IN THE BEGINNING

Over the next few pages we look back on the music that initiated rock’n’roll, and the people who really birthed the rock star persona.

Robert Johnson, Son House, Lead Belly, Memphis Minnie, Charley Patton, John Lee Hooker (pictured), Howlin’ Wolf… History has a way of deifying names such as these, ensuring that they’re spoken about in awed, reverent tones because of their innovative musical inspiration. In one respect this reverence is completely justified. These musicians and others are the founders of rock’n’roll, and of popular music as a whole. Without them there would be no Chuck Berry, Led Zeppelin, Rival Sons and so many more.

Except the full picture is a little gnarlier than that, and way more interesting. They weren’t the majestic paragons that history often paints them as. History doesn’t always pay so much attention to the kind of people they were, and the kind of lives they led. Perhaps it’s easier not to.

The truth is these legends of blues were probably just as badly behaved, if not worse, than the 60s and 70s stars they would go on to inspire. Unsurprisingly, they mostly led harsh lives: Lead Belly was a convicted murderer, Robert Johnson a serial womaniser, Son House a hard-drinking ex-convict, and boozy Memphis Minnie could hold her own in a fight. Only a fool would fuck with them.

The music itself often gets the hagiography treatment too, in a way that smooths its legacy and ignores the circumstances that bred it. The likes of Lead Belly have been embraced as folk heroes by artists such as Bob Dylan, and also by the most recent crop of new bluesy rock bands, who’ve favoured these older figures over the classic rockcum-blues explosion crowd, essentially because they’re more stripped-back. Words like ‘authentic’ and ‘raw’ are used a lot. Nirvana effectively turned the MTV generation on to Delta blues with their cover of Lead Belly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night?/In The Pines.

But here’s the thing: Lead Belly wasn’t trying to be restrained, or virtuous, he was just working with the tools he had; that sparser sound of his and so many others was only because they didn’t have Marshall stacks and Fender Strats. If Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson had had access to an electric guitar, there’s every chance he’d have cranked it all the way to 11 and played just as many indulgent, face-melting solos as 70s rock stars.

And that’s what all the men and women on the next few pages were: the first pioneers of blues and rock’n’roll, yes, but also the first rock stars.