Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon,
and British Renderings of American Blues in the 1960s
Steve Armour
Final Capstone Project
Dr. Oetter
26 April 2010
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The blues music tradition and its derivative styles currently enjoys popularity all
over the world. Rock radio listeners cannot tune into a station for very long without hearing
an instrumental phrase or a certain type of vocal inflection that had some origins in early
blues. Over the past fifty or sixty years, the face of blues music has evolved so that British
figures such as Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton have come to tower over
their audience as “quintessential” purveyors of the form just as much or more than early
luminaries like Robert Johnson and Son House. Some of the reasons for this are obvious.
White performers thrived with the white audience, which was large, avid, and often deeppocketed. But an interesting phenomenon is occurring before this commercial aspect even
enters the equation. What actually caused these British musicians to take up the blues in the
first place? When a meaningful cultural expression created by a socially downtrodden
people in remote areas moves beyond its cultural enclave to enter the popular imagination,
some significant cross-cultural activity is occurring. The issue has value in terms of identity,
perceived authenticity, and intellectual property for both the original performers and those
who would later borrow from it and build upon it.
My goal for this research project is to explore the relationship between racial and
ethnic identity and the blues as a cultural expression through an examination of key British
blues performers Eric Clapton and Eric Burdon. My project will include an investigation of
how these performers and the white audience have interpreted (and sometimes manipulated)
the musical form to construct a unique interaction and identification with a culture that has
been historically marginalized. I will tackle these issues by exploring the existing literature
about the blues as both a musical form and cultural language, including biographical
accounts of select performers, musical histories, lyrical texts, journal articles, and songs.
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The Blues as an African-American Expression
At least a cursory understanding of the blues music culture in the United States is
critical to a discussion of the later British blues boom and its relation to the original music.
Historians vary on how far back they choose to go when citing a point of origin for the
blues. A detailed account of blues history will take us back to West Africa, where many of
the important features found in blues have their beginnings. In particular the countries of
Senegal and Gambia revealed a music culture that would be transferred in small ways to
the American South due to the American and European slave trade. Notably, this region of
the continent is very dry and lacking in forests, which means that wooden drums were
scarcer here than in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Gourd-based lutes and harps,
however, which usually had one to four strings, were a common instrument in this area1.
The presence of these stringed instruments in West Africa probably influenced some of the
crude guitar-like instruments that blacks made from found objects once they were
transplanted to the American south and may explain their willingness to pick up the guitar
once it became available.
Other features of West African music that show up later in the blues include a
driving rhythm, call-and-response vocals (and audience participation in general), and the
use of blue notes or bent notes. This “imprecision” of pitch has long been a staple of
African and African-American music music. As Robert Palmer describes, “European and
American visitors to Africa have often been puzzled by what they perceived as an African
fondness for muddying perfectly clean sounds.”2 West African vocal treatments can be
characteristically guttural and instruments are commonly altered with tin sheets to achieve
1
2
Palmer. Deep Blues, 27.
Ibid., 30.
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a rough, noisy, buzzing or rattling sound. These characteristics have continued to appear in
black music and are an important part of blues.
A very important step in the evolution of blues is the conglomeration of field
hollers, work songs, and spirituals that African-American field workers sang on plantations,
a socially important type of music that works as somewhat of an intermediary between
West African sounds and the blues. In particular, blue notes and call-and-response vocals
were present in these expressions, both of which can be found in the music that preceded
and followed work songs.3 After the Civil War, as instruments became available to freed
blacks, the tradition of these work songs continued and the vocal parts fell into more
formalized patterns, namely the twelve bar blues (three lines, each four bars long).4
But what is most important to this discussion, perhaps, is the social meaning of the
blues in America. Many examples of the blues chronicle the struggle against poverty,
oppression, and self-loathing that plagued African-Americans during the Jim Crow era and
the period that followed. Essentially, the blues arose from African musical forms and
themes that were adapted to the settings of slavery, sharecropping and the trials of virtual
non-citizenship. Thus, the blues is situated as a uniquely African-American artistic
expression. This observation has led to a great debate among scholars about who can
“legitimately participate” in the making and continuation of the blues in terms of race and
ethnicity.
