Eric Clapton is a British rock guitarist, one of the best ever. He is white, not black. As far as I know no one has ever thought he was black, not even when they heard him on the radio and did not know what he looked like.
And yet, like Elvis and Madonna, he was one of the main white musicians through which black music has affected white music in the English-speaking world.
He grew up in a white town in the middle of England, so how in the world did that come about?
When he was little he felt there was something different about him. By piecing together things he overheard his aunts say he found out the truth: his parents were his grandparents and his sister was his mother!
His mother had him in 1945 by a Canadian airman who was passing through England on the way to war. They never married. So Clapton was born in secret and in shame. His mother left town.
When he found out the truth he withdrew into himself. When his mother came to town he asked, “Can I call you Mummy now?” She said no. His own mother did not want him!
He turned to music to deal with the pain:
Music became a healer for me, and I learned to listen with all my being, I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family.
The music that spoke to his heart the most was the blues:
It’s very difficult to explain the effect the first blues record I heard had on me, except to say that I recognized it immediately. It was as if I were being reintroduced to something that I already knew, maybe from another, earlier life. For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
He especially loved the electric guitar blues of Chicago. People like Otis Rush, Muddy Waters and Freddie King were his heroes. But above them all was the Delta bluesman Robert Johnson.
He taught himself guitar by listening to his blues records and copying them till he got it right. But it seems he copied the form – in his own way – more than he did the substance.
In time playing the blues on his guitar became the only thing he cared about:
- So much so that he got kicked out of art school.
- So much so that when the pop music of Beatlemania took hold he still stuck to the blues.
- So much so that he quit the Yardbirds just when they had their first hit song: because they had turned their back on the blues.
By the late 1960s he had become one of the great guitar players of rock music along with Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and others who also loved the blues. Together they changed the course of rock music.
See also:
- Compare:
- Freddie King: Have You Ever Loved a Woman?
- Eric Clapton: Have You Ever Loved a Woman?
- Note that this is a very different song than Bryan Adams’s 1995 hit “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” But that too makes for an interesting comparison.
- And, while we are at it, compare: I Can’t Quit You Baby
- The blackness of:
- white American music
- England
- wigger
Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Jimi Page and others share similar trajectories in this regard.
During WWII, engineers learned a great deal about the technology of sound amplification using vacuum tube amplifiers. After the war, this technology became the platform for the popular music industry as we know it today. The very expensive recording equipment was installed in professional studios, while the relatively affordable playback equipment was built in former war machine factories and then mass marketed to consumers.
In post WWII decades, recorded music, broadcast via radio and marketed to consumers as 33 or 45 rpm singles, became a thriving industry.
Like most everything in the US, our popular music market was strictly segregated. “Black” music — mostly blues, but also some rhythm & blues — was virtually unknown to whites in the US. However, black music, and especially the the blues records from Chess, Stax, Checker and other blues labels, was very popular with white British kids. Those with musical inclinations learned these records, often note-for-note.
As the 50’s progressed into the 60’s, British engineer James Marshall (later made famous by his sort-of namesake, James Marshall Hendrix, whose stage presence literally defined the Fender Stratocaster/Marshall Stack as *the* rock music rig) and a few other mostly British electrical engineers, using skills and knowledge gained in wartime, was/were perfecting technology specifically used to amplify electric guitars to very loud volumes. At the same time, Les Paul and Leo Fender were tinkering with and learning to mass produce solid body electric guitars. The advantage of the solid body guitar was that it would not feed back at high volumes like hollow body guitars did. The additional advantage was that its solid mass yielded very long sustain for its notes compared to hollow body guitars.
These Brits found themselves at the confluence of this “perfect storm” of (a) rich musical material via the black American blues records, (b) mass produced, inexpensive solid body electric guitars, and (c) mass produced, affordable and reasonably reliable high wattage guitar amplifiers. With this triumvirate, they began forming rock bands, playing the black American blues songs that they truly loved, but at very high volumes, with lots of overdrive, loud drums, loud bass, etc.
This music swept first Britain and then, via what is now known as the “British Invasion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Invasion), swept across America. The difference, though, between America and Britain was that American kids were wholly unfamiliar with the songs being played. Thus, to American kids, not only was the timbre and percussion of loud rock bands viscerally exciting, the music itself sounded fresh and new, even though it had been played and distributed for decades in the US among the black community. The irony is that these British musicians started playing the music because they legitimately loved it, but as they learned that they could cash in on their popularity they sacrificed their eithics as musicians and arrogated credit for the creation of this music.
