Ms Perfect

 

I never saw Christine McVie with Fleetwood Mac. I only saw Fleetwood Mac when Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan were fronting the band.

But I did see Christine Perfect (as she was before marrying John McVie) several times with Chicken Shack on the same 1960s club circuit.

My unforgettable memory is the way she used to walk unassumingly on stage with her handbag, put it down by the side of the piano and then start playing the blues.

Shack's lead guitarist Stan Webb was mostly the one in the limelight, but the showstopping moment tended to be when Perfect took over and sang – beautifully – I'd Rather Go Blind, an old slow blues standard that she made her own.

Everyone seems to be remembering Christine McVie from the huge musical soap opera that Fleetwood Mac became after the Peter Green era... I'm happy to remember Christine Perfect. She really was something...

Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again... Slight Return

For reasons unknown to me, my post "Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again" attracted more readers than anything else on "Words And Music".

In short, it was a complaint about a Facebook group called The Real Blues Forum refusing to allow discussion about Jimi Hendrix being a blues guitarist.

Well, it's happened again. But this time the guitarist whose name cannot be mentioned is Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The latest trouble started when a hapless member of the forum posted a video of Albert King performing with Vaughan. A small discussion started about the playing styles of the two men, but was cut short by a right-thinking member of the forum pointing out that this discussion transgressed the rules. Something like: old black players ok to talk about, but modern white players (or Hendrix) not ok to talk about.

Someone then asked how on earth this video had even been posted in the first place.

When I responded by asking: "Can blue men play the whites?" - a light-hearted reference to the Bonzo Dog Band's classic enquiry - my contribution was almost immediately moderated, ie removed.

So now I've removed myself from The Real Blues Forum. It's funny that Albert King was able to bring himself to play with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Rory Gallagher, and that BB King could sing the praises of Eric Clapton and Peter Green, but (predominantly white) blues purists don't seem to even want to talk about them.

A Long Road

By chance, I heard that unmistakeable piano intro to A Hard Road by John Mayall last night and got the proverbial shivers. Although his previous album, Bluesbreakers, with Eric Clapton is the one everybody talks about, it was this one, with Peter Green replacing Clapton, that really was the manifesto for Mayall's blues.

The idea of a young white singer openly dedicating and committing his life to the blues may have sounded preposterous in 1967, but Mayall did just that and is still touring, aged 78.

And many of us whom Mayall, Clapton and Green inspired are also still playing. Something we never could have forecast. If Mayall can go to the end of the road, maybe we can too.