Blues Memories - Alan White
A few
details about me, how I got into the Blues as a teenager, how my passion for the
Blues grew over the years, and how I came to build the early blues website.....
Birthplace -
Worcestershire, England
I was born on 6th May 1949
at Thorney Cottage, Brotheridge Green, Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, UK, a
very historic and pretty old town next to the River Severn, now home to one of
the finest annual blues festivals in the UK. Of course when I popped into the
world there were still many of the old blues singers still going strong in the
US, but in the deep rural countryside of Worcestershire in the 1950’s, no chance
of growing up listening to blues music there! When I was still young however, my
parents moved to Solihull, on the south side of Birmingham, so most of my
schooldays were spent in the Birmingham area.
Schooldays - Discovering Blues Music
As a schoolboy at Wellesbourne
School, Acocks Green, Birmingham, over 40 years ago, I used to rave about the
Rolling Stones – I always preferred their music and raucous style over the
Beatles. I bought all their LP records and played them over and over again. My
special favourites were Love in Vain, Little Red Rooster, and Prodigal Son. Why
did I prefer these and who were these written by? Johnson, Dixon, and Wilkins -
who were they? As a teenager in England in 1967 there were no computers, no
Internet, nothing about them in the libraries and I knew no-one who could tell
me who these songwriters were. Slowly I trawled the record stores in Birmingham
and started to discover a few - very few - albums with titles like ‘The Rural
Blues’, ‘How Blue Can You Get’ and ‘This is Blues’. I started to recognise song
names but I didn’t recognise the singers – Muddy Waters – who’s he?? I invested
in one or two of these ‘sampler’ albums (that’s all you could get at the time)
and I was smitten – what wonderful music – I had found the Blues! From the
Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Cream and John Mayall in the UK to Robert
Johnson, Willie Dixon, Robert Wilkins and Muddy Waters in the US. This was my
introduction to the Blues and I’ve been passionate about all types of Blues
music ever since. About the same time I also became interested in Gospel music
(as I read somewhere, Gospel and the Blues are just the flip sides of the same
coin). I’m not very religious but I love the passion in the singing.
Teenage Years - Live Blues Music at
Mother’s Club, Erdington, Birmingham
As a teenager, at that time, you were
supposed to go to discos, night clubs, dancing and parties. I wasn’t for all of
that. I wanted live music – blues or rhythm & blues or even rock n’roll. My good
schoolfriend Bob Sumner and I were of one mind – we had to find good live music.
Fortunately Birmingham had a number of venues that attracted artists and bands
which we were able to see, such as Spencer Davis Group, Eric Burdon and the
Animals, Deep Purple, Van Morrison, The Who, and many other major bands of the
time. In addition to these one-off gigs at large venues we were looking for a
blues club and we certainly found it at Mother’s Club in Erdington, Birmingham.
We spotted an advert for Mothers Club in the Birmingham Evening Mail newspaper,
listing names we hadn’t heard of at that time but thought it sounded just what
we were looking for, so we went one Saturday night. And we continued to go three
or four nights a week until the club closed down in 1971.
Mothers was THE ‘home of good
sounds’. From 1968 to 1971 the club carved a niche in the history of rock music,
being voted number one venue in the world by America’s Billboard magazine! The
list of artists and bands who played there (and many of whom I was fortunate to
see) included:
Pink Floyd
John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers
Canned Heat
Deep Purple
Joe Cocker
Fleetwood Mac
Muddy Waters
Otis Span
Free
The Who
Led Zeppelin
Richie Havens
Black Sabbath
Mississippi Fred McDowell
Johnny Shines
Jeff Beck
Traffic with Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi
Groundhogs
Elton John
Santana
Van Morrison
The Faces
Derek and the Dominoes with Eric Clapton
A regular DJ at Mothers was John
Peel.
Birmingham is regarded by many
as the birthplace of heavy metal music. In the late 1960s Black Sabbath, The
Move, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant and John Bonham) cut their
teeth in the city's early bands such as the Band Of Joy, Balls and the Rockin'
Chevrolets. At this time America's Billboard magazine declared Mothers to be
"the number one rock venue in the world", later in an interview with Fused
magazine, John Peel also cited it as being one of the "best nightclubs in
Britain" of it's time. Pink Floyd recorded much of their album "Ummagumma" at
the venue, The Who performed their musical hit "Tommy" there, Traffic staged
their debut gig there alongside many early performances from Black Sabbath.
Black Sabbath with ‘frontman’ Ozzy Osborne were the local band who played
Mothers regularly on Wednesdays. Mothers used to be compared with the Cavern
Club in Liverpool where the Beatles regularly played. Mothers was about the same
size club, but with a more ‘bluesy’ feel. By the way I saw the Beatles play at
the Odeon in Birmingham in circa 1965 when I was about 16 (you could say I saw
them but I couldn’t hear them – full of screaming girls!!). After Mothers Club
closed down (the owners of the site wanted to use the space as a furniture
showroom - hmmmm!) Bob and I continued to go to other music venues in and around
Birmingham, but it was never the same as Mothers!
We did go to the Bath Blues Festival,
or should I say ‘The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music’ on the
weekend of 27-28th June 1970. The festival started at midday on the
Saturday and finished at about 6.30 am on the Monday. This was our first
experience of a major music festival. A crowd of some 150,000 descending on the
small town of Shepton Mallet near Bath for two days of music - flowing virtually
non stop – bliss!
