Background and Content
In late 1968, Traffic disbanded, guitarist Dave Mason having left the group for the second time prior to the completion of the Traffic album. In 1969, Steve Winwood joined the supergroup Blind Faith, while drummer/lyricist Jim Capaldi and woodwinds player Chris Wood turned to session work. Wood and Winwood also joined Blind Faith's drummer Ginger Baker in his post-Blind Faith group Ginger Baker's Air Force for their first album.
In the beginning of 1970, after the demise of Blind Faith, the band having lasted barely six months, Winwood returned to the studio ostensibly to make his first solo album, originally to be titled Mad Shadows. He recorded two tracks with producer Guy Stevens, "Stranger to Himself" and "Every Mother's Son", but yearned for like-minded musicians to accompany. Inviting Wood and Capaldi to join him, Winwood's solo album became the reunion of Traffic, and a re-launch of the band's career.
As did most of their albums, it featured influences from jazz and blues, but the version of the traditional English folk tune "John Barleycorn" also showed the musicians attending to the same strains of folk baroque and electric folk as contemporary British bands The Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
It was reissued for compact disc in the UK on November 1, 1999, with five bonus tracks, including three recorded in concert from the Fillmore East in New York City. In the US, the remastered reissue of February 27, 2001 included only the two studio bonus tracks.
Steve Winwood oversaw a deluxe edition version that was released on March 15, 2011, featuring the original studio album, digitally remastered on disc one, plus a second disc of bonus material including more of the Fillmore East concert with alternate mixes and versions of album tracks.
Read more about this topic: John Barleycorn Must Die
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