Alexis Korner: the Godfather of British Blues

BLUESMUSE 30

As a young lad, probably too young to drink, if the truth be known, I used to luxuriate in the bath listening to the chocolate-brown tones of Alexis Korner before going out to down voracious pints.

The great man had a blues show on BBC radio on Sunday evenings and, boy, did he know his stuff, which was understandable given his background.

Korner's Blues Incorporated band, which he formed in 1961 with the English blues harmonica legend, Cyril Davies, featured such up and coming blues and rock luminaries as Ginger Baker, Long John Baldry, Graham Bond, Eric Burdon, Jack Bruce, Charlie Watts and Ronnie and Art Woods (Ronnie’s brother), to name a few. Young fans who often joined Korner on stage included Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Paul Jones and Manfred Mann, Steve Marriott, John Mayall, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Keith Richards and Rod Stewart. That’s how important Korner was to the development of British rock. When his later band, CCS, covered Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, it became the TV theme tune to Top of the Pops for the next ten years.

Alexis Korner

But Alexis Korner had a double life. When I returned to London to work in an advertising agency in 1980, I was making a TV commercial with an art director who suggested Alexis Korner as the voice-over. I nearly fell off my chair. I discovered that not only was Alexis Korner also a voice-over artist, he was one of the most in-demand voice-overs in British television and radio advertising. His rich and plummy baritone tones had starred in hundreds of commercials, many of them famous. The art director didn't even know Korner was a musician.

 If you’ve ever heard the former head of the British Army, General Sir Mike Jackson speak, that’s a bit how Alexis Korner sounded. But Korner’s voice had even more whisky and cigarettes-style gravel in it than the General’s, and Korner's vowels were even more polished. As they say up north, he were reet posh.

No other Englishman did as much for British blues as Alexis Korner. He brought many American blues greats over to London, put them up, and played and recorded with most of them including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Jimi Henrix. But even though he sounded like an English aristocrat, Alexis Korner wasn’t even a natural-born Englishman (with apologies to Humble Pie). Korner was born in Paris in 1928 to an Austrian-Jewish father and a Greek-Turkish mother, which is just another example of how so many different nationalities have consistently contributed to the development of the blues.

After living in Switzerland and North Africa Alexis Korner arrived in London at the beginning of World War Two aged 12. There, upon hearing blues for the first time while listening to the radio during the racket of a German bombing raid, he was hooked for life. 

There’s a chapter devoted to World War Two blues in ‘How Blues Evolved Volume Two’.

one of two illustrated histories of the blues at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one

In the U.S. please go to: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved

Sadly, Alexis Korner died far too young in 1984, aged 55.