ERIC CLAPTON Played ‘Crossroads’ Under a Fake Name — Judge Said ‘That Sounds Just Like Eric Clapton’ D

Eric Clapton was standing in the River Camel in Cornwall at 6:00 in the morning on August 14th, 2016, waist-deep in cold water with a fly rod in both hands and exactly the quality of silence that Eric Clapton came to Cornwall to find when the phone in the jacket pocket on the bank buzzed. It was Nigel.

Eric Clapton waded to the bank. Eric Clapton picked up the phone. “There’s a guitar competition at the folk festival tonight,” Nigel said, “in St. Ives. 14 contestants. Prize is a local recording session.” Nigel, “I’ve already registered you. George Lawson, 71, retired.” “When did you do that?” “Yesterday, while you were in the river.

You looked busy.” Eric Clapton had been coming to Cornwall for the fishing for years. Fly fishing in the rivers of the far southwest of England was the thing Eric Clapton did when the music needed to be quiet for a while, when the accumulated weight of 55 years of performing and recording and the particular intensity of being Eric Clapton in public required something that was entirely the opposite of all of that. There was no audience in a river.

There was no microphone, no setlist, no expectation. There was only the water moving at whatever pace it chose and the rod and the fly and the specific kind of patience that is not the patience of waiting for something to happen, but the patience of being present in the conditions that will allow something to happen when it is ready.

The River Camel was one of the best rivers in the southwest for salmon and sea trout. Eric Clapton had been fishing it for most of the previous decade. That evening, Eric Clapton sat in a plastic chair in a village hall in St. Ives, registered as George Lawson, wearing a flat cap and a pair of reading glasses that Nigel had produced from a jacket pocket with the self-satisfaction of someone who had thought of everything. Nigel sat beside him.

Drop a comment right now. Tell us where in the world you’re watching from and subscribe. In the final round of the Cornwall Folk Festival Acoustic Guitar Competition, Eric Clapton played Crossroads, the Robert Johnson original. The song that had been in Eric Clapton’s hands since 1961 and that Cream had brought to the world in 1968.

David Holt, sitting at the judges table after 11 years of running this competition, listened to the first eight bars. Then David leaned toward his microphone. “That sounds just like Eric Clapton’s version.” David said. Eric Clapton looked at him. “I’ve been told that before.” Eric Clapton said.

David sat with those six words for 3 seconds, then the evening changed. Crossroads had been written by Robert Johnson in Mississippi in the 1930s in the specific circumstances of the Delta blues tradition. A man, a guitar, and whatever it was that Johnson had agreed to at the crossroads, depending on which version of the story you accepted.

The song was a reaching out, like most blues songs, but one with a specific geography and a specific feeling of being stuck between directions, of not knowing which road led somewhere useful. That feeling had traveled a very long way from its origin to reach the bedroom of a 13-year-old boy in Ripley, Surrey, England in 1958.

Eric Clapton had found the Robert Johnson recordings through the record collections of older musicians through the slowly organizing London blues scene of the late 1950s, through the specific shared understanding that was developing among a small number of young British musicians that the most important music in the world was on those American records and the only thing to do was learn every note of it.

The Robert Johnson recordings had opened a door that Eric Clapton had spent the following 60 years walking through. The specific way Johnson bent strings, the conversation between the bass notes and the melody, the quality of tension and release in the phrasing, all of it had become the foundation of Eric Clapton’s playing, the bedrock under everything that came after.

When Eric Clapton played Crossroads with Cream in 1968, the performance had taken a Delta blues song and expanded it into something that reached a generation of listeners who had never heard of Robert Johnson, but who understood immediately that whatever was happening in that guitar playing was coming from somewhere deep and real.

By 2016, Eric Clapton had been playing Crossroads for 55 years. The song had not gotten smaller. The Cornwall Folk Festival acoustic guitar competition was held every August in the village hall in St. Ives as part of the broader folk festival that occupied the town for a long weekend.

It attracted folk guitarists, acoustic blues players, finger style enthusiasts, and anyone who had been meaning to enter for years and had finally gotten around to it. The head judge was David Holt, 58 years old, owner of a music school in Penzance that he had been running since 1998. A trained folk guitarist who had spent 30 years developing expertise in the acoustic guitar traditions of the British Isles and the American South.

