"Keep on playing the blues somewhere, we love you": John Mayall, British blues pioneer, dies aged 90

John Mayall, the Bluesbreaker whose band was a launchpad for many of British rock's biggest names, including Eric clapton and Mick Fleetwood, has died, aged 90.

A family statement confirmed, “It is with heavy hearts that we bear the news that John Mayall passed away peacefully in his California home yesterday, July 22, 2024, surrounded by his loving family.

“Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world’s greatest road warriors.” A cause of death was not immediately revealed.

“John Mayall gave us ninety years of tireless efforts to educate, inspire and entertain..."

“Keep on playing the blues somewhere, John. We love you,” his family wrote.

The story of Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton and Peter Green

Mayall was born in Macclesfield, England in 1933. "My father was a guitar player so I struggled around on his," he once told MusicRadar . "The action was a little high for me so it wasn’t something that I could really get my teeth into.

"He had an old guitar that he wasn’t using so I took the bottom two strings off and used it as a four-string guitar. I was able to manage on that for a while."

He moved to London in the early '60s and inaugurated John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, a blues collective that has a good claim to being one of the most influential groups ever, importing and mutating American sounds while incubating a slew of players who would go on to dominate rock music in the '60s and '70s.

Mayall's Bluesbreakers featured an endlessly rotating rollcall of players, over the years including such luminaries as Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor.

In 1996, no less an authority than John Lee Hooker told us , "That's who made the blues. Eric Clapton, John Mayall and all those other people over in England made the blues a big thing.

"In the States, people didn't want to know, and it wasn't until the British guys made the American people listen that people like myself and Freddie King, Albert and BB King started to get people wanting to hear our music.

"It was our music originally, but it was those guys in England who made it big and then brought it back to the States."