It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.
My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties - Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.
The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It's a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.
The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.
We were either listening to jazz or Robert Johnson, the old blues man, but not to our peers.
It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.
Hearing the blues changed my life.
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.
Rhythm and blues started even before phonograph records were being produced because black people entertained themselves. It wasn't done for money. It was done for entertainment. Most white people didn't know anything about this because prejudice kept them from ever seeing what was going on.
The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.