Random Cutting - Growth of the Blues (1961)

Click to Read

They do say that the Blues is the poetry of the South, so that may be why a balding, bespectacled poet and Hull librarian who once turned down the offer to be poet laureate, namely Philip Larkin, wrote this piece in praise of the form.  It dates from 1961, a good 2 years before the Blues burst onto the English music club scene. I discovered the Blues one evening in 1963 when, on TV, I saw Sonny Boy Williamson on a disused branch-line station platform singing and playing his ‘harp’. I read both ‘The Country Blues’ and ‘Blues Fell This Morning’ in those early years.