Blues Transformations in the Music of Cream

Abstract

Abstract In 1966, guitarist Eric Clapton joined with bass player Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker to form the rock trio Cream. While Clapton tended toward a style of electric blues close to the Mississippi Delta and Chicago blues songs he venerated, with the combination of Bruce’s elaborate bass lines and Baker’s jazz-influenced drumming Cream quickly became the best known of the original “power trio” blues-based rock bands and prepared the ground for the later group Led Zeppelin to begin the transition from blues-based rock to heavy metal. Cream’s assimilation and transformation of blues songs and styles is part of the widespread influence of American popular music—jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock ‘n’ roll—on the development of British rock music in the late 1950s and 1960s. While this influence has been well documented in its biographical, historical, cultural, and sociological aspects, the purely musical features of the various transformations, such as Cream’s recasting of blues songs into rock songs, have received less attention.

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