Wizz Jones

Folk musician, beatnik and guitar teacher to Keith Richards

- Patrick Kidd

In 1961, a 16-year-old folk music enthusiast called Ralph May took the milk train to Brighton for a weekend rave.

There he saw one of his heroes sitting on the beach, picking and plucking at “the most battered old guitar I had ever seen”. Yet it made a beautiful noise. Wizz Jones was no more pretty, with a broken nose down which his glasses kept sliding and hair past his shoulders, but to May this beatnik seemed like a god.

Too nervous to introduce himself, May later met Jones at a folk club in Croydon and was encouraged by him to become a fellow travelling minstrel. In 1966, playing together on a tour of Cornwall, Jones suggested his protege change his surname to that of the American ragtime guitarist Blind Willie McTell.

Ralph McTell was one of many to be influenced by Jones, who has died at 86. "All the guys that play guitar from my generation owe something to this man,” McTell said in 2016 when they recorded the album About Time together. "Jimmy Page and Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, they all talk about Wizz because he was the only one playing this kind of earthy blues."

Richards, the Rolling Stones guitarist, used to skip classes at art college for lessons with Jones. “He had a Jesus haircut and a beard and was a great guitar-picker,” Richards wrote. “I learnt Cocaine from him - the song, not the dope.”