Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mick Taylor

There is a quiet vindication in Mick Taylor noticing the blues getting younger. Coming from a player forged in the late-60s crucible of British rock, Taylor is pointing to a cultural reversal: the music that once served as a private language between older Black innovators and a small circle of obsessive disciples is now showing up as a common tongue for kids with guitars, regardless of gender.

The intent is partly report, partly relief. Blues has long been eulogized in public even while it survives in practice; Taylor’s road-level evidence pushes back on the lazy “dying genre” narrative. The subtext is that authenticity isn’t a museum condition. It can be learned, coveted, reinterpreted, even misread, and still remain a living craft. When he says “always meeting people,” he’s not citing charts or streaming data. He’s invoking the oldest metric in music: who’s showing up night after night to play.

His quick add-on, “male and female,” matters. Blues guitar culture has been notoriously masculinized, with mythology built around lone geniuses and machismo. Taylor’s phrasing isn’t polished, but it’s telling: he’s registering a shift in who feels entitled to the instrument, and by extension, who gets to claim the lineage. In the background sits Taylor’s own complicated position - a white British musician shaped by Black American forms - which makes his observation feel less like ownership and more like stewardship. The blues, he suggests, keeps slipping its boundaries, surviving precisely because it refuses to stay put.