Alexis Korner, often called the father of British blues, first heard the music that would define his life inside a London air raid shelter during a German bombing run in the early 1940s, when someone played a record by pianist Jimmy Yancey. Born in Paris in 1928 to an Austrian Jewish father and a mother of Greek, Turkish, and Austrian heritage, he had already lived as a refugee in France, Switzerland, and North Africa before arriving in Britain. This episode explores how a displaced child of the continent came to understand an American Delta art form as a language of survival.

We follow Korner from Chris Barber’s jazz band and his partnership with harmonica player Cyril Davies to the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club they opened at the Roundhouse pub in Soho in 1955, and on to Blues Incorporated, the 1961 band whose orbit included Charlie Watts, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, and a young Jimmy Page. The episode also covers his own late commercial success with CCS, his broadcasting career at the BBC, and his posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

• Why the emotional core of the blues resonated with a refugee who had fled the Second World War across Europe
• How Korner and Davies imported American blues artists to a cramped Soho pub, giving British teenagers a live master class
• His mentorship of Free, whose name he coined, and his recording sessions with Robert Plant before Led Zeppelin formed
• The 1970 band CCS and its brass-heavy cover of Whole Lotta Love, which became the Top of the Pops theme for over a decade
• His BBC Radio 1 documentary series including the 13-part Guitar Greats, his death from lung cancer in January 1984 at age 55, and Keith Richards inducting him into the Hall of Fame in 2024