Blues Run the Game — out today
Blues Run the Game - a Jackson C Frank cover by Jon Wilks. Out May 1st, 2026. Photo image by Ronnie Hall.
My recording of 'Blues Run the Game' is out today on Bandcamp and all major streaming platforms. It's the Jackson C. Frank song that became the unofficial anthem of Les Cousins, the Soho folk club at the heart of the book I'm currently writing — and a song I've been circling for a long time.
Listen and download
You can download or stream it from…
How I approached it
There's an unwritten rule among folk singers of a certain persuasion: if you're interested in the British fingerpicking tradition, you have to record 'Blues Run the Game' at some point. It's the law. In which case, I'm nothing more than a law-abiding citizen.What took me a while to work out was how. I'd known the song since my teens, and that familiarity was almost the problem — it felt so settled in my head that I couldn't find a way in that felt like mine. What unlocked it was Martin Simpson's version on Trails & Tribulations. He follows the vocal melody closely on the guitar, shadowing it rather than accompanying it. That idea has a name: heterophony. I learned the word from the singer Nick Hart, though the practice itself is older than any label for it. It's something Martin Carthy does instinctively, and something Simpson brings to this recording, albeit with the added country stylings that come with the use of a pedal steel guitar and an extremely tight band. Hearing it made the song make sense to me in a new way.
But Simpson's version is Simpson's version. He's said as much himself — what's the point in copying what someone else has done? Why not do your own thing? That's always been my approach to covers. I'd been playing a lot in DADEAB — Martin Carthy's open tuning — following long conversations with him on tour, and that's where my hands fell when I came to this song. It felt natural rather than deliberate. I knew I wanted it to be a purely one-man-and-his-guitar thing — I love that about the original — and I also wanted to put a few blues bends in. It's a song about the blues, after all, even if Frank's blueprint never quite hints at that musically. It felt like something that had always been there, waiting to be let out.
If you want the full story — Frank's life, the recording session, the Royal Festival Hall, how the song spread through the clubs of London — I've written about it here: Blues Run the Game: The Haunted Legacy of Jackson C. Frank.
I hope you enjoy the version I’ve come up with. If you’d like to read more, please consider signing up to my monthly newsletter.
