Blues Britannia

Every now and then, the BBC comes up with a documentary on popular music that really hits the mark. "Blues Britannia" was compulsory viewing for anyone interested in how American blues inspired so many of our great musicians of the last fifty years. Clips from performances from black performers such as Muddy Waters put alongside those of white middle class British bands including The Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds were fascinating. But the strength of the programme was in the the interviews with many of the musicians such as Jack Bruce, Bill Wyman, Ian Anderson, Paul Jones, Chris Deja and most of all Keith Richard.

Keith was brilliant, lucid and articulate, apart from the occasional "hureeeegh". He was in his element talking about how black American artists inspired him to play the guitar their way. He also did a great impression of Captain Jack Sparrow. Paul Jones mentioned how Brian Jones was starting a band and invited him to be vocalist, but he turned it down!

There were mentions for Jelly Roll Morton (I still have a record somewhere), one of the best exponents of blues piano, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee (reminding me that they headlined one of the concerts I went to see around 1965 at the Odeon Hammersmith) and Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac. "Man of the World" is still a fabulous song.

One of the main contributors was Chris Barber, who someone mentioned was the grandfather of British blues. As well as leading his jazz band, he brought a number of black American artists to play in the UK. I saw his band play at Dunmow Jazz Club around 1962/3, but before then, in 1954, he recorded, perhaps, the first important record that included British guitar based popular music. But that is for another time. One glaring omission from the programme was how the banjo/guitar player from the Chris Barber Jazz Band was playing guitar blues in the mid fifties. Just listen to Lonnie Donegan's "Diggin' My Potatoes" on YouTube.

The programme ended with how British bands re-exported blues based rock to an American white audience who had never heard of their own originators of this music. And the rest is history.