco |
Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup |
1942 |
1965 Sue ILP 921 |
|
10. Cross Road Blues |
Robert Johnson |
1936 |
Sep 1962 Philips BBL 7539 |
|
11. Outside Woman Blues |
Blind Joe Reynolds |
1929 |
1965 Origin Jazz Library OJL-8 |
|
12. How Many More Years |
Howlin’ Wolf |
1951 |
1966 Marble Arch MAL 665 |
|
13. I’m So Glad |
Skip James |
1931 |
1965 Origin Jazz Library OJL-8 |
|
14. It Hurts Me Too |
Tampa Red |
1949 |
1965 Sue ILP 927 (Elmore James) |
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15. Love In Vain |
Robert Johnson |
1937 |
1970 CBS 64102 (Waterman Tapes) |
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16. Mean Old World |
T-Bone Walker |
1942 |
1964 Pye NPL 28043 (Little Walter) |
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17. Need Your Love So Bad |
Little Willie John |
1955 |
1961 King 767 US |
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18. Sitting On Top Of The World |
Howlin’ Wolf |
1957 |
1965 Chess CRL 4508 |
|
19. See See Baby (Lawdy Mama) |
Freddie King |
1962 |
1965 Delmark 612 (Junior Wells) |
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20. From Four Until Late |
Robert Johnson |
1937 |
1970 CBS 64102 (Waterman Tapes) |
|
21. Reconsider Baby |
Lowell Fulsom |
1954 |
July 1963 Pye NPL 28030 |
|
22. Key To The Highway |
Bill “Jazz” Gillum |
1940 |
1958 RCA 130.257 French |
|
23. Eyesight To The Blind |
Sonny Boy Williamson |
1952 |
1963 Stateside 10106 (Mose Allison) |
|
24. I Can’t Quit You Baby |
Otis Rush |
1956 |
1965 Sue ILP 921 |
|
25. The Thrill Is Gone |
Roy Hawkins |
1951 |
1969 Stateside SS 2161 (B.B.King) |
|
26. Rock Me Baby |
B.B. King |
1961 |
Jun 1964 Ember 196 |
|
27. Sweet Home Chicago |
Robert Johnson |
1937 |
1970 CBS 64102 (Waterman Tapes) |
|
28. First Time I Met The Blues |
Buddy Guy |
1960 |
July 1963 Pye NPL 28030 |
|
29. Double Trouble |
Otis Rush |
1958 |
Aug 1969 Blue Horizon 57-3159 |
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