Joel Rudinow and Paul Christopher Taylor have debated in corresponding journal
articles about the nature of race, identity and the blues. These articles pick apart many
issues about race, ethnicity, identity, and authenticity involving the blues: Do African-
3
4
Ibid., 33.
Baraka. Blues People, 68.
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Americans have an exclusive cultural claim to the blues? Can white people sing the blues?
Should we consider the blues a “racial project”?5 These issues are very complicated and
every argument seems to have at least some partial truth, but is always marred by the
abstract nature of the subject matter. But certainly as the blues has disseminated into the
popular imagination, one can make some justified claims about how it has been interpreted
and used by those outside of the music culture in which it developed.
Some, such as Amiri Baraka with his theory of “The Great Music Robbery”
maintain that black music has historically been “stolen” by the white music establishment
and redelivered to the white audience in a form that they will deem more acceptable,
without giving credit to the original (black) creators.6 Although Baraka’s concerns about
the commercially-driven white appropriation of black music may be well warranted, we
should be careful not to invest too strongly in his idea of cultural theft. Cultural exchange
and fusion exists in nearly every culture in the world and this is generally not viewed as a
moral conundrum because cultures do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, cultural borrowing
can be a way for people to make sense of their own circumstances through the lens of
another culture, even if in doing so they are making false assumptions about that culture,
which is really what my investigation of British blues is about.
The Blues Comes to Britain
Rudinow. Race, Ethnicity, and Expressive Authenticity, 127, 130; Taylor. So Black, So Blue…Response to
Rudinow, 314.
6
Baraka. The Music, 328-332.
5
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The British blues movement (sometimes called the “boom” or “revival”) is a
significant example of cross-cultural transmission and reception because it is the pinnacle
of white or non-American engagement with the blues, spawning a fanaticism that continues
today, particularly among white Westerners. British blues would have its day as a
profitable genre, but, for reasons we will see later, the role of commercial interest in its
development should not be overstated. Since virtually the beginning of the recording age,
black music has always been well-received in Britain. Before and throughout the blues
movement, jazz was of wildly popular interest. Many of those who took interest in the
blues were art school students, a type of citizen “trained to accept new ideas yet suspicious
of authority and its promises of a transformed society.”7 This suspicion arose from the
political rhetoric of the 1950s that claimed England was moving towards a utopian state of
affluence and classlessness. Young people took this to mean that they would be forced into
the drudgery of unskilled work for the rest of their lives and they resented the disparity
between the promises of their leaders and the unsatisfying reality of postwar England.
Their frustration led them to empathize with marginalized populations, and they
“appropriated the blues as a signifier to define and reflect their sense of otherness.”8
In the 50s and 60s, British ideas about the blues were very much steeped in
mythology. As rock guitarist Pete Townshend says of this time, “America was still a distant
and evocative IDEA to us, full of mystique.”9 Townshend is suggesting that young Britons
were fascinated with America to the point of romanticizing, viewing it as a metaphor for
excitement and freedom. It was also seen as attractively dangerous and transgressive since
7
Schwartz. How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the
United Kingdom, 74.
8
Ibid.
9
Townshend. Liner notes. The Who. Who’s Missing. LP. Polydor, 1988.
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conservative British nationalists saw America as a “corrupting influence on native cultural
institutions,” 10allowing the younger generation to reject social conformity through contact
with another culture. Eric Clapton explains his fascination with America:
The first books I ever bought were about America. The first records were American. I was
just devoted to the American way of life without ever having been there. I wanted to learn
about red Indians and the blues and everything. I was really an American [sic] fan.11
Ulrich Adelt reads into the subtext of Clapton’s words and makes the rather astute
observation that Clapton’s elation with all things American is “closely linked with an
imagined otherness” hence the mention of blues and “red Indians.” For British blues fans at
this time, America was often seen through the lens of its conflicts and contradictions,
particularly those with racial implications. It is probably no accident that the blues became
a transatlantic obsession at the height of the American Civil Rights Movement. As it played
out, the blues became the story of the underdog, the downtrodden, and the destitute, which
the British identified with however disparate the two situations actually were. The social
unrest was serious enough, yet distant enough, to appear exciting to them. Eric Burdon
maintained that the constant fighting between his fellow travelers Chuck Berry and Jerry
Lee Lewis on their 1963 tour of England made their bus “a four-wheeled microcosm of
America’s biggest social problem.” After describing the chaos of their altercations, he
concludes, “We couldn’t wait for the excitement of America.”12
One factor that made the importation of American blues into Britain such a
remarkable situation is that the British audience itself was made up of radical purists. This
tendency applies well to Britain’s preceding jazz scene, in which a conflict between
10
Schwartz. How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the
United Kingdom.
