According to a speech posted by his home on his official Facebook page, John Mayall, the singer and musician who was frequently called the “godfather of the American music” and whose long-running band The Bluesbreakers incubated some of stone music’s biggest stars, including Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor, and Mick Fleetwood, passed away on Monday at his house in California. He was 90.
The statement did n’t name a cause, but instead attributed the death to “health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career.”
Mayall, who’d been performing on the road since late as 2022, was expected to be inducted into the Rock &, Roll Hall of Fame in October as a victim of the firm’s Music Control Award. The house praised Mayall’s “rugged personality and unique voice and style” on its website and claimed he” continued to experiment with and stretch the blues.”
” The music is such an immortal source of inspiration to me”, he , told , The Times in 1990. ” It’s quite inexhaustible, really”.
A guitar, keyboardist, song, saxophone player and singer, Mayall released tens of songs and played many gigs in a job that stretched over more than half a decade. Yet he’s ideal remembered for helping to release the music revival of the 1960s that would go on to create music stars of Clapton,  , the Rolling Stones , and Fleetwood Mac.
His 1966 LP” Blues Breakers”, which featured Clapton on guitar ( not long after he’d left the Yardbirds ), is widely considered a classic of the form and earned a spot on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Mayall was born in 1933 near Manchester, England, where his father collected records and played music as a hobby. At age 3, he “got addicted” to the music of the Mills Brothers, he told The Times, after being discharged from the British Army in his early 20s, he formed his first band” strictly for my own satisfaction”.
By the age of 30, he had already moved to London to pursue music professionally and discovered a vibrant blues scene that he called” the south’s answer to the north, to the Liverpool pop-rock thing dominated by the Beatles.” Beyond Clapton, the Bluesbreakers eventually attracted Peter Green, who left the band to form Fleetwood Mac, Jack Bruce, who played with Clapton in Cream, and Aynsley Dunbar, who played drums for Frank Zappa, among other artists.
Mayall relocated to Los Angeles in 1969, and he spent the rest of his playing years incorporating jazz. However, he quickly recovered from the Bluesbreakers, which he had been playing for 120 dates a year, in the middle of the 1980s.
” There would be more, but I put a ceiling on it”, he told The Times. ” Otherwise, I would n’t get any home life, and that’s very important to me”.
Mayall is survived by six children, Gaz, Jason, Red, Ben, Zak and Samson: seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. His family’s statement said he “is also surrounded with love by his previous wives, Pamela and Maggie, his devoted secretary, Jane, and his close friends”.
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