Its possible for someone to like rock music without having ever heard the Blues. One would hope that people just respond naturally and honestly to music without always having to intellectualise it or put it into some kind of historical context. Certainly Rock and Roll and the Blues are pretty much one and the same thing, its impossible to seperate one from the other. You can hear Bo Diddelys influence on the Velvet Underground for example. Its a different story as Rock and Roll gradually evolved in to "Rock" which isn't really a genre, just a convenient label for a lot of mainly guitar based misic. Up to the 70s most rock bands still had a heavy blues influence. Hendrix, Clapton/Cream, Beatles, The Stones, New York Dolls, Deep Purple, Fleatwood Mac and Led Zeppelin are all fairly diverse acts but all still had that blues influence. By the time you get to the 80s, the blues influence is still there, Sonic Youth for example have a bit of a blues influence via the the velvet underground, they definitely had the great bluesmens understanding of tone, but some bands were moving away from the blues. I think heavy metal is good example of this, early heavy metal bands like Led Zeppelin were basically electrified blues, but by the time you get to Metallica, the blues influence has been diluted, you also had all these "shred" guitarists in metal bands who were playing complex stuff that was more neo-classical than it was raw blues. Might explain why a lot of "shred" guitar bands were rubbish, only listened to by obsessive 14 year wannabe guitarists! I think "Rock" without a noticeable blues influence can be good, but Rock and Roll is just the baby of the Blues.

Yo,Binokular be in effect y'all. Ok, I'm getting that old 'I agree yet I disagree' feeling again. Yes, I agree that there has been a lot of cross pollination between white and black culture. Rock 'n' Roll itself is obviously a cross pollinated music, black culture through the sieve of a white sensibility, but it is not oversimplifying to say that the root of most popular music is black. It is just a statement of fact. What both Charles and Presley are trying to do in their respective statements is give credit to the true originators of this music at a time when the record business and society would not give due praise. After all, these records were demeaningly termed 'race records'. Today, things are different and musicians like Beyonce, Pharrell Williams, Ice T, Chuck D, P Diddy, Russell Simmons and so on are praised, and paid, properly in their own right. Back in May, for example, The Houstonian magazine put Willie Nelson and Beyonce together on their cover for a special issue on Texas music. I don't altogether agree with painting Britain as some kind of opened armed multicultural second home of the blues. The British Blues explosion began with skiffle and stars such as Bill Haley, Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan. Although American musicians such as Muddy Waters did play gigs in England during the 1950s, thanks to the work of people like Chris Barber and Alexis Korner, their audiences were small and essentially restricted to afficianados. Furthermore, young white British R&B fans in the 1960's were simply unable to get original recordings of Howling Wolf etc in their local stores because these were 'imports' and available only through specialist record shops on the Charing Cross Road. Instead fans like the young Keith Richards, had to make do with 'covers albums', re-recordings of blues songs by white session musicians, put out by a label called Embassy and distributed through Woolworths. I don't quite agree that you just turn on the radio and just 'like or dislike' a song. If you like a particular type of music and want to explore it, you will start to follow it like a river back to its source. Ultimately, I don't think you can truly like any kind of 'black' orignated music and not like or be aware of its roots. By the way, to confuse things even more, the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure has a theory that American Blues is really just the music of Mali, transposed from Africa into the setting of the Deep South and that John Lee Hooker is just playing Malian music with an American accent. Play Farka Toure's 'Roucky' and Lee Hooker's 'I Rule My Den' back to back and you'll see what I mean.

theory: everyone in the (western culture) world likes at least one blues song, how about we try to prove/disprove this one? i bet its true. of course defining blues is gonna be the nightmare at some stage. its just a very emotive form of music, people get it stright away, not too much complication to it, yet most of us cant do it propery (properly=Stevie Ray Vaghaun, etc etc etc...)

OK, I'm going to go back to this "hearing stuff on the radio and liking it" thing again (sorry!). OK yes, Jules is right, most adults who listen to the radio will know something about the origin of what they are listening to, but I'm going to have to say that my comment was based on my personal experience, on how I respond to music personally. I generally just go with the flow musically, I hear something, I like it, it don't like, I don't try to think top hard why. Jules, you react in a slightly more cerebral manner perhaps. I'm of the opinion that how we respond to music is largely based on our emotional disposition. OK it would be silly to say that I listen totally without preconception, everybody has their own predjudices but generally I try to just listen. There are definitely people out there who can listen to music without knowing its background: Kids. It may be a cliche but kids genuinely have fewer pre-conceived ideas. When I was a kid and heard the Beach Boys for the first time, I had no idea who Brian Wilson was, what LSD was or how it afected him or even that these guys didn't really surf. I just heard it and though "cool!". When I was 11 and heard Roy Orbison, I had no idea of the difference between R'n'B or Rock and Roll or that it was originally black music, at least not until I read the liner notes of the album cover after persuading my mum to buy me the record. Maybe I was just a naive dumb kid, but thats how things were.