John Mayall Passes Away
Bluesbreaker was perhaps the most influential rock musician of the 1960s Music News 24-07-2024 13:07
photo: David Gomez
His passing was confirmed in a statement from the family: “It is with a heavy heart that we share the news that John Mayall passed away peacefully yesterday, July 22, 2024, at his home in California, surrounded by his loving family.” A cause of death was not immediately released.
Mayall was born in 1933 in Macclesfield, England. “My dad was a guitarist so I kind of rooted with his guitar,” he once said. “The action was a bit high for me so it wasn’t something I could really get my teeth into.
“He had an old guitar that he wasn’t using, so I took off the bottom two strings and used it as a four-string guitar. That worked for me for a while.” In addition to guitar, Mayall also played keyboards and harmonica and was a singer.
In the early 1960s he moved to London and formed John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, a blues collective that can rightly be called one of the most influential bands ever. It imported and mutated American sounds and cultivated many of the players who would come to dominate the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s.
Mayall’s Bluesbreakers featured an endlessly rotating group of musicians including such later greats as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Peter Green and Mick Taylor.
John Lee Hooker once said that “Eric Clapton, John Mayall and all those other people in England made the blues something big. In the States people didn’t want to hear it, and it wasn’t until the British got the Americans to listen to it that people wanted to hear my music and Freddie, Albert and BB King.”