The festival featured
a lineup of the top American west coast and British bands of the day, including:
The Byrds, Canned Heat, Colosseum, Donovan, Fairport Convention, Maynard
Ferguson Big Band, Flock, Formerly Fat Harry, Keef Hartley, Hot Tuna, It's A
Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, Dr. John, Led Zeppelin, John Mayall, Country
Joe, The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Santana, Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter, Frank
Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. We were amazed by it all, especially lying
in a field looking up at the stars (we had our tent pinched before we could even
put it up!) listening to John Mayall – he was on stage at about 4.00am as I
recall!
Of course many of these bands and
artists at the Bath Festival we had seen at Mothers Club – Colosseum, Fairport
Convention, Keef Hartley, and believe it or not Led Zeppelin! How could you have
seen Led Zeppelin at such a small club in a suburb of Birmingham I hear you ask.
Well the Groundhogs (the original Groundhogs : Tony (T.S.) McPhee - vocals &
guitar, Pete Cruickshank - bass guitar, Ken Pustelnik - drums) were billed to
make one of their regular visits to Mothers and they couldn’t get there in time
(stranded somewhere in Europe), so Phil Myatt (the club's promoter), decided to
call up some friends for a bit of a jamming session instead – so as not to
disappoint the usual capacity crowd. When Phil announced to the audience that
the Groundhogs couldn’t appear, he explained his urgent phone calls and
introduced on stage… Robert Plant and John Bonham (they both lived close to
Birmingham at the time), so they had a jamming session to an aghast audience!
Passion for the Blues and Gospel
Music
Over the years my passion for the
Blues has continued, going to see blues artists performing live whenever I
could, collecting many vinyl albums and of course more recently accumulating a
wealth of blues CDs. As I have a broad Blues and Gospel interest, my collection
covers a wide range. If I had to list my favourites it would include (in roughly
alphabetical order):
Barbeque Bob
Big Bill Broonzy
Rev J.M. Gates
Golden Gate Quartet
John Lee Hooker
Son House
Howlin' Wolf
Mississippi John Hurt
Elmore James
Skip James
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Lonnie Johnson
Robert Johnson
Blind Willie Johnson
Leadbelly
Blind Willie McTell
Rev A.W. Nix
Charlie Patton
Ma Rainey
Bessie Smith
Frank Stokes
Washington Philips
Washboard Sam
Sister O.M. Terrell
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Muddy Waters
Geeshie Wiley
Rev Robert Wilkins
And of the current blues artists and
bands;
Kyla Brox Band
King Earl Boogie Band
Connie Lush and Blues Shouter
Mud in Your Ear
John O'Leary Band
Ian Siegal Band
Slowburner
Ray Stubbs
The Stumble
Earl Thomas
Sherrie Williams
Studying and Researching the Blues
About 9-10 years ago I came across an advert for a
part-time course on “An Appreciation of the Blues” at a local college which I
thought would be too good to miss. This was my first meeting with my good
friends Max Haymes and his brother Rex. Max was a regular part-time lecturer at
Lancaster University, specialising in African-American Studies, particularly
pre-war Blues music (see
Max’s details). Rex is Max’s ‘kid brother’ who
plays a mean acoustic blues guitar. Max has run several part-time evening blues
courses over the years and I have attended most of them (even persuading my
wife, Christine, to attend one of them). I suppose at this point I should tell
you the true story of the time when Max set us all a project to write an essay
on a blues topic taken from a list of suggestions. Both Christine and I did our
separate essays, mine was on the life of Robert Johnson (see
essay and Christine’s was on Poetry and the
Blues (Christine won’t let me publish her essay!). Our essays were duly marked
and we both were given pass grades. However the essays were then sent to an
independent assessor (this was a part-time ‘Open University’ course module).
When the essays came back the assessor had upgraded Christine’s essay! I am now
often reminded that Christine had a higher grade than me – and she would be the
first to admit that she isn’t really a blues fanatic (she just happens to be
good at poetry – my excuse!).
Evolution of the Early Blues Website
In the year 2000 I had the idea of
creating a blues website to publish interesting articles about the origins of
the blues, and help
promote a new blues club Max wanted to start in Lancaster. I remember the very
first meeting of the club in a back room at the Dukes Theatre in Lancaster. Rex
played acoustic guitar, joined by Al Dean and Brendan Cronin, both also on
acoustic guitar. The audience consisted of Adrian and Victoria Morris (who on
subsequent meetings played bass guitar and saxophone respectively), Max, as
‘compare’ and ‘one man crowd’ (people who know Max will know what I mean!), and
me as supporter and ‘official photographer’ (I cant play a single note in tune
on any instrument) . The club has gone from strength to strength, at several
venues in Lancaster over time, and is alive and well to this day. And what of
the website? I registered the domain name
www.earlyblues.com and set up the website in October
2000, initially comprising blues articles and essays, together with photos taken
at Max’s Blues Club. Over the years I have added many blues related subjects,
and the website has become much more diverse, which I think is good as it
creates more interest. More recently I have added many of my photos of artists
and bands taken at UK Blues Festivals (combining my hobby of photography and the
Blues). I also have many other plans for the website, with lots of blues related
material to add. But reader, you will have to be patient, I work full time and I
don’t have a great deal of time to update the website. I can assure you I will
do all I can, when I can (I’m currently typing this whilst on holiday in
Spain!).
Thank you for taking the time to read
this and I hope you enjoy the website as much as I enjoy developing and
maintaining it. Keep checking, I'm always adding new material.
Alan White
2007
If you have any thoughts or comments,
you can email me at
alan.white@earlyblues.com
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