David had been organizing and judging this competition for 11 years. David’s expertise was genuine, his assessments were honest, and his confidence in both was the natural product of two decades of professional engagement with the music. What David had not encountered in 11 years of this competition was a contestant who had been playing one of the songs in the repertoire since before David was born.

Eric Clapton and Nigel had arrived at the village hall at 7:00 in the evening. The 14 contestants were arranged in chairs along the side of the hall waiting their turns. Nobody looked twice at the older man in the flat cap who signed in as George Lawson. The woman at the registration table handed Eric Clapton a number and pointed toward the chairs. Round one.

14 contestants played one at a time. Eric Clapton was 11th. Eric Clapton took the borrowed acoustic guitar, a Taylor 314CE that belonged to a contestant who had offered it when George Lawson mentioned not having brought his own, walked to the performance area, sat on the stool, and played a slow 12 bar blues in E that was technically adequate in every particular and genuinely impressive in none. David made notes.

George all solid basics, good feel for the form, but the phrasing is mechanical in places. The soul of the blues lives in the spaces between the notes as much as the notes themselves. You’ve got the structure. You need to find the feeling inside it. Through to round two, but only just. Eric Clapton nodded.

Eric Clapton returned to the chair. Nigel beside him was looking at the ceiling. Nigel’s hands were pressed flat on his thighs. Nigel’s jaw was clenched with the effort of a man who had been in this situation twice before and knew from experience exactly how much self-control the situation required.

“The soul of the blues.” Nigel said at a volume only Eric Clapton could hear. “He’s not wrong.” Eric Clapton said. “He told you to find the feeling inside it.” “A good note.” Eric Clapton said. “I’ll take it on board.” Nigel put both hands over his face. Round two reduced 14 to six. Eric Clapton played a slightly more developed piece.

The same key, a few melodic gestures that hinted at a vocabulary considerably larger than round one had suggested. David’s assessment was more encouraging. Something underneath trying to come through. Better dynamics. A hint of the real blues feeling. Through to the final. The final. Three contestants. Callum Trevithick, 17 years old, a student from Penzance who had been playing guitar for four years and who had in both preliminary rounds played with a quality that David had written down in his judging notes with a single word. Honest. A woman named Ann, 44, a school teacher from Truro who played Celtic influenced finger style with considerable technical precision. And George Lawson, 71, retired, who had been standing in a river that morning with a fly rod. Callum played first. Callum played an original piece Ali, a slow acoustic melody built on an open DADGAD tuning, simple in its harmonic movement, but with a quality in the phrasing that David had been noting throughout both preliminary rounds. The

playing came from inside the music rather than on top of it. It was not technically sophisticated. Callum was 17 with 4 years of playing behind him and the technical range of someone with 4 years of playing, but the emotional intelligence in the piece was not related to technique. It was related to something that either a player has or doesn’t have at the age they currently are and Callum had it.

David gave the marks the performance deserved and felt the particular satisfaction of a judge who has backed a young talent from the beginning and is watching the assessment prove correct. Ann played second, a clean accomplished fingerstyle arrangement that earned its applause without surprising anyone.

Then David called George Lawson. Eric Clapton stood up. Eric Clapton walked to the performance area with a quality of movement that several people in the room noticed but could not immediately name. Not the cautious considered gate of an older man navigating an unfamiliar space, something more direct, more habitual.

The gate of someone who has walked from a chair to a stage so many thousands of times that the body does it without instruction from the mind. Several people in the room had watched both preliminary rounds without paying close attention to George Lawson, who had not been remarkable enough to pay close attention to.

They were paying close attention now and they were not sure when they had started. Eric Clapton sat on the stool. Eric Clapton looked out at the 40-some people of the Cornwall Folk Festival Acoustic Guitar Competition audience, the village hall in St. Ives, the coast of Cornwall, 500 miles from the Mississippi Delta where Crossroads had come from and 58 years from the bedroom in Ripley, Surrey, where Eric Clapton had first heard it on a record and understood that this was the music that mattered. Eric Clapton played Crossroads. What came out of the borrowed Taylor guitar was the song that Robert Johnson had written and that Eric Clapton had been playing since 1961 and that Cream had taken to the world in 1968, played at the tempo Eric Clapton had settled into across decades of live performance with the string bends in the second position that had been the signature of Eric Clapton’s blues playing since the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers and the years before either of those with the phrasing that treated the silence between notes as

deliberately as the notes themselves with the specific quality of tension that Eric Clapton had spent 60 years learning to generate in exactly the space where the melody needed it. The borrowed Taylor was a good instrument. In Eric Clapton’s hands it sounded like what it was, a good instrument being played by someone for whom any instrument would sound approximately right because the music was already fully formed before it reached the strings.

