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and acoustic guitar on specific selections. The album is available exclusively from Jon, on his
website.

After returning home from the Clarksdale trip, Jon and his wife Marion decided they’d move to
Cornwall, and in October of 2019 they made the permanent move. The American TV star is back
on British soil! If you run into him at your neighborhood pub, do buy the lad a pint!!!

I asked Jon Walmsley to tell us about his life, career and his solo album “Goin To Clarksdale” This
is what he told me ...

LL: You were born in Blackburn, UK,
but your family came to America
when you were just two years old.
Where in America did you land and
what brought the family there
please?

JW: We came to San Diego. My mother’s
Uncle Jack was living there. He’d made
a recent trip back to Blackburn,
extolling the virtues of life in Southern
California. He said, “California is a
wonderful place to bring up a child.” His
stories about the sunshine and life
overlooking Mission Bay were all my
mother needed to hear. She was fed up
with the cold, wet, northern England
winters. Once she had her mind made
up, there was no stopping her. Six weeks later, my parents had sold their grocery business, their
Morris Minor car, packed a few suitcases, and boom! There we were, in sunny California.

LL: When did you start playing the guitar? What sparked your interest?

JW: I always loved music. In one of my mother’s diaries there’s an entry about me, as a toddler
in Blackburn, singing the latest hit - ‘Bye, Bye, Love’, by the Everly Brothers. That was released
in 1957, so I would have been about a year and half. She also mentioned that I sang myself to
sleep at night. In San Diego, at five or six, I was fascinated by music and television. One of the big
shows at that time was “The Adventures Of Ozzie and Harriet,” a sitcom based on the real-life
family, the Nelsons, who portrayed themselves on screen. The highlight for me was the end of
each episode, when Ricky Nelson would sing one of his hits, accompanied by his band, which
featured the incredible James Burton on guitar. The concept of an electric guitar completely blew
my mind. I didn’t know anything about amplifiers, and I assumed that James was plugging his
guitar directly into the wall socket! About the same time, my parents bought me a little Philco
clock radio, so I’d be up in time for school. The great thing about the radio was that I could listen
to music every night, fall asleep, and the radio would turn itself off automatically. I used to play
a game in my head as I was drifting off. I’d listen to a line of a song lyric and try to guess what
the rhyming line would be - before they sang it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was training
my brain to write song lyrics! By seven, I was dying to play guitar. Mum took me to our local
music store, Tailford’s, in Bellflower, California. The man behind the counter said he thought my
hands were too small and that we should come back in a year. A year later, immediately after my