Eric Clapton was right up there among the offenders. Agabond describes Clapton as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. He was certainly “great” if that is defined by market share and popularity. Many guitarists (including me) feel that his technique and “chops” were always second rate (yeah, I know he played the solo on the Beatles “Gently Weeps” and it is lovely, but listen to his flat and lifeless rendition of “I Shot The Sheriff” to get a sense of how his music in general fails to move the soul). Eric in my mind is a perfect example of how a mediocre talent can, with some ambition, be carried into the stratosphere of superstardom by the strength of good material — in Eric’s case, black Amerian blues music. He wasn’t alone. Jeff Beck, Jimi Page, John Lennon, Ray Davies, Keith Richards — all of these guys owe 100% of their fame to the blues recordings that they dutifully learned to copy in their London and Liverpool basements.
Among the offenders, as noted, was Jimi Page. Led Zeppelin’s “The Lemon Song,” and several others, is/are almost note-for-note exactly the same, right down to the guitar solo, as tunes written and recorded by the great Willie Dixon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Dixon). In fact, Dixon successfully sued Zeppelin for copyright infringement. Imagine how strong the evidence must have been for a black man to win a case like that vs. white superstar musicians!
As an aside, Elvis Presley had a similar trajectory, but his was much more colored by race than the Brits. Elvis was a white American kid, a southern boy, who as a youth discovered the world of black music and fell in love with it. This made him a rebel and an outcast among his peers. Nonetheless, Elvis fell so much in love with black music that he threw himself into the endeavor of trying to emulate it himself, in his singing and dancing. He continued in this pursuit despite the scorn, disapproval and outright anger his actions elicited from his white southern family and community.
It’s ironic that Elvis is nowadays held up as an icon of racism, partly for apocryphal statements falsely attributed to him, but also because he is regarded as a “cultural thief” of sorts. Elvis was not nearly clever nor sentient enough to engineer the success he found through his emulation of black music. He was an idiot savant, sort of like Snoop Dogg today, who was simply driven by his soul to play and perform the music he loved. The real culprit in the sordid story that was Elvis’ life was the person who used the name “Colonel Tom Parker” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Tom_Parker).
Elvis’ life trajectory was very much parallel to that of today’s Eminem, who is not stained with the same charge of “racist” and “cultural thief” that continues to plague Elvis in his grave.
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Blanc2: Great comment.
Just a correction: I never said Eric Clapton was one of the greatest guitarist of all times. I was careful to qualify it to either Britain or rock music of the late 1960s.
Even Clapton would admit that Jimi Hendrix and the black American bluesmen he was copying were much better than he was.
On the other hand, as I do not play guitar I probably do put too much weight on his market share, like you said.
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Blanc2: I do not think Eric Clapton was any more of a cultural thief than Jimi Hendrix. But maybe can give me a good example of what you mean. They were both playing the music they loved, in their own way, and saw themselves as part of a tradition that goes back to black American blues.
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Among the British Wave musicians, Eric might have less direct instances than many in terms of “cultural thievery.” For example, unlike both Keith Richards and Jimi Page, I cannot think of an example off the top of my head where Eric arrogated the writing credit for a song written by Willie Dixon or some other black American blues musician. He may have done so, but I can’t recall an instance.
In general, though, the “British Wave” musicians found their popularity by playing very loud, overdriven renditions of black American bluse songs. Yes, it is true that they played this music initially because they loved it, and it is also true that they transformed the music by learning to play it their own way. However, the fact that they found fame and fortune playing black American music to white Americans was certainly opportunistic. I concede that there is an open point about whether that alone rose to the level of “thievery” (as opposed to musicians who did arrogate writing credit).
I distinguish Jimi Hendrix from the Brits for several reasons. First, he was black and American (and had, among other things, seen tenure with groups like the Isley Brothers). Second, Jimi drew from a variety of musical styles, including the folk songs of Bob Dylan. Finally, Jimi Hendrix was one of those rare artists who come along once or twice in a generation whose bright flame of sheer creative and artistic force burned so white-hot that it literally seared the musical landscape with the purity and and power of its uniquely individual truth. Note that nowadays you almost never hear guitarists cover Jimi Hendrix tunes. This is because they can’t. Hendrix was so much better than almost anybody else ever will be. The only contemporary guitarists I’ve heard who can cover Hendrix with any credibility have been Stevie Ray Vaughn, Prince and John Frusciante.
