Andrew Kellett's British Blues Network: Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity examines the impact of African-American bluesmen on white (male) British teenagers in 1950s and early 1960s England. Carefully researched and well supported by case studies and extensive endnotes, this cultural history complements other work in the growing body of study of English society and identity through popular music.
Mutual fascination with each other's culture between Britain and America goes back centuries, but the phenomenon accelerated in the years after World War II. Having lost its predominant political and economic place on the world stage, Britain regained influence culturally, especially in America, through the so-called “British invasion” from 1964 onwards. Britain exported music, fashion, and European cultural sophistication that the United States readily embraced, returning the favor as American film and popular music had strongly influenced British popular culture in the 1950s. Key to the 1960s phenomenon were Britain's indigenous rock and roll musicians—not the American rock-and-roll imitators of, for example, Larry Parnes's venerable stable of the late 1950s, who were fashioned after Elvis et al., but rather next-generation musicians inspired by recordings of African American bluesmen—rara ava usually accessible only haphazardly via film, precious records acquired from US servicemen, relatives traveling abroad, or mail order. The influence of the likes of Robert Johnson, B. B. King, and Big Bill Broonzey on Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, Ray Davies, and others appears throughout (auto)biographies of these artists. Kellett investigates how and why working and lower middle-class white British teens and men, at that particular place and time in Britain, claimed to identify with these African American bluesmen, when ostensibly they had nothing socially, culturally, or economically in common.
Kellett first explains how white, mostly middle-class British men managed to acquire African American blues music to begin with. It was a haphazard process in the time before instant communication and the systematic information overload of the twenty-first century, but this random appropriation of the music and culture was beneficial as it allowed the English to fill in gaps with their own bricolage of musical and cultural influences. Kellett sets up the context for this cultural assimilation by introducing the social and economic setting in which the white British blues enthusiasts came of age in the 1950s.
Next, Kellett considers the effects of blues music and performers on issues of gender and social mobility. He argues that part of the appeal of the idealized bluesman was his absolute masculinity—in manner, performance, and musical theme. The masculine image allowed musicians to take on sociological importance as father figures. Young blues enthusiasts did not necessarily lack fathers, but their admiration for the bluesman character reflected frustration with their parents’ generation and the grayness and austerity of postwar Britain.
In the next chapter, Kellett considers the keen sense of rivalry among English popular musicians in the 1960s and early 1970s—competition that sparked creativity and led to British domination of American music charts, especially between 1966 and 1972. Living on a small, densely populated island, these English artists tended to cluster. Physical proximity led to musical exchange, innovation, and development of hybrid genres in ways not possible for the much larger and more geographically spread music industry in the United States.
Finally, Kellett considers authenticity and the “processes” Kellett calls “experimentation, refiliation, and augmentation” (142). Mere emulation of the blues was not enough to satisfy; by 1966–1970, the musical marriage between British middle class white men and African American bluesmen became a fusion of two cultural strands—and here is where Englishness was most instrumental in transforming American blues into distinctively English forms. English musicians lacked the cultural baggage of racism and civil rights, and instead folded together their experience with social mobility, class consciousness, and frustration with the generation gap. In this period, Kellett argues, blues music in the United Kingdom became aggressively British, “full of British characters speaking in specifically British voices,” “supercharged with volume” and themes of “sex, violence, and power” (142).
This last chapter is subtitled “I Just Can't be Satisfied”—but Kellett's work here is eminently satisfying as he examines the complexities of this cultural-musical fusion. He discusses the effects of the “other” in British blues—and here his own perception of this process as an “other” (Kellett is American) enhances the argument. Britain, he notes, was in a unique position with regards to the United States—same language, shared history, shared cultural background—but there was also enough distance in time and space for both Britain and America to be fascinated with each other's cultural exports and “coolness.” These British men who took to American blues, emulated it, enhanced it, and gave it back to America illustrate the vibrant creativity among a small and closely packed population of artists. Britain's small size fostered the “explosion of musical creativity” as Britain urbanized in the 1960s (177); the results allowed Britons to return to the world scene, not as political or economic heavyweights, but rather as cultural leaders: “the epicentre of a veritable revolution in first musical then cultural taste,” and “arbiters of international ‘cool’” (178).
The British Blues Network is a solid piece of cultural and musical history, recommended not only to scholars and students of twentieth-century British cultural history, but also to the general reader.
