Chris Barber
1930–2021
English trad-jazz trombonist who used his own popularity to import the blues — the tours that put and in front of British audiences were his.
led one of Britain's most popular bands of the 1950s, and spent that success on music his fans had never heard. Because the Musicians' Union barred visiting American instrumentalists, he first exploited the fact that singers belonged to a different union, then worked through the 1956 exchange agreement: Big Bill Broonzy and Brother John Sellers on a British concert tour in 1957, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and in October 1958 Muddy Waters with pianist Otis Spann. Barber spent decades afterwards correcting the legend that Muddy's electric guitar had scandalized Britain — Muddy, he said, never played loud. He kept touring into his late eighties and died in 2021.