The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when everyone in them has the same thought at the same moment without discussing it. David Holt at the judges table held his pen above his notepad. The notepad already contained from round one the words good basics need soul, mechanical phrasing needs feeling.

David listened to eight bars of Crossroads. David leaned toward his microphone. That sounds just like Eric Clapton’s version, David said, not as an accusation, as an observation that arrived before David had finished processing what he was actually saying. Eric Clapton looked at David.

I’ve been told that before, Eric Clapton said 3 seconds. David’s face during those 3 seconds was the face of someone whose understanding of the previous 4 hours was being simultaneously revised and expanded. David was a musician. David knew the song and he knew the famous recording and he had heard in the last 45 seconds the bend on the seventh that was the specific signature of Eric Clapton’s version, not anyone else’s version, not a general blues approach to the bend, but the one particular way that one particular player had approached it consistently across 55 years of performing. David put his pen down. The room’s own recognition arrived more slowly. The folk festival audience contained people of various ages and various levels of familiarity with Eric Clapton’s catalog. It arrived in some people immediately and in others over the following 30 seconds, person by person, the way recognition travels through a small room when the information requires a moment to connect with what the eyes and ears have already

received. When it arrived in all 40 people simultaneously, the village hall in St. Ives, Cornwall, on August 14th, 2016, produced the specific sound of a crowd that has just understood something extraordinary and is responding to it from a place that is deeper than entertainment. Eric Clapton waited.

Then, Eric Clapton looked at Callum Trevithick. “The prize is yours,” Eric Clapton said. “You played the truth. That’s what the blues is for.” Callum, 17 from Penzance, was in a state of experience that 17-year-olds are generally not equipped to have processed. Eric Clapton looked at David.

“Would you give us a few minutes? George Lawson and this young man have a song to play.” They played together for 12 minutes. Callum on lead, Eric Clapton on rhythm. The same structure that had worked in Surrey the previous winter and the one before that. The same understanding that the most useful thing a musician of Eric Clapton’s experience can do for a 17-year-old from Penzance is not to demonstrate what is possible, but to provide the ground from which the 17-year-old can discover it for themselves. Callum played Crossroads. Callum played it in his own way. The dad gad instinct from his original piece finding its way into a standard blues structure in an interesting and not unwelcome fashion. Callum played better than Callum had played anything in any of the three competition rounds, because the rhythm under the melody was being held by someone who had been holding rhythm for 60 years, and when the foundation is that secure, the structure above it can attempt more than it otherwise would. David Holt has told this story once publicly at the Cornwall Folk Festival

the following summer, when a journalist asked him about the most significant moment in the competition’s history. David said, “I told Eric Clapton his playing lacked soul and needed more feeling. I have been a musician for 30 years. I know what I heard and I know what I said. I said the wrong thing to the wrong person.

” A pause. “But I have never heard Crossroads played more correctly. So in the end, I was right about that much.” The poster from August 2016 is on the wall of the village hall in St. Ives. Entry 11 reads, “George Lawson, 71, retired, Cornwall.” Beside it, a handwritten note in David’s handwriting, “Good basics, needs soul, needs feeling.

” Below it in a different pen, added some weeks later in David’s handwriting, “The talent was there, just not being shown.” Callum Trevithick went on to play professionally. David sent him a note, “The standard isn’t the recording, it’s whether you mean it.” Eric Clapton was back at the River Camel at 6:00 the following morning.

The fish were not cooperating. Nigel sat on the bank and ate a sandwich and did not mention the previous evening for approximately 40 minutes. Then Nigel said, “David told you your playing lacked soul.” Eric Clapton, standing in the water with the rod, said, “He wasn’t wrong to say it. David was hearing what I showed him.

I was being careful.” Nigel considered this. Subscribe. Leave a comment. Come back next week.