The Players:

Paul Jones, speaking about when he started to play music, rose to fame as the singer from 1963 to 1966 for Manfred Mann.

Eric Burdon, speaking about first experiencing the blues, was lead singer of The Animals.

Malcolm McLaren, speaking about the 60s British R&B scene, is perhaps best known for his career as the infamous manager of the Sex Pistols.

Hubert Sumlin, speaking about visiting Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival, was a guitar player with Howlin’ Wolf for over two decades.

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Read an excerpt from the interviews:

Paul Jones: Just as soon as “Rock Island Line” hit number one. It didn’t do that in America but in England, Chris Barber who was a “trad” band leader, also played bass, Lonnie Donegan who was his banjo player, but also played guitar, and was a fanatical, not, well he was a Lonnie Johnson enthusiast, but he was also a Leadbelly enthusiast. And the washboard player Beryl Briden. The three of them did a record of a Leadbelly song called “The Rock Island Line.” And for some reason this old sort of folk song, tear away folk song got to number one in Great Britain. And all over Britain fourteen-year-old boys got their parents to buy them cheap acoustic guitars, and they learned three chord so they could go, [sings]. And we all did it, hundreds of thousands of us, including Eric Clapton and all of us. And that was it for me.

Eric Burdon: I was gone from the first time I heard Muddy Waters's guitar. I heard him rehearsing in the City Hall in Newcastle on a summer's night. The doors were open to let air into the place. I was coming home from college, evening class, and I could hear this electric guitar echoing across the … the city center and I … Whoa! What is that?! You know.

I heard John Lee Hooker singing things like, "I've been working in a steel mill trucking steel like a slave all day." You know, and "I woke up this morning and my baby's gone away." You know, and I related to that directly because that was happening to people, to grown men on my block on my street, you know? Suddenly there was, you know, people returning from Korea and finding out there was no jobs to be had, and the girlfriend had fled, was somebody else, you know? I mean, these were real, real things that were happening around me. And yet here was this black guy from Detroit, Michigan, who was putting it all into words!

Malcolm McLaren: Rhythm and blues, which was the basis of all English rock and roll in the 60s, really came out of the desperate search to associate yourself with the darkness and the existentially bored feeling of the fact that the only thing certain in the future was death. We were driven as fans of that attitude to discover in the music of American rock and roll, the pure, true angst and darkness of it all. And that was discovered in the origins of the blues. Robert Johnson became a mentor and a hero for all those groups of which I was an early and very young fan. Of The Rolling Stones, The Pretty Things, The Yardbirds, and so on. And that music was a bit like your bible. It was like your history. If you didn’t know that, you were nobody. If you didn’t hang out on the underground, holding an LP that portrayed Big Bill Broonzy or Sonny Boy Williamson or Muddy Waters, or indeed Robert Johnson, it was much more difficult to get ahold of, because he had long since died. We’re talking man that lived in the 30s, then you really weren’t considered very hip.

Hubert Sumlin: And these people, man, I came down off this … we came down off the plane — I’ll never forget this — had this big billboard with me and our pictures big as a house, man! [laughs] I said, “Ohhhh!” I said, “Hey look at there! Wolf?” “Yeah man, I know, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know … man maybe these people is alright!” [laughs]

Video Copyright © 2001 Experience Music Project (Hubert Sumlin), © 1998 Experience Music Project (Paul Jones), © 1996 WGBH Educational Foundation and BBC TV (Malcolm McLaren and Eric Burdon)

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