Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect – The British Blues

Sat, Mar 8, 2025

This week’s episode of Cause and Effect, hosted by Dr Jay, focuses on The British Blues.  When one thinks of the blues, England isn’t the first place most people think of but they definitely latched onto the blues in the mid-to-late 1950’s and started to make it their own.  An electrified visit by Muddy Waters in 1958 set the younger generation on their ear and they never looked back.  They kept speeding it up, cranking it up, and sent it back to America as part of the British Invasion.  Any genre that includes The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix is pretty much an influence on much of the music we hear today.

We’ll dig into some of the tracks that introduced the blues to England, some of the American blues legends that brought it over in person, the bands that started by playing legendary blues tracks but then began writing their own, bands that started with the blues but branched out in many different directions, and some recent music that calls the British Blues an influence.

There’ll be nearly 100 years of music on this show so I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I loved pulling it together and doing the research.  If you’re familiar with my usual show, Alternative Milestones which airs every Thursday from 1-3 PM, you know that digging into music history is kinda my thing.

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