Peter Haycock explored acoustic delta style on the Climax Blues Band album "A Lot Of Bottle", sometimes Jeremy Spencer played acoustic slide work n the vain of Gospel and John Baldry recorded "Black Girl". Alvin Lee played an old fingerpicking acoustic style on the song "Don't Want You Woman" off the Ten Years After debut. Ron Wood played a beautiful Mississippi style slide on "Around The Plynth" from the Faces album "First Step". Rory Gallagher , hailing from Cork, Ireland played the style more frequently and he was thought to be part of the British Blues movement by most bands, yet differed with his unique approach such as playing sax on the "On The Boards" album by Taste and performing more on acoustic instruments than many others would during a live performance. It seemed that way, but not sure.  There were times when you could find that style ON a British Blues album, but...yes..it did seem that most British musicians focused more on the Chicago Blues.

Sorry, I don't consider that stuff "blues."  Blues was an art-form that was uniquely American, rooted in the post-slavery culture of the South and migration of blacks to the North in order to find economic and social freedom.  

The Brits copied the blues, morphed them, even ripped them off wholesale, but it ain't the blues according to my playbook.  Blues-rock is more like it.  

 

Apology accepted.  Rory Gallagher came the closest to the American black blues sound, and he died in a very traditional manner.   Everyone else was a poser.  

Fripp made a point that ITCOCK broke away from the "American blues" sound by being perhaps the first band rooted in European musical tradition.  

http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/News/en-us/Greg-Lake-Reflects-on-Legacy-of-King-Crimson-ELP.aspx

Greg Lake admits prog-rock became overblown, but his pioneering work in King Crimson and Emerson Lake & Palmer nonetheless remains a deep source of pride. “It was a very strange thing to hear a rock band taking their influences from European music, as King Crimson did,” Lake tells Rolling Stone, in a new interview. “I mean, I didn't sing with a mid-Atlantic accent. I sang with a British accent. The music of King Crimson was almost exclusively based on more European structures. It wasn't the three-minute single. It wasn't basic blues-riff music.”

Sorry C., I'm going to have to say nonsense to your line of reasoning. By your logic, blues is a dead language, like Latin. It went on life-support by the mid-50s when R&B supplanted blues as the favorite genre among black listeners and died altogether by the 70s with the advent of funk.

 

But blues didn't die, and the master bluesmen who fell into obscurity before 1960 were saved by white American and Brit guitarists who worshipped the greats and revived their careers. Hundreds of careers. And to say that great and consummate white musicians like Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Ray Vaughan (all members of the Blues Hall of Fame, by the way) didn't play the blues is absolute bullsh*t. Johnny Winter and Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray and Albert King, Bonnie Raitt and Sippie Wallace -- these were familial relationships. You missed the boat on this one.

 

It was a new generation of bluesmen who revived the musical form and brought it to the pinnacle of popularity, and in the process saved a lot of musicians who might have died poor and forgotten. The new generation just didn't happen to be black, and actually blacks have nearly abandoned the genre, sadly, as they have jazz. Or did jazz end with John Coltrane?

 

I think if you asked Muddy Waters if Johnny Winter was a bluesman, or Albert King if Stevie Ray was a bluesman, they would unequivocally say yes. I think the same goes for Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Jeremy Spencer or Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, or Canned Heat (with their incendiary release Hooker 'n Heat).

 

By your clouded thinking, no one can play blues who is not black and wasn't born before 1940. That is silly, and sort of reverse racism, muddle-headed as that may be. As far as Clapton, he's in the Blues Hall of Fame, and jammed with every great bluesman on the planet. Look at the list that's been elected to the Hall. Ain't no one there who don't play the blues:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_Hall_of_Fame (again, the only white musicians currently are Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Ray Vaughan -- a very select group - so it's not like they are an asinine outfit like the Rock and Roll Hall that pulls performers from every known genre, claims they are rock and plops them in to sell tickets)

 

Oh, and by the way, one of the greatest blues albums of all time was Albert King's Born Under A Bad Sign. Who was backing Albert on that album? The Stax Records house band, which included Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Wayne Jackson and Joe Arnold -- all white guys, and white guys who played on every Stax blues and R&B classic. As I said, bullsh*t.

 

P.S. By the same pretzel logic, the genre "progressive rock" occurred between 1969-1979 exclusively by musicians from London and Canterbury (and perhaps Luton) because they and only they had direct access to the European classical/folk motifs and middle/upper class British snobbery with the intent to strip rock of its blues background and graft this European classicism onto it. Americans need not apply and anyone starting their performing careers past 1980 ain't prog. Sorry, find another name.

Exactly.  

Why is it called "neo-prog" on PA?  I don't like the term "prog," neither did originators like Peter Banks and others. 

John Wetton said it best:

Can't go back to the 1970s.  Folks keep trying, but the energy and inspiration isn't there.  Neither is the talent.