Eric Clapton: Rescued by music

Brian Scott MacKenzie
7 min readMar 30, 2020
Slowhand onstage in Barcelona in 1974 (Credit: Wikimedia)

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.

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Brian Scott MacKenzie

History, politics, education, music, culture. Award-winning high school teacher, former principal. College instructor. Seahawks Diehard. Twitter: @brian_mrbmkz