The British blues scene grew up in the late 1950's around ex-skiffle band players Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and later coalesced around John Mayall's pioneering band The Bluesbreakers, The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones. They all drew heavily on the dominant style of the day, electric Chicago blues, a style typified by the songwriting of Willie Dixon.
Mayall stuck to his blues roots throughout a long career, although his experimental BARE WIRES album of 1968 broke new ground for the British jazz-rock movement. He was also one of the first British musicians to write songs in a blues format, but is possibly best remembered as a songwriter for Room To Move in 1969. Mayall's Bluesbreakers and The Yardbirds were the proving ground and launch pad for many British guitar greats including Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Mick Taylor and Andy Fraser, who went on to found some of Britain's top blues-based rock bands of the 1960's - Cream, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and Free.

One side-effect of the British Invasion of America in the mid 1960's - the music of The Rolling Stones and Cream in particular - was that mainstream white America finally woke up to the blues as a part of their musical heritage, and started taking notice of the originators of the music they were hearing played by white Europeans. This opened doors that had previously been closed to many black artists such as Muddy Waters, B.B.King, Buddy Guy, Albert King and Howlin' Wolf. Blues rock continues to be a popular style in Britain, one of it's later protagonists being the ex-Thin Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore.

As an aside, Led Zeppelin's blues rock standard "Dazed And Confused", although credited to Jimmy Page, was a direct take-off of a song of the same name written by New York folk singer Jake Holmes.

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