John Mayall, OBE, died last week at 90. Often called the “Godfather of British blues,” Mayall was so much more than just a pioneer of British blues. By introducing a generation of rock fans to the blues, he arguably had a hand in saving blues as a viable commercial music form at a time in the 1960s when elderly bluesmen were trotted out at folk festivals as quaint examples of a bygone era.
Almost every biography of Mayall includes the litany of rock stars who played with him in his iterations of the Bluesbreakers, including Eric Clapton, who left a successful Yardbirds to sharpen his blues skills with Mayall’s band; Peter Green, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor, who left to form the original Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor. who went on to join the Rolling Stones. Mayall was so well regarded as a band leader that Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor and Walter Trout all left a successful Canned Heat to join his Bluesbreakers. On 1990’s A Sense of Place, Sonny Landreth was essentially a member of the band though credited as a guest artist. Coco Montoya also played with the Bluesbreakers, leaving in 1993 to be replaced with Buddy Whittington. But Mayall’s reputation as a band leader and mentor ignores his own musical talents. A multi-instrumentalist, Mayall played all the parts except drums on The Blues Alone in 1967. And he was among the most exciting blues harp players in the world – one listen to “Room to Move” on Turning Point should convince any skeptics of that.
Hailing from Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, Mayall attended art college while living in a treehouse in Manchester after serving the military in Korea. While working as an artist, Mayall continued to pursue his passion for the blues, eventually moving to London in 1963. Mayall’s 1960s albums with Clapton, Green and Taylor are blues-rock classics, but over the years he continued to produce high quality music, conquered an alcohol dependency, and matured as a showman.
As a bonus, check out the (calculated) worst lip synching ever by “John Mahall”:
About the author: Bill Wilcox is a roots music enthusiast recently relocated from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia, PA and back again.