John Mayall, a musician often called the godfather of British blues and whose 1960s band the Bluesbreakers helped launch the careers of rock star Eric Clapton and members of Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones and Journey, died July 22. He was 90.
His death was announced in a statement shared by his social media accounts, which said he died at his home in California but did not share additional details. Mr. Mayall last performed in February 2022 in San Juan Capistrano, Calif.
A multi-instrumentalist who sang and played guitar, keyboards and harmonica, Mr. Mayall was better known as a bandleader who had a superb eye for talent and a steadfast devotion to the purity of the blues. No fewer than seven members of his groups have been named to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which announced in April that Mr. Mayall would be inducted this fall.
Advertisem*nt
Mr. Mayall served in the British army and worked as a graphic artist before settling in London in 1963 to embark on a career in music. He was a decade older than the young rockers of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other groups constituting the “British invasion” of the 1960s, but he was a revered mentor to many of them and one of the most influential musicians of his generation.
“I had this friend in London, John Mayall of the Bluesbreakers, who used to play me a lot of records late at night,” the Beatles’ Paul McCartney recalled to Guitar Player magazine in 1990. “You’d go back to his place, and he’d sit you down, give you a drink, and say, ‘Just check this out.’”
From an early age, Mr. Mayall became a devotee of the classic music created by African Americans in the South. Although he never learned to read musical notation, Mr. Mayall became so adept at the 12-bar blues idiom that he and his bandmates sometimes accompanied touring performers such as Sonny Boy Williamson and John Lee Hooker, helping to bring their music to a wider audience.
“John Mayall, he was the master of it,” blues star B.B. King reportedly said. “If it wasn’t for the British musicians, a lot of us Black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.”
In London, Mr. Mayall formed the Bluesbreakers and became a central figure in the music world, releasing his debut album, “John Mayall Plays John Mayall,” in 1965.
That year, he asked Clapton to join the Bluesbreakers. Already a guitar wizard at 20, Clapton brought a youthful energy to the classic blues favored by Mr. Mayall, with long, elegantly phrased solos and a fiery, driving style that combined precision with passion. Graffiti began to appear in London, proclaiming “Clapton Is God.”
“All I can tell you is what his playing did to me,” Mr. Mayall told Guitar Player in 1995. “I didn’t analyze it — I just know that it gave me chills. There was something there that cut right through to me.”
Clapton left the Bluesbreakers, only to return after a few months. He recorded one album with Mr. Mayall, “Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton,” which came out in 1967. (The band’s name was spelled with two words on the cover. The recording also was known to fans as the “Beano album” after the name of a comic book Clapton is reading in the jacket photo.)
The album included several songs written and sung by Mr. Mayall, along with blues classics by Robert Johnson, Freddie King and Otis Rush. It cemented Clapton’s reputation as a premier blues-rock guitarist, but by the time the album was released, he had left the Bluesbreakers, along with bassist Jack Bruce, to form the power trio Cream, with drummer Ginger Baker.
Mr. Mayall, who encouraged his musicians to explore their own projects, then hired Peter Green as lead guitarist, with John McVie on bass and, at different times, Aynsley Dunbar and Mick Fleetwood on drums. Green, who appeared on the Bluesbreakers’ “A Hard Road” (1967), was known for his sustained notes and improvised solos that seemed to have been carefully composed. Music aficionados still debate whether he or Clapton was the superior guitarist.
When Green, McVie and Fleetwood left the Bluesbreakers to form Fleetwood Mac, Mr. Mayall turned to 17-year-old guitarist Mick Taylor and added two saxophonists to the lineup. The group recorded the well-received “Crusade” and “Bare Wires” albums with Taylor, who departed in 1969 for a five-year stint with the Rolling Stones.
Despite the ever-changing personnel — there were at least 100 Bluesbreakers over the years — Mr. Mayall remained the group’s guiding force and a beacon of musical integrity. He fired any musician in his band who drank on the job.
