Crossroads
On a stage in San Francisco, the British power trio Cream took Robert Johnson's acoustic Delta lament and plugged it into a massive wall of Marshall amplifiers. Supported by bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker's frenetic, heavily jazz-influenced rhythm section, Eric Clapton delivered what is widely considered one of the most celebrated live guitar performances in rock history. Played at a blistering, aggressive tempo, Clapton executed a fluid, incredibly articulate solo that brought the complex vocabulary of Chicago electric blues to a stadium audience, fundamentally writing the playbook for the hard rock of the 1970s.
The floating-verse lineage for this recording (who else recorded it, where the melody or lyric traveled, and how it was adapted) is still being mapped. This section will trace the song's DNA across the archive.
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