11
Graham and Greenfield. Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, 216.
12
Burdon and Marshall. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, 19.
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aficionados of “trad jazz” (from 1920s New Orleans) and “modern jazz” (be bop of the
1940s) revealed the harsh scrutiny of the trendy young British when deeming a musical
sound “pure.” As the nascent blues scene continued to grow in Britain, blues fans latched
onto often dated ideas about what constituted the blues. At the 1958 Leeds Folk Festival,
for instance, Muddy Waters and Otis Spann were booed by the audience for playing
electric instruments.13 This is a remarkable thing to consider since Muddy Waters had been
playing the blues in the Mississippi Delta since about 1932, several years before the electric
guitar was even being played widespread and likely before anyone in the audience had
even heard of the blues. In other words, it would be odd to question Waters’ authenticity in
this situation. It seems as though he was only continuing the development of a medium he
helped cultivate in the first place. After all, the blues is a living cultural expression, not
something locked in time as a remnant of a mythical past. If anyone at this time could have
played the electric blues with honesty and integrity, would not it have been Muddy Waters?
But in the opinion of a stubborn British youth, Waters’ performance did not live up to their
ideas about the blues. For them, somewhat arbitrarily, “true” blues could only pour from
the hollow body of an acoustic guitar. Of course, a mere four years later Waters would
return and try to appease the crowd with an acoustic set, only to once again disappoint an
audience who by this time was immersed in a British blues scene dominated by electric
guitars.14
Sometimes blues enthusiasts associated authenticity with their perceptions of
blackness, giving way to stereotypes about black life in the South in the process. One critic
praised a performance by blues players Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee for creating a
13
14
Adelt. “Trying to Find an Identity: Eric Clapton’s Changing Conception of ‘Blackness,’” 435.
Ibid.
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“genuine” blues atmosphere at their London concert, characterized by “swirling mist” from
the bayou, “Spanish moss,” the sound of hounds, and “the low, far-off cry of the freight
train”15. Valerie Wilmer comments similarly on a Jesse Fuller performance, writing “As he
swings along you can hear the roar and whistle of the freight train; you can smell the scent
of dried grass and the cotton field; you can see the black bodies sweating as they line the
tracks—you know you are listening to the real thing.”16 Blind Willie Johnson was reviewed
as “a chiller, a dark-night, fire-and-brimstone Christian singer of voodoo propensities. In a
dim room you listen to a down bound train carving a relentless way through a black mistdrenched Louisiana night…”17
It seems curious the degree to which mist and freight trains became emblems of the
rural South for the British music press, but what is more unsettling is how the image of
blacks laboring on a chain gang is conjured up to indicate authenticity. In effect, black
social pain and hardship becomes the basis by which British listeners can validate their
taste. Also troubling is Tony Standish’s association of Blind Willie Johnson (a native of
Texas, not Louisiana) with voodoo, a common stereotype conflating Southern black
religious practices and “black magic.”
What writers and fans were essentially doing was giving in to romantic ideals about
the blues. The issue of romanticism is important to understanding the relationship between
British blues and earlier American blues. Later, we will see this especially in Eric
Clapton’s romantic notions about the blues. As George Lipsitz explains, “The enduring
appeal of romanticism in art and music in Western culture testifies powerfully to the very
real alienation and isolation of bourgeois life, as well as the oppressive and relentless
15
Schwartz. How Britain Got the Blues, 99.
Ibid, 100.
17
Ibid.
