Blues Legend John Mayall Is Dead at 90

“Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller… all the blind guys.” That’s how the multi-instrumentalist John Mayall, one of the chief architects of the British blues revival of the 1960s, who died at 90 yesterday at his home in California, described the influences that shaped his musical tastes and inspired a career that stretched across six decades. That career, which started well before Mayall formed his famous Bluesbreakers in 1963, was not defined by blindness so much as by a single-minded, near-messianic vision that the music created by Black artists of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago’s South Side possessed beauty, honesty, and strength that transcended race, age, and geography. And so, thanks to Mayall—along with the like-minded musician Alexis Korner and a growing number of aficionados—American blues took root in London’s coffee bars, the domain of trad jazz. From there it migrated to subterranean clubs packed with sweaty youths, and on to record players and radios in bedsitter flats from Bournemouth to Belfast.

Soon, a generation had its mojo working as the British R&B scene exploded: the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Them, and much of what came after, including Cream and Fleetwood Mac, two epochal rock bands that Mayall had a hand in creating. The blues-focused vision that Mayall brought to popular music in the 1960s turns out to have been, in retrospect, 20/20.

In the 21st century, conversations about the British blues boom have focused on these important foundational aspects—and raised thorny questions regarding cultural appropriation. But there is no doubt that Mayall’s adoration of the blues was genuine and uncynical, not to mention daring, vanguard, and subversive—an important dent in the armor of postwar, stiff-upper-lip, class-divided Britain. As Mayall and other proselytizers brought the work of Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James to ravenous young audiences on the other side of the Atlantic, those blues legends began to find themselves in demand as concert attractions, sought out as musical mentors, and anointed as cultural icons in Europe, America, and, in time, across the globe.

John Mayall was born in 1933 and grew up in the town of Cheadle Hulme, outside of Manchester. His parents divorced when he was a boy. The best-known exploit of Mayall’s childhood was that he built a treehouse out of window frames and tarps in a sturdy oak behind his mother’s house, outfitting it with a bed and paraffin lamp. This, he said, “became my room, my world.” (In 1970, he wrote a song about it, “Home in a Tree.”) His father made a hobby out of jazz guitar and, the young Mayall, at age 12, had likewise begun to play the instrument, along with the piano. By the late 1940s, he had become besotted with jazz, Hoovering up 78 rpm records. And then he stumbled on the blues—the genre that would transfix him for the rest of his days.

As a white suburban kid growing up in England after the war, listening to the blues brought Mayall face to face with the genre’s outsized personalities and the harsh conditions they often sang about. As Mayall told the Guardian in 2021, “So-called ‘race records’ told the story of the vile lynchings and racial injustices in the south that were a black man’s reality in the early 20th century. Not many other people I knew were all that interested in this music, but it was something I was really passionate about.”

In 1956, Mayall had returned from national service in Korea to attend art college in Manchester, forming his first band, the Powerhouse Four. This was followed by the Blues Syndicate, which traveled to London in 1961, whereupon Mayall met Korner, who encouraged him to move south. Mayall threw himself into the London blues scene, forming his Bluesbreakers and becoming a mainstay at such clubs as the Marquee. If the blues-infused Rolling Stones were on a trajectory of international pop stardom, the Bluesbreakers were musician’s musicians, all about integrity—the spirit of the blues. They were the perfect band for record-collecting blues trainspotters, a group that would never be tainted by huge commercial success: the stuff of the purist, not the tourist.

Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were a clearinghouse for generational talent. Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds and joined the band; his playing was featured on its debut LP, released in 1966. When Clapton left, Peter Green, later to found 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 blue-chip gallery you wanted to show your work in. The bassist Jack Bruce met Clapton in the Bluesbreakers, then went on to found Cream. Other future rock stars who were Mayall alumni: Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, later of Fleetwood Mac, and the well-traveled drummer Aynsley Dunbar. In these Bluesbreakers incarnations, and in many more that would follow, Mayall moved between guitar and keyboards, with spotlight moments to demonstrate his prowess on harmonica. Even so, Mayall’s chief talent may have been his uncanny, unselfish capacity for spotting it in others.

In the late ’60s, Mayall expatriated to California, moving into a house in Laurel Canyon that became affectionately known as The Brain Damage Club, based on the kind of personalities and diversions one could find there. The house burned to the ground in the 1979 Kirkwood Bowl-Laurel Canyon Fire, which consumed all of Mayall’s archives, along with the trove of vintage erotica his father had amassed. (“My father was a pornography collector,” Mayall would unabashedly say. “A totally irreplaceable collection.”) Throughout the ensuing decades, there were more concerts, tours, collaborations, and albums, as Mayall became invariably known as the Godfather of the British Blues. In 2005, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire. A 35-disc boxed set of Mayall’s work was released in 2021. Three years later he was inducted, at age 90, into the Rock & Roll Hall of fame. Mayall married twice; he had six children and several grandchildren.

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

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

When a reporter once asked John Mayall about his unwavering fidelity to the blues, the music that took him from a tree house in a Manchester suburb to concert stages around the world, Mayall responded, “There’s nothing else I can play.”