You’ve heard of the British Blues Boom, haven’t you? Well, aside from the headline acts like the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream and Fleetwood Mac, there are other excellent bands that now get forgotten, often because they were late to the trend.
The first two Ten Years After records are a good example. Al Kooper’s ‘I Can’t Keep From Cryin’, Sometimes’ and Woody Herman’s Woodchoppers Ball are both wonderful tracks very much in the blues-jazz idiom that informed so much later rock.
The Groundhogs started towards the end of the boom with Scratching The Surface in 1968 but were soon playing a rough-edged form of blues-rock by the time of 1970’s Thank Christ For The Bomb and 1971’s Split.
One of my favourites is Aynsley Dunbar’s Retaliation who’s 1968 debut is a striking blues record that is often ignored because it didn’t chart.
Free’s debut in 1969 just about announced the end of the movement. Very bluesy but now heavier, which would become dominant in the next decade.
Savoy Brown initially had Blues Band tagged onto their name and their debut in the UK ‘Shake Down’ and ‘Getting To The Point’ are superb blues outings from ‘67 & ‘68 as are all of Chicken Shack’s releases, the first 40 Blue Fingers, Freshly Packed and Ready to Serve was a #12 hit in the UK. I always like guitarist Stan Webb who later joined Savoy Brown for an album.
Jethro Tull’s 1968 debut, Stand Up, was part of the blues boom, covering songs like the traditional Cat’s Squirrel, also done by Cream. That made #10 in uk and even #62 in America.
There are other bands like Skip Bifferty and Tomorrow who tiptoed into the blues but were more psychedelic really and Taste, of course, who were Irish, but enjoyed riding on the blues boom wave of popularity.
Black Cat Bones, featuring Paul Kossoff were another product of blues interest and were heavier than most. Bob Brunning left Fleetwood Mac and formed Brunning Sunflower Blues Band. Producing several albums of which their 1968 debut Bullen St. Blues is, if you can find an original is worth £25-50 is another forgotten band.
Obviously if you like the blues, go to the source material that all of these bands copied, but the British reinterpretation had many forms and the records are more varied than simply reworking standards (though they did that too) How odd that we sold the music back to mainstream America and gave birth to heavy and blues rock as we came to know it.
