Politics & Power Quote by Mick Taylor

There’s a quiet corrective buried in Mick Taylor’s matter-of-fact timeline: blues didn’t simply “go global,” it got extracted, rebranded, and redistributed. By framing the 1950s as a world of black clubs and black musicians, he restores the music to its original social geography - intimate rooms shaped by segregation, local economies, and a community that understood the blues as lived experience, not just a sound.

Then comes the pivot: “from the ’60s onwards it changed.” Taylor doesn’t name names, but the subtext hums with them - the British blues boom, the Stones, Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, the festival circuit, the record-collector pipeline. The sentence compresses a whole cultural transaction: a black American form becomes a white transatlantic obsession, then an international commodity. “International” reads like celebration on the surface; underneath, it’s a euphemism for displacement. When a scene globalizes, someone usually gains access and someone else loses ownership.

Taylor’s intent feels less like guilt than realism from a participant-witness. As a guitarist who benefited from that ’60s shift, he’s careful, almost understated, which makes the observation sharper. He acknowledges origin without romanticizing it, and he acknowledges expansion without pretending it was neutral. The power of the quote is its restraint: one clean before-and-after that lets the listener supply the uncomfortable middle - appropriation, amplification, and the uneven economics of who gets credited, booked, and remembered when the blues stops being “something you would hear” in specific rooms and starts being something the world believes it has discovered.