Black, White and Blue.

Although I was alive and sentient during the fifties I don’t remember much about it. I find out what was really going on from TV programmes like ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’.

The newsreels and photos show 50s Britain in greyscale - it‘s all they could do back then. Even Keef tells us that it was drab and miserable and ‘there weren’t no sweets‘.

But the fifties were really colourful. OK it was mostly in the States - but we saw it in all in glorious Technicolor in the 1/9s at Chorley Odeon. Those starlets all had ruby red lips and ‘The sky was as Blue as an Elephant’s Eye’.

Look at the wallpaper and ‘atomic style’ fashion and design of the period.
We all want it now.

I certainly do remember the Blues in Britain (mainly in the early sixties) when those black guys came over here to play for pasty faced middle class lads in suits. I’ve talked about my passion for the music of Muddy Waters and co. before.

However anger rose in my inadequate breast as the narrator claimed that ‘The Thames delta was Britain’s distant echo of the American South‘.

Never heard of Liverpool?

But I warmed to Keef as he talked about his passion for the music, his struggles to get the authentic sound and his delight when ’Little Red Rooster’ became the only pure blues record ever to reach no1.


I loved it.

So - could white men sing the blues?
Probably not - but it doesn't really matter does it?
KAZ