16
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materialism of capitalist societies.”18 For British blues enthusiasts, the blues was an escape
into something thought to be real, pure, and frozen in time. They felt that it freed them
from the triviality and emptiness of commercial culture, which is ironic since they were
actually discovering the blues through commercial outlets (In fact, while many British
blues fans made a point of tracking down the most obscure music available, their initial
attraction to blues was often sparked by widely marketed rock ‘n’ roll artists like Bo
Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Fats Domino). But their romanticism of the blues in this way is
harmful because it “maintains the illusion that individual whites can appropriate aspects of
African American experience for their own benefit without having to acknowledge their
structural relationships with actual African Americans.”19
Eric Clapton’s Identity and Conceptions of Race
Eric Clapton is a fine reference point for how British blues followers engaged in an
appropriation of the blues to self-identify, and how it guided their ideas about race. The
aforementioned sense of “otherness” that he saw in blues performers and his identification
with the blues was crucial to Eric Clapton’s development. In his own words, he felt
my back was against the wall and that the only way to survive was with dignity, pride, and
courage. I heard that in certain forms of music and I heard it most of all in the blues….It
was one man with a guitar versus the world…when it came down to it, it was one guy who
was completely alone and had no options, no alternatives other than just to sing and play to
ease his pains. And that echoed what I felt.20
Clapton’s perceived lack of “options” and “alternatives,” must be viewed in a relative
context, and this goes for all British blues enthusiasts who saw something of themselves in
the hardships of African-Americans. The opportunities that were open to Clapton as a
working-class Briton far outmatched those of black Americans before the Civil Rights
Lipsitz. “Remembering Robert Johnson: Romance and Reality,” 43.
Ibid., 40.
20
Sandford. Clapton: Edge of Darkness, 22.
18
19
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Movement. But as we learn more about Clapton we find that his skewed comparison is part
of his search for an identity:
Now I didn’t feel I had any identity, and the first time I heard blues music, it was like a
crying of the soul to me. I immediately identified with it. It was the first time I’d heard
anything akin to how I was feeling, which was an inner poverty. It stirred me quite blindly.
I wasn’t sure just why I wanted to play it, but I felt completely in tune.21
Clapton’s feelings of being a lonely, dejected youth are important and contribute greatly to
his sense of self. What he overlooks, however, is that the “inner poverty” that he sees as a
shared bond between him and bluesmen was, for the bluesman, often informed by a very
real material poverty.22 But it seems that Clapton and British blues fans rarely bothered
with acknowledging the realities of black experience. In their minds, feeling sad and
disheartened with your own society was enough to afford you a genuine empathy with an
oppressed people.
As it turns out, Clapton’s sense of identity is frequently tied to race. Consider that
upon meeting Jimi Hendrix Clapton determined him to be “the real thing” before even
hearing him play, claiming “If I was black, I would be this guy.”23 Clapton’s comments
indicate his struggle with his own whiteness and sense of authenticity and show him
investing in racial essentialism concerning the blues.
One of Clapton’s earliest encounter with the blues was seeing Big Bill Broonzy on
television playing in a nightclub under the eerie, swaying glow of a single light bulb. He
remembers hearing the blues as something he recognized immediately. “It was as if I were
being introduced to something that I already knew, maybe from another, earlier life,”24 he
states in his autobiography. His most telling description of blues and its effect on him calls
21
Coleman. Clapton! The Authorized Biography. 28.
Adelt. “Trying to Find an Identity,” 437.
23
Platt. Disraeli Gears: Cream, 26.
24
Clapton. Clapton: The Autobiography, 33.
22
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it “primitively soothing,”25 a troubling characterization of the blues that recalls stereotypes
of an “uncivilized” African culture. Clapton’s first memories of his obsession are vague,
perhaps even to him, but are quite telling in terms of his identity and ideas about the blues.
By understanding the blues as something that he could have experienced in a past life,
Clapton connects this culturally constructed phenomenon—one developed an ocean
away—to his own being.
Spiritually connecting himself to the blues is something that Clapton would
virtually make into a career, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his open obsession
with Robert Johnson. Throughout his career Clapton was more vocal about his appreciation
for Robert Johnson than any other blues artist. He became enamored with Johnson’s music
for the first time after a friend lent him the record King of the Delta Blues Singers, a
collection of Johnson’s 1930s recordings. In the liner notes he discovered that Johnson
auditioned for these sessions in a San Antonio hotel room where he played facing the
corner because he was so shy. Clapton was captivated by this tidbit of trivia because he had
himself been paralyzed by shyness as a child. He also identified with the song “Hellhound
on My Trail,” which, he says, seemed to channel things he had always felt:26
I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
Mmm, blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
And the day keeps on remindin' me, there's a hellhound on my trail
Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail27
“Hellhound on My Trail” describes a man in a ceaselessly distressed condition who must
“keep moving” to avoid succumbing to his troubles. Clapton had his share of problems and
challenges. He was born illegitimate and raised by his grandparents, he had many troubles
25
Ibid.
