Most definitely.
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From the YouTube ‘learn more’:
Song
Artist
Mason Williams
Album
Classical Gas
Writers
Mason Williams
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Here’s a book I could not put down, and felt rather unpleasant with myself for not putting it down. Some of the most beautiful music (to me), by a person who could and did behave horribly (particularly toward women). See also: Miles, Getz…
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Not to further derail, but yeah, I was just being snarky. I didn’t even know Clapton covered it until today. Frankly, without the slightly-flatulent French Horn bridge, it just ain’t Classical Gas.
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Poor Eric.
Being a racist and an idiot is not a good look for a musician
Wildly off-topic, sorry, but… have you seen Mudpies, a daughter and father English mudlarking team? Honestly the most delightful and wholesome thing on you-tube. They seem to genuinely adore getting into the mud and seeing what they can find. I love them!
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Love this use of the song:
Wasn’t aware of the Clapton misconception before this thread.
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He is also an actual wife beater. That got swept under the rug. Consumption of various chemical substances is also in his history (?history). He’s an SOB.
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I have been not calling Eric Clapton since before not calling him was cool. 
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I’m amused/bemused by Eric Clapton. Because of hearing him on the radio, I looked up his old stuff, and went down the blues rabbit hole. If not for Clapton, I never would have found the Delta blues, the Chicago blues, and then Bessie Smith and Etta James. I never would have sang in a blues band.
Clapton was the gateway to a whole generation of midwestern white suburban kids learning about black blues artists.
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But did they learn about the Black blues artists from listening to Clapton? I mean, it’s possible to leave the suburbs and go downtown – Chicago, St. Louis, etc. – to hear live blues. If all they were doing was buying Clapton albums, then they’re not really learning where it all comes from, and he’s making bank on their ignorance.
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Appropriation combined with exploitation; same as it ever was.
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I think you mean Gordon but OTOH it could have been a pun.
Edit: OOPs apparently I don’t know my gorgons well enough - I thought it was synonymous with ogre.
Those suburban kids were unlikely to get into the urban centers where blues clubs were found in the 70s and 80s. Getting an invitation to something they then learned more about, even if only from books and radio as it were.
No one defended Gary Glitter THEN.
FFS Mr Clapton is apparently a rascist. Boo hoo. Evidentally he cannot play guitar and was by some peoples reckoning not very good anyway. YMMD. Apparently he has seen his colleagues abandon him. Oh well, he is 74 and like a lot of elderly people they have a rapidly diminishing friends list and fewer phone calls. Lamentable, but the guy is no axe murderer either. Public shunning? You do what you think is right.
Clapton covered that. The original is by j.j. Cale if you haven’t heard Cale’s early records you should check him out. An often overlooked master. And probably a monster in some way I don’t know about.
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My experience is specific to Cleveland in the 1970s-2000s. We’ve been lucky enough to have a great music scene here. We had great radio (until corporate took it over), we had lots of live music venues (until it became cheaper to hire DJs), and an ever evolving and revolving cast of musicians.
Unfortunately, there were (and are) more people who’d rather listen to rock and ignore its roots than dig down and learn. We had Robert Jr. Lockwood and a whole cadre of old blues musicians here, and sitting in with them at jam nights was an education that white suburban guitarists couldn’t otherwise get. And they got schooled, often.
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There are a number of unreasonable assumptions here. The first is that, although Winwood “sounded like Ray Charles” (a great performer), that Ray Charles or even another black performer lost the gig because they were not white. That is a nonsense. Cream was a British band made up of young talented punks. It only ran for a couple of years and the next band Clapton formed was Blind Faith - which featured Steve Winwood. Winwood was only 21 in 1969 when the short-lived band existed (Clapton was 3 years his senior) and by then was already then a veteran of The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic - big names who may be before your time. Winwood got picked up because you are going to go with who you know - he already had a pedigree and apparently a “soulful” sound. These guys would never have employed and could never have employed Ray Charles - and that has nothing to do with his race.
And BTW It did no harm to Clapton’s rising star that some fan daubed a wall with “Clapton is god”. Great PR. Better let’s face it - everyone knows that was Jimi.
Believe what you want. The point wasn’t that they wanted the actual Ray Charles. The point was they wanted white people who could perform and sound like black people. There’s no assumption to that. It’s fact.
Clapton might have been able to convince the world that it was just a sad and unavoidable fact of the music business at that time if he hadn’t himself proclaimed to the world that he didn’t want people of other races in his country at all.
You think that he didn’t want people of color in his country, but his band would have been fine? I think there is an unreasonable assumption there.
“Winwood got picked up because you are going to go with who you know - he already had a pedigree and apparently a “soulful” sound.”
And that’s the problem. Racists tend not to know a lot of people of color, which leads back to my argument why this is important. They not only influence, but they also exclude.
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Gateway is a pretty apt metaphor: gilded, heavily advertised, and put up by someone who doesn’t own what is on the other side of the gateway.
Do not stop at the gate. Especially now that it’s no longer needed.
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