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I am one of the 'Old Greys' that haunt the music scene. Born in the UK, I started playing music in the mid 1950s and was part of the skiffle craze, a musical rage generated, in large part, by the activities of jazz trombonist Chris Barber and Chris's banjo man Lonnie Donegan. They and others (like Ken Colyer, The Vipers and Chas McDevitt) introduced me to the Blues and to some early Old Timey Country Music. The musical sources for skiffle were primarily American black and white roots idioms. Chris Barber and one or two of his contemporaries were at the forefront of bringing to the UK some artists whose names are now legends; Muddy Waters, Jesse Fuller, Big Bill Broonzy, Howling Wolf and more. These visitors to the UK had a massive influence on what is today called yoof culture, often appearing on teenage music TV programmes like 6.5 Special, Oh Boy!, not to mention the awful Juke Box Jury, which when Wolf appeared, voted his record Love Me Darlin, as a miss. Bizarrely, the panel included Lonnie Donegan . Anyway, all this was enough to stimulate the interest of the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things and others, including me, to check out the roots of the music. For me it was the start of a life-long love affair.
I took every chance to play, and when I first moved to London in 1958, took the opportunity to rub shoulders with people at blues clubs in the city; The Roundhouse, 100 Oxford Street and The Marquee, but principally the Troubadour in Old Brompton Road, where I was a regular. There I met and made music with the likes of Long John Baldry, Alexis Korner, Wally Whyton and towards the folky end of the music scene, Martin Carthy and Shirley Collins. Slowly however, career and a growing family took over and although I still played in public occasionally, the gigs got fewer and fewer, save for a short spell as a resident at a club in west London. Eventually even that stopped. Then, for my 60th birthday, my lovely wife Tricia organised a surprise party for me. She booked a blues band to entertain and one of the members, who knew that I played, persuaded me to join them. I did and found that I wanted to go back to gigging. So here we are.
In the last couple of years I have done quite a few gigs and have been delighted to open for Otis Grand, Doug MacLeod and Sherman Robertson. My new CD (See above) is going well. I have also been DJing, doing a blues programme on Vibraphonic FM (See my Blog)
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