During his first U.S. tour in 1967, Mr. Mayall was drawn to the climate of California, moving two years later to the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles, where a dynamic music scene was emerging. Dropping the Bluesbreakers name, he released “Blues From Laurel Canyon” in 1968 (even though it was recorded in England), then changed direction with “The Turning Point” (1969), a live recording that was one of the first “unplugged” albums of the rock era.
Advertisem*nt
On “The Turning Point,” Mr. Mayall abandoned the amplified “Chicago blues” style in favor of acoustic guitars, bass and saxophones, with no drums. The album included a fast-paced shuffle tune, “Room to Move,” which became perhaps Mr. Mayall’s best-known composition.
Over the next few years, Clapton, the Rolling Stones’ Taylor and the members of Fleetwood Mac became rock superstars. Even Dunbar, who was fired by Mr. Mayall, found fame as the drummer for the group Journey. (All of them, along with bassist Bruce, are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.)
Mr. Mayall, meanwhile, went his own way, making jazz and blues hybrid albums with trumpeter Blue Mitchell and saxophonists Ernie Watts and Red Holloway, as he sought a deeper definition of the blues. He made recordings with New Orleans musicians Allen Toussaint and James Booker.
Despite his requirement of sobriety on the bandstand, Mr. Mayall developed a drinking problem in the 1970s, and his musical profile began to diminish. His new recordings were often dismissed by critics, but years later they were rediscovered and praised as sincere, imaginative attempts to broaden the vocabulary of the blues.
“Sometimes something will stick to the ceiling, like the 'Turning Point’ album or the Bluesbreakers album with Clapton,” Mr. Mayall told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “But at the time of doing these things you never have any idea what will become of them. You don’t approach them with the idea of trying to get a hit. You try to come up with a valid piece of music that will stand the test of time. If it catches a wider audience, that’s fantastic.”
John Brumwell Mayall was born Nov. 29, 1933, in Macclesfield in the English county of Cheshire. His father was an amateur guitarist who played in dance bands but otherwise struggled to find steady work. His mother was a homemaker.
To escape the strife between his parents, young John built a treehouse in which he installed furniture and electricity. He lived in it for years.
He also found refuge in his father’s jazz and blues record collection, which included the Mills Brothers, Django Reinhardt and Lonnie Johnson. He took up the guitar, then at 14 began attending an art school in Manchester, where he taught himself to play boogie-woogie piano in the style of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis.
“When I started playing, it was strictly for my own satisfaction,” Mr. Mayall recalled in 1990. “I found nobody else was at all interested in it, so it was a very private thing, really, and that would account for why I didn’t think about music as a profession until I was 30.”
Advertisem*nt
After working at a department store, Mr. Mayall served in the British army in the 1950s, then studied at the Manchester School of Art, where he formed his first band, the Powerhouse Four. He later led a group called the Blues Syndicate while working in Manchester as a designer and graphic artist for an advertising agency, before his move to London.
His marriages to Pamela Heap and Maggie Parker, a singer who performs as Maggie Mayall, ended in divorce. Survivors include six children, Gaz, Jason, Red, Ben, Zak and Samson; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In the 1980s, Mr. Mayall quit drinking and revived the Bluesbreakers, reuniting for occasional concerts with Clapton, Taylor and McVie. Several standout guitarists, including Harvey Mandel, Coco Montoya and Walter Trout, worked in Mr. Mayall’s groups before he retired the Bluesbreakers name in 2008. He continued to tour and recorded with such American blues stars as Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples and Albert Collins. Critics ranked several of Mr. Mayall’s later efforts, including 2016’s “Talk About That,” featuring guitarist Joe Walsh, among the best of his career.
In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II named Mr. Mayall to the Order of the British Empire, and he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis when he was 85. The BBC aired a documentary about his life, he published an autobiography in 2019 and archival recordings were released, including a 35-disc box set and early live performances.
“Blues is something people recognize as an expression of life,” Mr. Mayall said in 2001. “And it’s totally infectious. It’s a root form of music. It tells stories.”