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There would have never been a British Invasion unless white Americans were racist. It is a crying shame that songs had to go across the Atlantic and back just to go from the black end of the American radio dial to the white middle of the dial.
On the other hand, even aside from racism, it was unlikely that white Americans would ever go for pure blues music on a mass scale. For one thing the sense of the world you see in blues songs (or even in the first Led Zeppelin album) is a million miles from the middle-class white American sense of the world, even the hippie end of it.
So the value added by the British Invasion was to make the blues into something that white Americans would listen to and, yes, buy.
So while it was a crying shame, it was not thievery (except, of course, for cases where proper credit and royalties were not given).
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He made some comments in the ’70s in support of Enoch Powell, a very right-wing politician, so Im dubious. I do like Layla though…
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I do not know what the comments were, but he did support Powell in 1976 because he would do something about immigration.
Clapton did not like how in Jamaica there were ads on television trying to get people to come to Britain, painting a wonderful future there for them, but then when they got to Britain they got screwed. He thought that was unfair. It only helped the rich who wanted cheap black labour.
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He had a West Indian girlfriend once and clearly loves black music. That, of course, does not mean he is not racist!
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Where did you find that he once had a West Indian g/f?
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It is in his autobiography.
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i dont see whites playing blues as theivery. as jimi hendrix said, music is colorless and raceless, something that you feel. yes, the british invasion seemed to be the only way most white middle class americans would welcome the “devils music” into their ears, cuz you know, its only acceptable when four scrauny white, mop toped british guys sing it, right? That part, yes, is sad, but people like clapton were certainly not racist. yes, theres tons of “musicians” that play types of music for money, to ride the wave of a trend, but i think race is a bad word when related to music. cus in the end, it DONT MATTER!
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What amazes me here is the fact there’s something “strange” about a person being interested in a music that didn’t originate in a group he belongs to.
I admit, I am not into rap at all, but I like American music (just like I like British movies)- that’s just something I feel I can relate to. My cousin is an a band that plays Irish folk music. That’s not something I see as “strange” or difficult to understand.
I know this isn’t about me, my experience or anything like that, but I am really confused by the whole “blackness of Eric Clapton” issue. So, if you play blues, there must be something “black” about you? I don’t get it.
What is sad is truly sad here is the fact that white Americans needed Clapton to show them “black music” is good. But that’s another thing (or is it?)
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Love Layla. Tears In Heaven is beautiful.
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Bit dubious about giving this guy too much credit. On the one hand he embraces and interprets ‘the blues’ well, but on the other, his feelings about ‘PoC’ are on par with many current ‘race realists’. When it suits him, he is ‘colourblind’ but this is juxtaposed with negative racist statements.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism)
Apparently, even as late as 2007 he reiterated his support for Enoch Powell and denied that Powell’s views were racist in an interview with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show…
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Apologies – just read through some of the other comments. It seems his opinion on racist matters are well known already.
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Then I read that he made a bunch of racist comments some years ago. Wow. I didn’t know that. He supported some racist politician in England. Learn something new everyday.
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Well I didn’t know this. I love Change The World, Lay Down Sally. Damn it. I’m upset about this. How will I ever listen to these songs that I love knowing these ugly things about him. I wish i didn’t know this stuff now.
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Well I guess I have to separate the artistry from the lack of character of the artist.
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And he was with Naomi Campbell. But that doesn’t mean he is not a racist.
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” as jimi hendrix said, music is colorless and raceless, something that you feel.”
If Jimi Said that, he was woefully ignorant. Black/African musical expressions couldn’t have come from any other ethnic group due to the fact that they were (and still are) unique & INTRINSIC to the African (global) experience.. This might be hard for people to comprehend, but “blues” wasn’t something that was created in America at all. That way of lamenting is something that several ethnic groups in Africa do to this day (the scale & melodies) , so saying that black/african styles are colorless/raceless is incredibly ignorant, as they wouldn’t see the light of day if African people hadn’t created them in the first place.
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Just finding this post. Keith Richards of the Stones. If you close your eyes and not look at him, you think you were listening to a Black bluesman.
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Eric Clapton is a culture vulture of black music.
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