included Mike Jagger.
This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing—but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain, one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers, and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of “nigger brown” shoe polish and dogs routinely named “Blackie,” “Sambo,” and “Nigger.” Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronizing awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to major-league cricket matches.
There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shantytowns, and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different—standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicized contempt for the coziness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that “there are no good, brave causes left.” To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in prewar rural America was more than cause enough.
But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement—an empathy—he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humor and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furor over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of “Teddy Bear” and “All Shook Up” with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed “Careless Love” or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priaptic “Black Snake Moan.” And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?
Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following—mostly “intellectual” types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals, and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship—charity, some
This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing—but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain, one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers, and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of “nigger brown” shoe polish and dogs routinely named “Blackie,” “Sambo,” and “Nigger.” Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronizing awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to major-league cricket matches.
There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shantytowns, and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different—standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicized contempt for the coziness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that “there are no good, brave causes left.” To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in prewar rural America was more than cause enough.
But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement—an empathy—he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humor and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furor over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of “Teddy Bear” and “All Shook Up” with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed “Careless Love” or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priaptic “Black Snake Moan.” And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?
Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following—mostly “intellectual” types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals, and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship—charity, some
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