Clapton. Clapton, 40.
27
Johnson. “Hellhound on My Trail.”
26
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with woman and drugs, and he lost his four-year-old son in 1991. Although Clapton
purports a shared emotional bond with Johnson, “on his best day, Robert Johnson caught
more hell than Eric Clapton had ever imagined.”28 Johnson grew up in the segregated South,
a world of hard labor, unfair wages, and lynch mobs. By associating himself with Johnson,
Clapton affords himself a sense of authenticity and emotional depth. What Clapton fails to
acknowledge are the social and economic conditions that allow him rather than an AfricanAmerican to gain tremendous wealth by playing African-American music.29 Moreover,
Clapton romanticizes the plight of long dead blues players, but shows little sympathy for
the oppressed minorities in the here and now. His vocal support of segregationist politician
Enoch Powell at a concert in Birmingham, England in 1976 drew waves of controversy, as
well his antagonistic comments aimed at immigrants.30
Robert Johnson is the subject of great mythologizing by blues listeners and the
commercial world. Central to this is the famed crossroads story, in which Johnson acquires
amazing talent by trading his soul to the devil at the intersection of two roads. The story
has spread to become the pinnacle of blues myth. It is the subject for his 1937 song “Cross
Road Blues,” later covered by Clapton as “Crossroads.” It is also the basis for the 1986
film Crossroads and has been used extensively in Mississippi to promote tourism.
Although the story has great appeal as a captivating piece of folklore, it has very real
implications. In West African culture, the crossroads image serves as a metaphor for
decision-making and potential, just as it does in Western culture. The “devil” in this
scenario is actually the deity Eshu-Elegbara, not an evil being, but an unpredictable figure
Lipsitz. “Robert Johnson,” 42.
Ibid., 43.
30
Adelt. “Trying to Find an Identity,” 447.
28
29
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with the power to make things happen.31 Lipsitz suggests that when Johnson’s relatives and
fans—who first reported the crossroads story to a historian—were interpreting Johnson’s
story, they were understanding it through the lens of African folkways and beliefs that
allowed them to make sense of their plight as second-class citizens in America.
Another way of understanding the crossroads story is through a historical lens.
There is evidence in the lyrics of “Cross Road Blues” that Johnson is speaking about a
social code that affected many African-Americans in the early 20th century: the dangers of
being a black person caught alone in an unfamiliar place after dark.
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.
Asked the Lord above,“Have mercy save poor Bob, if you please.
Mmmmm, standin’ at the crossroad I tried to flag a ride.
Didn’t nobody seems to know me, everybody pass me by.
Mmm, the sun goin’ down, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.
Oooo ooee eeee, boy, dark gon’ catch me here.
I haven’t got no lovin’ sweet woman that love and feel my care.
You can run, you can run, tell my friend poor Willie Brown.
You can run, tell my friend, poor Willie Brown
Lord, that I’m standing at the crossroad, babe, I believe I’m sinkin’ down.32
The sense of distress in this song is clear as Johnson desperately tries to flag down a ride
from a friend or kind stranger before being spotted out after the sun goes down. Johnson
was reacting to a well-understood and harshly enforced behavioral code of the Jim Crow
era that attempted to push African-Americans to the fringes of society. The song comments
on “only one aspect of an elaborate apparatus that circumscribed the actions of black
Southerners [but] underscore[s] the precariousness and vulnerability of black life”33 at this
time.
Lipsitz. “Robert Johnson,” 41.
Johnson. “Cross Road Blues.”
33
Litwack. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, 410-411.
31
32
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Clapton’s romanticizing of Johnson, his proclaimed identification with his pain, and
the mythology that is used to sell music, movies, and tourist attractions do little to afford us
any real understanding of the social circumstances that informed his music and the blues as
an expression. This can only be done by looking past the myth and the magic that is
supposed to make the blues “pure” and “real,” and by analyzing the world that these people
actually lived in.
