Obituary: Wizz Jones

Patrick Kidd

Wizz Jones, musician, at Norwich Folk Festival, U.K., 1978. Photograph Tony Rees

Folk musician who inspired fellow guitarists including Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards

In 1961, a 16-year-old folk music enthusiast called Ralph May took the milk train to Brighton for a weekend rave. There he saw one of his heroes sitting on the beach, picking and plucking at “the most battered old guitar I had ever seen”. Yet it made a beautiful noise. Wizz Jones was no more pretty, with a broken nose down which his glasses kept sliding and hair past his shoulders, but to May this beatnik seemed like a god.

Too nervous to introduce himself, May later met Jones at a folk club in Croydon and was encouraged by him to become a fellow travelling minstrel. In 1966, playing together on a tour of Cornwall, Jones suggested his protege change his surname to that of the American ragtime guitarist Blind Willie McTell.

Ralph McTell was one of many to be influenced by Jones, who has died at 86. “All the guys that play guitar from my generation owe something to this man,” McTell said in 2016 when they recorded the album About Time together. “Jimmy Page and Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, they all talk about Wizz because he was the only one playing this kind of earthy blues.”

Such was the deftness of his fingering, McTell said, it seemed that Jones played 13-bar blues when everyone else was playing 12. “I can’t count,” Jones replied.

Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, used to skip classes at art college for lessons with Jones. “He had a Jesus haircut and a beard and was a great guitar-picker,” Richards wrote. “I learnt Cocaine from him – the song, not the dope. He was a watched man.”

The critic Peter Paphides wrote this week that “there wasn’t a guitarist from Wizz’s generation that could play with the physicality he brought to his instrument”. He recalled seeing Jones play the Davy Graham standard Anji at Islington’s Union Chapel with a mix of “head-spinning virtuosity with punk intensity”.

Perhaps that energetic style explains why Jones was playing such a beat-up instrument when McTell first saw him. He was still using a 1940s George Foley guitar, which he bought in 1959 and took busking everywhere. “It was held together by faith alone,” McTell said. That and leather strips from his belt stuck over the cracks with glue. In 1966, McTell persuaded Jones to buy a new Epiphone Texan.

All the guys that play guitar from my generation owe something to this man

Ralph McTell

Raymond Ronald Jones was born on 25 April, 1939, in Thornton Heath, Surrey. He was given his nickname by his mother as he was keen on magic tricks. As a boy, he fell in love with skiffle on the radio, although he said that Lonnie Donegan, who popularised the genre, “murdered” it. After leaving school at 16, he got a job in a textile warehouse and played guitar with a band called the Wranglers. One of their first gigs was at a boys’ club where they had been booked by the upcoming comedian Roy Hudd.

One morning, on his commute to work, Jones found himself on a carriage with the singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl, author of Dirty Old Town. When Jones told him he was getting into the blues, MacColl invited him home to meet a guest, the American musician Big Bill Broonzy, but Jones, to his lasting regret, did not go. Broonzy, who died in 1958, was one of his favourite guitarists. Another influence was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Jones soon moved into an attic room near Marble Arch, which allowed him to explore Soho’s clubs. To his relief, he was excused national service after two days, before they could cut his hair, because of a history of migraines. In 1959, he met his future wife, Sandy Wedlake, in Cornwall and they toured Europe and Morocco together while raising three sons and a daughter. “I spent much of my childhood in the back of a VW van,” said his oldest son, Simeon, who also became a musician.

In 1963, Jones formed a bluegrass duo with Pete Stanley. “I was the beatnik alternative, he was the smart dude,” Jones said. They released one single, a cover of Bob Dylan’s Ballad of Hollis Brown, and an album, Sixteen Tons of Bluegrass, but parted in 1967 and Jones never achieved the success that his talent suggested he would.

Bert Jansch, founder of the folk group Pentangle, called Jones “the most underrated guitarist ever”. Jones claimed he was lazy, but perhaps it was more diffidence. “I fiddled along, brought up a family, kept that together and did gigs as best I could,” he said.

In 2010, he turned down an offer from Eric Clapton to perform at his Crossroads festival in Chicago. Jones did not play in the US until the late 1990s, where one review reported that he “squeezed and shook an amazing amount of sound out of his six-string acoustic guitar, which intermittently sounded like a 12-string, a sitar or a full band”.

Jones claimed he had written only 20 songs with which he was happy. One was Burma Star, about his father, a prisoner of war. Another was When I Leave Berlin, written in 1971, which Bruce Springsteen performed to open a concert in the German capital in 2012. “I think his management needed a song and Googled it,” Jones said.

In 2019, he received a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, where he played at Cadogan Hall in London with his son, Simeon, and grandson, Alfie. His final performance was on 28 February this year at the Ivy House in Nunhead, south London. “It’s been a life of ups and downs and folk poverty,” he said on turning 80. “But it was all worth it.”

Wizz Jones, born 25 April 1939, died 27 April 2025, aged 86

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