The blues will never die… thanks to Jim

LIFE certainly has its ups and downs. Ask veteran Birmingham impresario Jim Simpson, who only a few weeks ago was wondering whether his annual jazz and blues festival would survive another year.

Back then, things were not looking good for an event that has brought pleasure to countless thousands over the last four decades.

Well, it has indeed been saved. And not only that, Jim’s also been invited to organise a festival - run along precisely the same lines - in the American city of Chicago, legendary home of the electric blues. Now how’s that for a drastic change in fortunes!

This summer, the future of the Birmingham Jazz and Blues Festival was hanging in the balance. To be sure, the party mood at the festival launch in July was very much in evidence, yet I noticed there was still a bit of a cloud hanging over what was otherwise a joyful occasion.

And that was all because the plug had been pulled by major sponsors regarding the funding needed to set the Second City’s streets ablaze with the best that the world of jazz and blues can offer.

All right, this year’s festival would just about be OK and go ahead. But what about the future of this legendary Midlands event?

So, ever optimistic and refusing to be beaten, veteran record label founder and impresario Jim threw down the gauntlet and made a heartfelt appeal to the people of Birmingham. Please give us whatever you can so that next year’s festival – the 42^nd – can take place.

And you know what? Those big-hearted Brummies, from businessmen and women to the ordinary man and woman in the street, dug so deeply into their pockets that next year’s bash is now assured.

For Jim has revealed how the public’s ongoing generosity, plus the beginnings of relationships with new funding partners, had given him the confidence to organise the 42^nd consecutive festival next year. While more funding is still required, he explained that there was now enough momentum to confirm next year’s Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival would run from July 24 to August 2, 2026.

He said: “On top of this, we have had new funding from the West Midlands Combined Authority, and we will explore this and other funding avenues for the 2026 festival. 

“We very much need more funds to fully finance what will be the 42^nd year, but we’re already in a much stronger position than this time last year.”

However, while this crisis was going on, a musical revolution was happening – and one that has rightly made the second city the FIRST city when it comes to musical innovation. For a major American blues artist now wants the 87-year-old Jim Simpson to stage a similar festival in Chicago, the legendary city of the electric blues.

Indeed, the eyes of the world are now truly on Birmingham, with multiple media outlets now reporting on how the city has become the UK’s home of the blues.

The constant stream of attention in recent months has been driven by Jim’s Big Bear Music and Big Bear Records, the Birmingham-based companies still active after more than 55 years.

Media interest has also been sparked by how he once managed Black Sabbath, initially a fledgling 1960s blues band called Earth, before he changed their name and they virtually single-handedly created heavy metal rock.

Black Sabbath left Birmingham under new management after their first two albums in 1970, but Jim 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.

For example, 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. The magazine discusses Big Bear’s flagship festival, reporting how the 10-day event this summer featured 178 performances – 166 free admission – at 101 venues across the West Midlands, to an audience of more than 64,000.

But that’s not all, because 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 similar blues festival in the Windy City.

Earl said: “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.”

And in my own small way, I also played a part in spreading the gospel. For as well as alerting various Midlands media to the story, I also contacted my old mucker from our Rugby Advertiser days, Paul Merry, who hosts the Paul Merry Blues and Rock website in Australia.

This is the go-to site Down Under for music fans right across the continent and further afield. Merry describes Birmingham’s rich musical pedigree and how “no one is more responsible for this than Jim ‘Mr Birmingham’ Simpson’.

It’s not only English-speaking media that are entranced by Big Bear’s blues crusade 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 many American 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 Jim himself aiming for? “I want to keep the blues alive,” he says.

“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 Blues Letter, 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 US musician who once featured in the classic 1971 Clint Eastwood film Play Misty for Me.

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.

Based in Birmingham since 1968, Big Bear Records is probably Britain’s longest established independent record company, which is at the forefront of jazz, swing and blues, with more than 100 album releases to its name.

The company is also an agency for live artists, booking a wide variety of acts for public events and private functions. It represents touring bands including King Pleasure, Tipitina and Lady Sings the Blues…

The late, great blues pianist Otis Spann once memorably observed that ‘the blues will never die’. But those words could equally have come from the mouth of Jim Simpson, a man who has not only helped to assure the music’s survival, but also firmly placed the great city of Birmingham on the world music map.