Blues Power
Cyril Davies and the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club - 83-85 Wardour Street
“Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis were the start of rhythm and blues in this country. ” - Charlie Watts
“One man pioneered a sound that was to give incentive to every group of this time… Cyril Davies.” - Jimmy Page
“Cyril Davies was a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish.” - Keith Richards
The spark that lit the fuse which ignited the British rock music explosion of the 1960s was struck in the upstairs room of a pub on Wardour Street. The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club met on Thursday evenings at the Round House pub from 1957 to 1961, and attracted many of those who went on to form the first wave of British rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, Yardbirds and Pretty Things. It also showcased American blues artists such as Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, providing a first opportunity for Britain’s blues enthusiasts to see artists they had only heard on record. And it all happened thanks to a gruff car mechanic who played harmonica.
Two tribes
According to jazz singer and journalist George Melly, the battle lines of post-war youth culture were drawn on Wardour Street. From The Round House northwards was traditionalist territory, while the modernists’ citadel was the Flamingo Club just south of Shaftesbury Avenue.
In the mid to late 1940s, American jazz had evolved into bebop - a modernist style with complex structures and shifting key changes, championed by Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and others. This inspired Ronnie Scott, whose first club on Great Windmill Street promoted this new sound of jazz, and attracted a keen audience of modernists - mainly young men wearing the latest in Italian tailoring. But most young British jazz enthusiasts were traditionalist in their tastes. They rejected what they saw as the complexity and intellectualism of bebop, and embraced what they saw as the authenticity of 1920s and 1930s Dixieland or New Orleans jazz.
Trad jazz took off in the 1950s as part of a peculiarly British youth sub-culture. As in most other sub-cultures that followed, they took an American music form and created something quintessentially British with it. In this case the music of New Orleans was wedded to left-wing politics and Edwardian dress, often including bowler hats. The Aldermaston CND marches were never without their duffle-coat wearing trad jazz marching bands. Popular with students, the bandleaders Chris Barber, Humphrey Lyttleton and Ken Colyer were those leading the trad charge into Britain’s popular and political culture.
For trombonist Chris Barber, playing trad was a quest for musical authenticity. The sleeve notes for his 1954 album New Orleans Joys describes New Orleans Jazz “as distinctive a tradition as English folk-music… and like all traditions there can be no tampering with it”. It is on this album that Barber’s band play two songs in a style that digs deeper into these traditions. With Barber on bass, Beryl Braden on washboard and Lonnie Donegan on guitar, the numbers John Henry and Rock Island Line are the first recorded skiffle songs. The sleeve notes describe skiffle in the following terms:
“This newly awakened interest in the true Negro ‘race' music which Chris and Lonnie have been fostering for some years, opens up a whole new field of traditional jazz adding to the already vast repertoire of classic numbers. It is a music which a little skill and enthusiasm can produce with quite good results; in the hands of our present experts it becomes exciting beyond all expectations in consideration of its simplicity.”
Rock Island Line became the country’s first gold single, and even became a top ten hit in the United States. It led to Britain’s skiffle boom where young people across the country would brandish washboards, guitars and DIY basses made of tea chests. In Liverpool, John Lennon’s Quarrymen were early adopters of the craze, as were Wally Whyton’s Vipers who kicked off music sessions at the 2i’s coffee bar on Old Compton Street. So also was twenty three year old mechanic and harmonica player Cyril Davies who opened The London Skiffle Club in the function room of The Round House pub.
Blues from the Round House
The club attracted those excited by skiffle’s DIY ethos and accessibility, including guitarist Alexis Korner, who had been a member of Chris Barber’s band. The skiffle craze peaked quickly its enthusiasts’ musical skills and ambitions outgrew the style’s limitations. Some of them gravitated to rock and roll, others to folk. For Davies and Korner, it was the blues.
