Some of my earliest experiences of listening to the blues came from the blues-rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s, which unobtrusively shared the record bins with the chart-topping bands, but were not household words. I heard them long before I learned anything about classic blues. Among my favourites were Traffic, Blind Faith and the Spencer Davis Group. What these three bands shared was the amazing vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood.
Winwood is English, but he learned his trade from the American masters. The older blues singers toured in England alone, relying on local pickup bands for backing wherever they went, and the teenage Winwood, active since the age of 8 in Birmingham’s club scene, played with B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, T‑Bone Walker, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and even Bo Diddley! Just how much he learned, and how quickly he learned it is demonstrated by this performance of the 1920s classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”, at the age of fifteen.
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