Songs For A Tailor - Background

Background

After performing with various blues bands in his youth, Bruce rose to prominence in the rock world as a member of influential rock band Cream. After the group disbanded in 1969, Bruce began releasing solo material. Songs for a Tailor, released in September 1969, was Bruce's debut solo release, but chronologically his second solo album; Things We Like, his first solo recording, was released a year later.

The album was titled in tribute to Jeannie Franklyn ("Genie the Tailor"), a clothing designer who designed wardrobes for Cream and was also the girlfriend of Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson (and, according to Bruce's 2010 biography Composing Himself, an ex-lover of Bruce's). In 1969, Franklyn wrote Bruce a letter requesting that he "ing some high notes for me," a letter that reached him on May 14, 1969, the day she was killed in a motor vehicle accident in Fairport Convention's touring van. Franklyn died—and Bruce received the letter from her—on his 26th birthday.

A blues and jazz musician by background who had studied Bach and Scottish folk music as a child, Bruce produced a debut effort that was musically diverse. Songs for a Tailor was described in Music Week on its 2003 reissue as "an impressive effort defying musical categorisation". Two of the songs—"Weird of Hermiston" and "The Clearout"—had originally been penned for possible inclusion on the 1967 Cream album Disraeli Gears. However, the album was not simply a continuation of Bruce's material for Cream, but displayed more of the musician's diversity.