Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson on the bluesman who inspired the great rock singers

It was October 15, 1965 when 18-year-old Ian Anderson travelled from Blackpool to Manchester to see the fourth visit to Britain of The American Folk Blues Festival. A rolling revue of blues legends, the original event was the brainchild of German promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, who’d developed a relationship with bluesman Willie Dixon . Through him they were able to persuade a stellar line-up – including Memphis Slim, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker – to play a month of shows in Germany, Switzerland and the UK in 1962.

Three years later, when the teenaged Anderson went to see the 1965 festival, Hooker was back, alongside Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy, Mississippi Fred McDowell and more. But it wasn’t one of the big stars who changed everything for the future Jethro Tull founder – it was a lesser-known Chicago blues guitarist and singer-songwriter named JB Lenoir.

Lenoir was 36 at this point, and would die less than two years later. He left a slim legacy of recordings, but it’s a legacy that lived on, and its influence spread among those who saw him live or heard those recordings.

“If he’s not directly connected with rock, he’s what drove people like us, so his pedigree means he’s a very important precursor of classic rock,” Anderson says. “Almost alone among blues artists – I might be tempted to say alone – he had a great sense of social justice, and didn’t just do rolling-and-tumbling, sexually laced lyrics. He sang about Vietnam and the protest marches in Alabama – he watched his brothers and sisters being beaten by police at Selma, so he has an authenticity.”

Alabama Blues , Lenoir’s lament for the injustice of a state that ‘ seem never to have loved poor me ’, is probably his best-known song. “He wasn’t angry – he sounds sad,” Anderson says. “He’s singing about political events that shaped modern history, but from the perspective of a bluesman with a heartfelt sadness and who is perplexed by the irrational nature of the world.”

Lenoir was born in Monticello, Mississippi, and moved to Chicago in 1949, having already worked with the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson II and Elmore James in New Orleans. In Chicago he recorded for Chess, JOB and Parrot Records, and his political streak was already evident on songs such as Eisenhower Blues, I’m In Korea and Korea Blues , although most of his recordings dealt with the more well-trodden blues subjects of women and hard times.

But the man Anderson saw at The American Folk Blues Festival wasn’t playing rave-ups with an electric band – it was just him and an acoustic guitar, which was the sound of the recordings he made in the last years of his life.

What was startling to Anderson was Lenoir’s singing. “He had a wonderful tenor voice that was like a bell ringing,” he says. “He was definitely a component part of what informed the vocals of Robert Plant and Ian Gillan . He sat there and mesmerised you with that wonderful voice and simple guitar playing.

“As someone who’s written music on an acoustic guitar for most of his life, it’s not hard to imagine [Lenoir’s music] with John Bonham on drums and Jimmy Page on acoustic guitar, because it’s music that speaks volumes. It’s not hard for me to imagine that I must have been subconsciously moved by his work when I was writing way outside the blues genre.”

While many collections of Lenoir’s music have been issued – usually juggling combinations of the same tracks – the material that hits home hardest for Anderson are the recordings promoter Fritz Rau made with him after bringing him over to Germany. Rau gave Anderson a copy in the early 1970s. You can hear those recordings on the 1979 compilation Passionate Blues via Spotify .

It still sounds startling today, ancient and modern simultaneously in its politics. Shot On Meredith , for example, prefigures hip hop in being a song as a news bulletin. It’s Lenoir’s immediate reaction to the shooting of James Meredith in Hernando, Mississippi, as he embarked in his solo March Against Fear to encourage voter registration among African Americans. ‘ June the sixth, 1966, they shot James Meredith down just like a dog ,’ Lenoir sings. ‘Mr President, I wonder what are you gonna do now/I don’t believe you’re gonna do nothing at all .’

In fact, Anderson says, it’s important to remember not just Lenoir and the other heroes of the blues, but also Lippmann and Rau. Without them there would have been no American Folk Blues Festivals for the people who formed the vanguard of British 60s rock to attend and be inspired by: as well as Anderson, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, Eric Burdon, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood are said to have attended Festival shows.

“We think of promoters as being either entrepreneurs who are a bit smoke and mirrors or snake-oil salesman, there to rip off the public and the artists,” Anderson says. “But the great promoters were really profound music people, and Lippmann and Rau were an example of that. These are the promoters who created classic rock around Europe. They saw what was up, and they deserve their place in the history books standing alongside the artists.”

More than 50 years on, JB Lenoir still holds an honoured place in Ian Anderson’s affections.

“He’s one of the few artists on my iPhone,” he says. “Whenever I want to be moved I’ll turn to him and listen to Alabama March . [embedded above is a clip of Lenoir performing it, shot in Chicago in 1965.] The wonderful thing about music is that it has the ability to transport us, and the temporal context becomes irrelevant. There are people who listen for nostalgia, and there are people who listen for elements of emotion and reaction, and even on a cerebral level can be removed from nostalgia. That’s how I listen to a lot of music today.”

As Anderson says, when you listen to just about any of the classic rock bands who emerged in Britain in the 1960s, you’ll likely be able to hear Lenoir in there somewhere. Not necessarily in any obvious place, “but it’s in the atoms of which they are composed”.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 250, published in July 2018.