John Mayall, the Godfather of British Blues, has passed away. A singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Mayall was a central player in the 1960s British blues scene that birthed groups like the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds. Originally from the Northwest of England, he rose to fame leading long-running London outfit the Bluesbreakers, whose pioneering blues-rock sound introduced the world to several of rock’s biggest stars, including Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones’ Mick Taylor, and Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, and Peter Green.
Close collaborators remember him as a passionate and scholarly devotee of Black-American music who turned an entire generation of British musicians onto the blues, one of the cornerstones of rock music. “When you went around to John Mayall’s house, it was a shrine to the blues,” Fleetwood told Fairfax Media Australia in 2015. “He’d sit you down, almost like a school teacher, and he’d bring out this vinyl.” Clapton shared Fleetwood’s impression of Mayall as an eccentric mentor figure. “With long curly hair and a beard, which gave him a look not unlike Jesus, he had the air of a favourite schoolmaster, while still managing to be cool,” he wrote in his autobiography. “He didn’t drink and he was a health-food fanatic and the first proper vegetarian I had ever met.”
Inspired by the Chicago and Mississippi blues records he fell in love with as a teen, Mayall developed a distinctive songwriting style that was both heavily indebted to an American art form and uniquely British. A self-taught musician who sang in a Northern British accent and played guitar, piano, and harmonica, among other instruments, he released almost seventy albums across his 60-year career. In the 1960s and 1970s, his idiosyncratic take on the blues made him a fixture in the UK and US rock charts, most notably with his 1969 acoustic album The Turning Point, which was certified gold in the US.
