The eyes of the world are on Birmingham, with multiple media outlets reporting on how the city has become the UK’s home of blues music.
The constant stream
of attention in recent months has been driven by Big Bear Music and Big
Bear Records, the Birmingham-based companies still active after more than 55
years.
Big Bear is headed by Jim
Simpson, and media interest is often sparked by how this music impresario once
managed Black Sabbath, initially a fledgling 1960s blues band called Earth
before Simpson changed their name and they transformed into heavy metal.
Black Sabbath left Birmingham under new management after their first two albums in 1970, but Simpson and Big Bear have continued to promote, record and run blues events in the city ever since.
These marathon efforts
have this summer been celebrated by music media as far away as the USA, Australia
and Finland.
The July edition
of Living Blues, the USA’s largest blues magazine, highlights how Henry’s
Blueshouse nights, launched by Big Bear in 1968 at The Crown pub in Birmingham,
where Earth once played, are now held every Tuesday at the city’s Snobs
nightclub.
It discusses Big Bear’s
flagship Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival, a ten-day event that ran for a
41st consecutive year in 2025 with 178 performances – 166 free
admission – at 101 venues across the West Midlands, to an audience of 64,498.
Earl Pryor – grandson of
legendary harmonica player Snooky Pryor, who Big Bear hosted in Birmingham and
recorded an album for in the 1970s – is quoted by Living Blues as
wanting Simpson to launch a facsimile blues festival in Chicago.
Earl says: “What Jim does
in Birmingham has shown that, once people hear what the blues is about, they
love it. In Birmingham, I saw blues transcending barriers between people and
bringing them together to dance, sing and laugh. Right now, we need that more
than ever.”
Stuart Constable, the
article’s author, adds: “This is why Jim Simpson matters now as much as he ever
did to the music that has shaped his life.”
Another recent article emerged on the Paul Merry Blues and Rock website in Australia, a music writer’s eponymous destination for fans down-under. Merry describes Birmingham’s rich musical pedigree and how “no-one is more responsible for this than Jim ‘Mr Birmingham’ Simpson”.
Not only English-speaking
media are entranced by Big Bear’s blues efforts in Birmingham. The latest edition
of Blues News, a Finnish magazine, carries a three-page feature headlined
“Birmingham legend Jim Simpson: blues, jazz and paranoid”, the last word
reflecting Black Sabbath’s second album when he was manager.
Over the decades, Big Bear
has promoted US blues players, releasing more than 30 American blues albums in
the 1970s by famed artists such as Champion Jack Dupree, Eddie ‘Guitar’ Burns,
Eddie ‘Playboy’ Taylor, Homesick James, Isaac ‘Doctor’ Ross and Willie Mabon.
Big Bear also once organised extended tours of Britain and Europe for 35 US
bluesmen, all from its Birmingham base.
A great example of
how Big Bear constantly links blues to the city is shown on Things I Used
To Do, its Chick Willis album of 2020, which pictures the US musician in
Birmingham’s Victoria Square on its sleeve notes.
With all this focus
on Big Bear, Birmingham and the blues, what is Simpson himself, now aged 87, aiming
for? “I want to keep the blues alive,” says Simpson.
“Blues has been the route
to all popular music over the years, and here in Birmingham we’ve never let go
of that magic. I want Big Bear to continue doing its bit so more people come to
see blues. I want local councils, tourist authorities and anyone else who can
see what blues has done in this city to put their resources behind it and
promote Birmingham to the world as the unrivalled home of UK blues.”
Big Bear’s blues focus
continues today, not only with the annual festival and weekly Blueshouse, but also
with the free weekly Henry’s Bluesletter, emailed to 16,000 fans worldwide, and
The Jazz Rag, a bi-monthly magazine that won ‘Best Jazz Media’ in the UK’s 2023
Parliamentary Jazz Awards.
Big Bear Records is
currently working on three album releases for 2026, including A Long Time Coming by
Shuggie Otis, a famed US musician who once featured in the classic 1971 Clint
Eastwood film Play Misty For Me.
If that’s not all, Big
Bear Music is also an artist management agency, featuring the likes of local
band
King Pleasure and the
Biscuit Boys, who have performed almost 7,000 times in 21 countries in nearly
40 years.
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