Adopting the Code
Since the blues became a way for British youths to understand and comment on
their own society, it was natural for them to adopt one of the most important aspects of any
artistic idiom: the language. No artist did this quite so often and with such self-awareness
as the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, not surprisingly, declared early on obsession with blues
and R&B, considering it “the most real thing I’d ever known.” 34 This “realness,” or notion
of authenticity stood in direct contrast with the “puritan ethic” of white middle-class Britain,
namely “sexual repression, status seeking, and goal-oriented labor” (368).35 They stood out
from the pack as particularly imitative of black styles, most notably Jagger’s singing voice
which he sometimes bent and shaped to achieve an almost parodic “black” sound.
In it’s original incarnation, the blues argot was a way for black musicians and black
audiences to both reject the vocabulary of the dominant culture and to skirt the strict
standards of censorship that would never permit their sexual wordplay (and sometimes
criticisms of whites) if not cleverly guised by these code words. Words such as “jelly roll,”
“ya-yas,” and “rooster” replaced terms for sexual body parts and acts. John M. Hellman, Jr.
explains the sexual nature of blues lyrics: “First, sex is generally the obsessive interest of
Oberbeck. “Mick Jagger and the Future of Rock,” 45
Hellman. “’I’m a Monkey”: The Influence of the Black American Blues Argot on the Rolling Stones,”
368.
34
35
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groups that are denied any other means of entertainment and achievement; second, sex is a
natural and strong metaphor for power relationships, of which the oppressed black man was
acutely aware.”36
In their early years the Rolling Stones frequently performed renditions of songs by
black blues artists. Songs like Slim Harpo’s “King Bee” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red
Rooster,” contained veiled phallic imagery, animalistic sexual content, and sexual boasting.
The Stones would eventually adopt many of these devices in their own songs, from the
boastful “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” to the eroticism of “Parachute Woman,” and
Mick Jagger would go on to become something of an international sex symbol.37 When
considering the reasons for their use of sexual content, it is important to remember that the
Stones were not “denied any other means of entertainment and achievement.” They were
middle class Londoners who could have gone on to any number of successes. Sex was also
not their only outlet for a dominant or powerful role. In other words, they were not
members of a systemically oppressed community. Furthermore, the Rolling Stones would
invoke the sexual nature of the blues to heighten their own sex appeal, which is somewhat
ironic since the black male sexuality they were channeling has been historically viewed by
polite society as a threat to white “innocence.” If black blues singers were to discuss
matters of sexuality in their songs at all, the stereotype of the black man as a sexual threat
is one factor that made the original blues argot so important.
Eric Burdon’s Music, Guilt, and Relationship with Blues “Authenticity”
It is remarkable how much artists within the British blues revival strived for
authenticity. If there is any such thing as authenticity in this context—and the matter is
36
37
Ibid., 369.
Ibid., 370.
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certainly open to debate—could it really be earned? Members of the 60s pop blues group
The Animals seemed to think so. Hailing from the industrial town of Newcastle in Northern
England, lead singer Eric Burdon had an untamed fascination with the American South,
black music, and the credibility he felt he could buy himself by channeling these
associations. Sometimes he did this to the point of dishonesty, falsely attempting to
attribute their 1964 rendition of “House of the Rising Son” to an early version by a black
musician, hoping that that this would heighten the Animals’ status as supremely authentic.
The rest of the band and most of the public understood that the Animals’ version stemmed
quite directly Bob Dylan’s version, released just two years earlier.38
Connecting their music to “blackness” was important to Burdon. As we have seen
before, “blackness,” in this scenario, equals genuineness, and the Animals were quite
skilled at mimicking black sounds. As band biographer Sean Egan would say, “The
Animals sound[ed] more uncompromisingly black than any of the countless bands who saw
chart action in the wake of the Beatles, including the Rolling Stones.”39 Later in his career
this fact would result in identity problems for Burdon. Eric Clapton sometimes downplayed
his talent on the basis of his race, but Burdon took this a step further, expressing guilt that
he was able to gain success by playing the music of a community prevented from such
opportunities. “Black music gets you there,” he said, “and when you get there, you can’t go
no place, if you’re black. But if you’re white and you play black, you can go anywhere you
want.”40
Burdon’s recognition of his own privilege is interesting. According to Brian Ward,
Burdon’s dilemma revolved not around “whether whites can really play the blues, but
Ward. “That White Man, Burdon: The Animal, British Beat Music and the American South,” 3-5.
