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Alexis Korner (1928 - 1984) was an English blues musician. Often referred to as "the father of British blues", he was instrumental in networking various English blues musicians, such as Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who went on to form the Rolling Stones. He also brought previously unknown American blues artists to England to perform. There is an apocryphal story that the Rolling Stones went to stay at his house late one night, in the early '60s, after a performance. They entered in the accepted way, by climbing in through the kitchen window, to find Muddy Waters' band sleeping on the kitchen floor.
Always a blues purist, Korner criticised better-known British blues musicians, during the blues boom of the late '60s, for their blind adherence to Chicago blues, as if the music came in no other form. Though he was a proficient musician and singer himself, it is probably as a networker and blues historian that he will be remembered.
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