Amazing notes from one of my first musical mentors . . . . . Maestro Mayall!
John Mayall: “Sonny Boy Williamson was my idol of course as opposed to Little Walter who was amplified harp. I lean more towards the acoustic harp the way Sonny played it, and Sonny Terry, people like that. So, I got on really well with him as well as anybody could really because he was definitely a very cantankerous character.”
While Clapton had a contentious relationship with Sonny Boy Williamson having recorded a live album with Sonny Boy as at 17-year-old guitarist with the Yardbirds, Mayall had a much more cordial friendship with the Delta blues giant.
“I might have been dissatisfied with my own attempts being far short of the idols of the songs we were covering, people like Otis Rush and Freddie King,” Mayall told me in 1994. “We were in awe of these people and Sonny Boy Williamson. Our attempts seemed rather feeble by comparison. We were developing our own style. And yet to me I was trying to learn those licks. Being a different person, of course, they came out differently.”
“We were all doing the best we could, and we loved he music, but we hadn’t understood really the roots of it sufficiently enough to be convincing or whatever, but he was glad to get the opportunity to get an audience, but he didn’t really have too much respect for the Yardbirds, so he made it quite known that he didn’t appreciate them, but Sonny Boy was a cantankerous character, and luckily he enjoyed talking to me, so we got along pretty well.
“He took me down to the Hohner Harmonica Headquarters in London,” recalls Mayall today, “and he got me fixed up with (harmonica) keys that weren’t really available to the public. He was very helpful. They weren’t available to the public in certain keys, and if you tried to find out how he did it you wouldn’t be able to find it. He had Hohner make them up in those particular keys. They weren’t for general distribution. I came away with those I needed.”
Don Wilcock / Blues Blast Interview 2016
Photo by ARTCO-Berlin/ullstein bild
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