The British Blues Network: Adoption, Emulation, and Creativity, by Andrew Kellett

Abstract

This book tells the story of how, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of white, British, suburban boys fell in love with the blues music of black Americans; how those boys formed bands to play the music; and how they ended up as part of the ‘rock aristocracy’, owning landed estates and living like gentry. Summarised in this way, it’s a familiar story—the stuff of countless histories of popular music, of (auto)biographies and of the occasional film. Andrew Kellett, however, does more than revisit a well-trodden path. In his version, this journey is indicative of a wider set of cultural processes. As his subtitle makes explicit, the adoption and emulation of the blues resulted in an extraordinary moment of creativity, one that led to British bands—Cream, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin—defining and dominating rock music in the USA and the UK and beyond. This moment of...