Egan. Animal Tracks, 60.
40
Burdon. Animal, 94.
38
39
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[…]whether whites should even try to express themselves using the music of a community
of which they are not members, grounded in historical experiences they never share.41
Somewhat contrary to Burdon’s rejection of his “playing black,” was his decision to front
the all black funk band War at the end of the 1960s. Burdon describes the bands early
rehearsals as a bit awkward because he was so accustomed to playing blues-based rock,
realizing, “They didn’t listen to the blues and didn’t want to play it. American blues meant
one thing to a group of black guys from Long Beach and quite another to people like me,
Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards.”42
Perhaps the idea Burdon is touching on to here is same one that Ward references
and the one that this thesis has been investigating all along: the idea that blues is embedded
in a historical and social context of which race is a crucial element. Why would a black
band from Long Beach not want to play the blues? Perhaps for them it represents the state
of desperation and misery that has afflicted their community for too long, and they would
prefer to speak out against institutionalized injustice rather than cast themselves as victims.
Or maybe they just don’t like the blues. But there is no denying that, particularly after
Burdon’s departure from the group, War became part of a coterie of funk and soul artists
that would emphasize black pride, racial tolerance, and social justice in their lyrics and
imagery, peaking with their gritty depiction of black urban life, “The World is a Ghetto.”
They consistently infused these messages into their music with an upbeat, celebratory
sound that seemed almost consciously antithetical to blues. This phenomenon suggests that
by the end of the 1960s, when many white blues rock bands were just getting started, there
41
42
Ibid., 14.
Burdon and Marhsall. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, 107.
Armour 19
was a movement in the African-American community away from the tragic and pitiable
subject matter of the blues toward much more lively and empowering fare.
In some ways, Burdon is a foil for Clapton. Clapton insists, “I had never really
understood, or been directly affected by, racial conflict,” owing this condition to music,
which has “helped me to transcend the physical side of that issue.”43 As we have seen,
however, Clapton’s musical journey has in fact involved his perceptions of race (recall his
premature comments on Jimi Hendrix among other things). Burdon, on the other hand,
faced issues of race head-on and recognized the contradictions in his performance, stating
very plainly in 1967, “I was trying to express myself in the past, but I was also trying to
escape. I wasn’t being myself. It wasn’t me that was singing. It was somebody trying to be
an American Negro.”44 Once Burdon observed racial bigotry first-hand in the American
South—watching a black GI be turned away from a New Orleans music venue and
witnessing a Klan parade—he became disillusioned with his own image.45
In Conclusion
When British blues revivalists were first adopting the blues and appropriating it for
their own purposes they were staunchly anti-commercial. In fact, the blues’ apparent lack
of commercial viability is one of the things that made it so appealing to them as they
shunned popular culture and England’s postwar efforts to stimulate mass consumerism.46
Ironically, the British blues explosion eventually helped usher blues-based music onto the
global stage and into the realm of cultural commodities.
43
Clapton. Clapton: The Autobiography, 94.
Melody Maker, August 15, 1967, p. 5
45
Ward. “That White Man, Burdon: The Animals, British Beat Music and the America South,” 12.
46
Schwartz. How Britain Got the Blues, 75.
44
Armour 20
Over the past 40 years or so, the image and idea of the blues has been applied in
popular films, television, and visual art, and has been used to sell everything from
automobiles to cigarettes. Much of the mainstream attraction that makes it such a workable
marketing tool stems from the same disconnected ideas about the blues that British
performers held in the early 60s: its sense of cool, rebellion, realness, and sex appeal.
Unfortunately, this detachment has problematic consequences. As Daniel Lieberfeld says,
“Because of blues culture’s commercialization and accompanying loss of social context,
the white imagination ignores or romanticizes the poverty, violence, and endurance that
bred and fed the blues.”47
47
Lieberfeld. “Million Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture,” 3.
Armour 21
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