The Return of Koerner, Ray & Glover

It must have been in 1964 that I first came across the names of Koerner, Ray & Glover. Flush with the hard-earned gains of a couple of summer holidays clearing tables in a department store’s cafeteria, I’d bought an acoustic guitar. Like many in that era, sucked off the pop mainstream by the twin attractions of the R&B boom and the Dylan-fuelled folk bonanza, I was already into scanning obscure publications for hints of the hip. I bought their first album – Blues, Rags & Hollers – as a very expensive American Elektra import and nearly played it grey on my bedroom Dansette.

I hadn’t yet fallen in with the crowd of ultra-purist mouldy-fygge blues collectors to whom country blues played by young white persons was anathema. Indeed, since I was by now deep in the process of desperately figuring out how to become a 65 year old Mississippi share-cropper myself, how could I not help but admire those who had clearly rambled a long way down that same lonesome highway? (That was how we talked in those days.) And although I’d long-since decided that those cleanly-dressed, neatly-coiffed pop stars the Beatles were only for silly little girls (if we tolerated pop at all, us weekend beatniks went for the Stones, the Animals, the Downliners Sect), nevertheless I was secretly impressed when a pop-press taste profile of the Fab Four mentioned that Koerner, Ray & Glover were among their favourite listening.

They followed it up with Lots More Blues, Rags & Hollers and eventually The Return Of Koerner, Ray & Glover, but it was when Koerner’s solo Spider Blues came out in Britain in 1965 that I have to admit an all-out attack of hero worship. The whole notion of ‘authenticity’ and all that ‘can blue men play the whites’ business simply hadn’t penetrated the nether regions of Weston-super-Mare. I had my Big Joe Williams, Blind Boy Fuller and Lightnin’ Hopkins records, but I played Spider Blues alongside them as an example of yet another fantastic, original stylist who I could only dream of emulating. He stomped, wheeled and bopped away on a 7-string guitar, played urgent, darting harmonica on a rack (when Tony Glover wasn’t doing the duties), and wrote his own songs rather than just copying old blues records. The final coat of inspirational paint on the package was album sleeve notes written by one Paul Nelson, who knew how to string a word or two together. He was editor of The Little Sandy Review – an American folk publication so influential (even over here) that I was astounded to discover just this summer that it numbered its circulation in hundreds rather than thousands.

(I’d kill to have Spider Blues on CD with more of Koerner’s solo things from the other K,R & G albums as extra tracks, he mentions in passing…)

That year I’d left home, moved to bed-sitter land in Bristol, trying to hold down a day job and be an apprentice folk bluesman at night. Koerner came to town to play at – good grief, I can’t remember – either the University Folk & Blues club or the Ballads & Blues down in the city. He was staggering: all long, lanky legs that stretched on forever until terminating in a pair of army boots, fingers that seemed to somehow bend back on themselves as he frailed impossibly complex rhythms out of one of those wondrous Gretsch flat-tops with a plectrum-shaped soundhole, like Ramblin’ Jack used to play. And at the end of the night, it turned out that the club had (as folk clubs often did, and probably still do) failed to honour their obligation to provide accomodation, so I dutifully kidnapped my hero and gave him a bed for the night. It was the one and only time in my life that I ever slept in the bath…