Blues legend John Mayall has died at the age of 90

“Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller… all the blind guys.” That’s how multi-instrumentalist John Mayall, one of the chief architects of the 1960s British blues revival, who died yesterday at his home in California aged 90, described the influences that shaped his musical tastes and inspired a career that spanned six decades. That career, which began long before Mayall formed his famous Bluesbreakers in 1963, was shaped not so much by blindness but by a single-minded, almost messianic vision that the music of black artists from the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side possessed beauty, honesty and power that transcended race, age and geography. And so, thanks to Mayall – along with like-minded musician Alexis Korner and a growing number of aficionados – the American blues took root in London’s coffee bars, the domain of traditional jazz. From there, the sound traveled to underground clubs full of sweaty teenagers and then to record players and radios in studio apartments from Bournemouth to Belfast.

Soon a whole generation had been cast their spell as the British R&B scene exploded: the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Them and much that came after, including Cream and Fleetwood Mac, two epochal rock bands that Mayall helped found. The blues-oriented vision that Mayall brought to popular music in the 1960s proves, in retrospect, to be absolutely correct.

In the 21st century, discussions of the British blues boom have focused on these important fundamental aspects – and raised thorny questions about cultural appropriation. But there is no doubt that Mayall’s veneration of the blues was genuine and uncynical, not to mention daring, avant-garde and subversive – an important dent in the armour of stiff, class-divided post-war Britain. As Mayall and other missionaries brought the works of Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Elmore James to hungry young audiences across the Atlantic, these blues legends became in demand as concert attractions, sought out as musical mentors and anointed as cultural icons in Europe, America and, in time, the world.

John Mayall was born in 1933 and grew up in the town of Cheadle Hulme outside Manchester. His parents divorced when he was a boy. Mayall’s best-known childhood exploit was building a treehouse out of window frames and tarpaulins in a sturdy oak tree behind his mother’s house, and furnishing it with a bed and a kerosene lamp. This, he said, “became my room, my world.” (In 1970 he wrote a song about it, “Home in a Tree.”) His father had made jazz guitar a hobby, and young Mayall had also started playing that instrument at age 12, along with the piano. By the late 1940s he had become obsessed with jazz, devouring 78-rpm records. And then he stumbled upon the blues – the genre that would captivate him for the rest of his life.

As a white suburban boy growing up in post-war England, listening to the blues exposed Mayall to the genre’s larger-than-life personalities and the harsh conditions they often sang about. Like Mayall, the Guardian 2021: “So-called ‘race records’ told the story of the heinous lynchings and racial injustice in the South that were a reality for a black man in the early 20th century. Not many other people I knew were as interested in this music, but it was something that really excited me.”

In 1956, Mayall returned from military service in Korea to attend art school in Manchester, where he formed his first band, the Powerhouse Four. This was followed by the Blues Syndicate, which travelled to London in 1961, where Mayall met Korner, who encouraged him to move south. Mayall threw himself into the London blues scene, forming his Bluesbreakers and becoming a fixture in clubs like the Marquee. While the blues-influenced Rolling Stones were on their way to international pop stardom, the Bluesbreakers were musicians for musicians, concerned with integrity – the spirit of the blues. They were the perfect band for record-collecting blues trainspotters, a group that was never tainted by huge commercial success: the stuff of purists, not tourists.

Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a melting pot of talent for a generation. Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was heard on their 1966 debut LP. When Clapton left, Peter Green, who later formed Fleetwood Mac, joined. And when Green left, Mick Taylor, later of the Rolling Stones, joined. Mayall was to British blues guitarists what Leo Castelli was to New York painters; his group was the premier gallery where you wanted to show your work. Bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers and then formed Cream. Other future rock stars who were among Mayall’s pupils: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-travelled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these incarnations of the Bluesbreakers, and many more to follow, Mayall alternated between guitar and keyboard, with moments in the spotlight showing off his skills on the harmonica. Yet Mayall’s greatest talent may have been his uncanny, selfless ability to recognize the talent of others.

In the late ’60s, Mayall emigrated to California and moved into a house in Laurel Canyon that became affectionately known as “The Brain Damage Club,” based on the personalities and entertainment that could be found there. The house burned to the ground in the 1979 Kirkwood Bowl-Laurel Canyon Fire, wiping out Mayall’s entire archives as well as the treasure trove of vintage erotica his father had amassed. (“My father was a porn collector,” Mayall said candidly. “An absolutely irreplaceable collection.”) The decades that followed saw more concerts, tours, collaborations and albums, and Mayall invariably became known as the godfather of British blues. In 2005, he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. A 35-CD box set of Mayall’s work was released in 2021. Three years later, at age 90, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Mayall has been married twice; He had six children and several grandchildren.

A cornerstone of Mayall’s songbook was “Room to Move,” powered by his driving, almost orgiastic harmonica. But if one song defined him, it was perhaps “All Your Love,” a mambo-influenced Chicago blues classic by Otis Rush that was the calling card of the Bluesbreakers and an early example of Clapton’s fretboard pyrotechnics. (Peter Green reinterpreted “All Your Love” as “Black Magic Woman,” which became a 1968 single for Fleetwood Mac and later a signature piece for Carlos Santana.)

In February 2020, on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, Mayall, surprisingly sprightly at 86, enthusiastically sang “All Your Love” at the London Palladium as part of an all-star tribute concert to Green’s music organized by Mick Fleetwood. (Green died about five months later.) It’s hard to guess how many times Mayall played that number and others like it—typically three-chord, 12-bar blues songs.

When a reporter once asked John Mayall about his unwavering loyalty to the blues, the music that took him from a treehouse in suburban Manchester to the concert stages of the world, Mayall replied, “I can’t play anything else.”