In 1957 the pair closed down the Skiffle Club - then reopened it a couple of weeks later rebadged as the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club. The new name brought with it a new audience, and new regular performers keen to share their passion for the blues with others. These included Davy Graham, Long John Baldry and Ralph McTell. Recordings made by club regulars, led by Davies and Korner, were released as a limited edition LP Blues From The Roundhouse, produced by Douglas Dobell who ran the specialist record store a short walk away on Charing Cross Road. These tracks, which are available today on streaming services, show how the blues embraced by the club was very much in the gentle acoustic country blues style. Despite their quest for authenticity, the fact remained that most of those at the club had never actually witnessed a performance by an authentic African American blues player.
It was Chris Barber who changed that. His band now included a remarkable Latvian/Irish blues singer Ottilie Patterson who brought blues numbers into the band’s set. The two of them had connections in America which they used to bring over some of the leading blues legends including Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Slim, among others. First stop on arriving in Britain was the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club. For the performers, two things stood out - the unusual experience of not playing to segregated audiences, and the huge enthusiasm of what was a predominantly white crowd.
British youth was beginning to embrace black American music in ways that American youth was not. According to music historian Stephen Tow: “Even though American teenagers had access to commercial radio, that outlet, like much of the South, remained segregated. In other words, white people were fed white music by white artists, and black people heard black music played on African American stations. In England, though, because of a lack of music radio (other than the staid BBC), kids so inclined had no barriers to discover music they fancied.”
Wizz Jones, a key figure in the English folk revival, remembers: “I mean, it was such a tiny room - about 20, 30, 40 people maybe, at the most. And it was all very underground… And I used to go there every week. One week I saw Big Bill Broonzy there. And then a few weeks later - maybe a few months later - I saw Muddy Waters there with his piano player Otis Spann.”
The Muddy Waters performance at the club in 1958 was literally electrifying, as Kris Needs explains: “That October, Muddy Waters visited the UK to play his only London club date at the Round House – said to be the first time an electric guitar had been seen in a London club, and was duly heckled. Muddy’s tough electric blues proved a revelation for Cyril, who amplified his harp with a small pick-up covered with rubber from a bicycle tyre attached to a cable.” The harder edged, high powered Chicago blues had taken root.
The club was where a younger generation of blues enthusiasts would meet and play together. As Keith Richards explains: “We’d all meet in this blues club, Alexis Korner’s place, and Brian (Jones), he stunned us playing Elmore James shit on slide onstage with Alexis, along with Cyril Davies, Nicky Hopkins, and Jack Bruce on bass. All of those guys were gathering together in just a few spots in London.”
The attraction of the blues was in part the sense of discovery - finding obscure records at specialist stores - and in part the romance of an African American culture that was so different to the post-war austerity of 1950s Britain. And of course the music sounded very different to anything else. According to Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford, the blues was easy to learn and provided a starting point for improvisation in collaboration with others: “The form is really great. It’s really simple… Every time you want to play a song together with some unknown people, you play blues. It’s easy.”
Easy. And loud. Which is why the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club closed down in 1961. The pub’s landlord complained about the noise coming out of the club every Thursday evening, so Cyril Davies decanted to the Ealing Jazz Club, in a cellar below a tearoom on Ealing Broadway in West London. The band opening the first session of the new Ealing Club featured art student Charlie Watts on drums and Ronnie Wood's brother Art Wood on vocals.
Davies and Korner formed a house band - Blues Incorporated - with an ever shifting line up of blues enthusiasts who included Eric Burdon, Long John Baldry, Mick Jagger, Paul Jones and Eric Clapton. As John May says: “It was a place where new bands were hatched and many musicians cut their teeth and learned their riffs.”
Cyril Davies passed away in 1964 aged thirty one, but his legacy lived on. Many of the musicians who performed at his Club went on to become major figures in British music, some of whom still perform today. The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club introduced the blues to Britain, and as such played an crucial and unique role in shaping our music.
Bringing It All Back Home
The story of how the blues was taken up and developed further by young aspiring musicians in Britain to create ‘classic’ rock music which in turn radically reshaped music in the country that gave birth to the blues is beyond the scope of this short essay. Our interest is how the conditions of cultural creativity and innovation were created above a pub in Soho.
