Eric Clapton: Rescued by music
Born today in 1945, Eric Clapton grew up in a small village in depressed postwar England. As a child, he learned that the elderly couple raising him were not his parents but his grandparents. His real father had abandoned him at birth and gone home to Quebec. His “older sister” was in fact his mother, but she had already remarried and left the country, too.
In his misery, Clapton had plenty of company. The war had left many English families fatherless. National morale plummeted as the empire disintegrated, the economy faltered, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation loomed.
By the bleak early ’60s, Clapton had taken up the guitar and joined the blues subculture, a small tribe that sought solace from the woes of modern Britain in music from a different country, an earlier generation, and another race — a unique folk genre developed by African Americans in the rural Deep South between the world wars.
Disdaining what they regarded as the artifice of rock and jazz, Clapton and his peers heard in the blues the purest possible distillation of human pain and beauty. Like musical…
