NPR Interview - Eric Clapton Looks Back at His Blues Roots
Listen online to the first in a two-part interview on NPR Radio
All Things Considered, October 17, 2007 · Eric Clapton has been reinventing himself musically for more than 40 years. But the strong pulse of the blues has powered his guitar playing since the beginning: from the Yardbirds when he was 18, through his stints with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Derek and the Dominoes, to today.
Now 62, the legendary guitarist is the author of a new autobiography, Clapton.
In the first of a two-part interview, Clapton talks to Melissa Block about his musical influences as a young man.
'Uncle Mac' and the Blues
His first guitar, which he got when he was 13, was a steel-string Hoyer made in Germany. It was about as big as he was, Clapton recalls.
"It was a very cheap guitar. And most cheap guitars, as anyone will tell you who tries to play a cheap guitar … they hurt to play," Clapton tells Block.
"It sounded nice, but it was just such hard work, I gave up. So I started when I was 13 and gave up when I was 13 and a half," he says.
Clapton's introduction to the blues — the music that would forever influence his own work — came from an unlikely source: a children's radio show in the 1950s and '60s hosted by "Uncle Mac" (aka Derek McCulloch).
The show's usual fare was novelty children's music, such as "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"
But every now and then, Clapton says, Uncle Mac would slip in some blues.
"I don't know what this guy was on; I can't imagine how it would get snuck in, whether it was his taste or someone else's, his wife, who knows?" Clapton says.
'I Got What They Were Trying to Do'
Clapton even remembers the first blues song he heard on the show: "Whoopin' the Blues" (full song audio) by harmonica player Sonny Terry and singer and guitarist Brownie McGhee.
"That's where it started for me," he says.
"It got to me on a level that nothing else did. I got what they were trying to do," Clapton says.
"I think the purity of what they were trying to do undercut everything else that you could hear on the radio. Aside from great classical music or great opera, there was a seriousness about it that none of this other music had."