Britain and America shared elements of a common culture and musicologists have traced how the blues itself draws on elements of British folk music. Its imperial past also gave Brits a taste for cultural bricolage - appropriating cultural elements from elsewhere to create something new (and at times bizarre). It was therefore perfectly natural to perform New Orleans jazz wearing bowler hats while at the same time campaigning for nuclear disarmament. But in London there was an openness and cosmopolitanism that was unique, not just in Britain but in the world. In his recent brilliant history of London, Panikos Panayi explains how “with the exception of Rome and not on such a significant scale, London has experienced migration for longer than any other city… Multiculture or cosmopolitanism has therefore characterised the evolution of London since the arrival of the Romans who founded this city of immigrants.”
Whether it’s Lovers’ Rock or fish and chips, London is well practiced in creating something innovative from the cultural practices of immigrants and outsiders. In the case of the blues in Soho, other things were going on as well. First, as we’ve seen in other cases, there was an affordable space that could bring people together. And in close proximity there were other spaces - secondhand and specialist record stores, St Martin’s art school common room, coffee bars and pubs - a network of related spaces and places.
Then there were the change-makers. Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner created and sustained this space, while Chris Barber and Ottilie Patterson had connections and influence that could bring the blues legends over to perform in it. This small personal network with its connections to the home of the blues drove innovation.
And fortunately that home was sufficiently far away for the Brits to not fully appreciate how that music was regarded and categorised by those who made it. In his PhD thesis on the rise of British rock music, Andrew Kellett observes how the first wave of British blues-based bands “were defined by their very eclectic understanding of ‘the blues’ or ‘R&B’” with a tendency to conflate all African American musical genres together. The distinctions between country blues, city blues, gospel, soul, R&B, etc that existed in America, simply didn’t exist on this side of the Atlantic. This led to an eclecticism in which everything could be mixed together including, after a few years, folk, jazz, Indian music, country-and-western and classical music.
Out of all this came the music of the ‘British Invasion’ which from 1964 triggered the rise of American rock music in the sixties. As Muddy Waters himself said “It took the people from England to hip my people - my white people - to what they had in their own backyard.”
The walking tour
83-85 Wardour Street is one stop on our guided musical walking tour of Soho. More details here https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/walk-on-the-wild-side-1656209
Sources
Chris Barber’s Jazz Band (1954) New Orleans Joys (sleeve notes) https://www.chrisbarber.net/LP-covers/sleevenotes.htm
British Blues Archive (2018) Biography: Cyril Davies http://www.britishbluesarchive.org.uk/Biographies/Cyril_Davies.php
Francis Davis (1995) The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People: From Charley Patton to Robert Cray, New York: Hyperion
Peter Guralnick (1986) Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Dream of Southern Freedom, New York: Harper and Row
Andrew James Kellett (2008) Fathers and Sons: American Blues and British Rock Music, 1960-1970, Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/8863/umi-umd-5897.pdf
George McKay (2002) Trad jazz in 1950s Britain—protest, pleasure, politics— interviews with some of those involved https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/9306/1/trad_jazz_interviews_2001-02_PDF.pdf
John May (2022) The Ealing Club: Birthplace of Blues in Britain https://hqinfo.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-ealing-club-birthplace-of-blues-in.html
Kris Needs (2017) How Bluesman Cyril Davies Inspired a Generation of British Bands, Classic Rock https://www.loudersound.com/features/how-bluesman-cyril-davies-inspired-a-generation-of-british-bands
Panikos Panay (2022) Migrant City: A New History of London, New Haven: Yale University Press
Stephen Tow (2020) London, Reign Over Me, Lanham: Roman & Littlefield
Roger Trobridge (2017) Cyril Davies... British Blues Harp Pioneer http://cyrildavies.com/Roundhouse.html
Blues Power - great piece of reminiscence writing.
I saw Alexis Korner in a subterranean Soho club in the early 60's. And I also bought my first LP at around that time too - Lonnie Donegan!!
Ray