Hearing even the first few notes of this slow Southern blues immediately takes me back to my youth listening to John Peel.

Pickin’ The Blues by Grinderswitch was the theme music of Peel’s nightly Radio 1 show from 1975-1992. I listened religiously every night in the late Seventies and I don’t remember hearing the song in any other context.

Despite being released as a single on the back of its popularity with Peel fans, it was never a hit, though it did make Peel’s ‘Festive Fifty’ in 1976 – a last hurrah for this sort of music before he began to champion punk.

It features some virtuoso guitar work by the late Dru Lombard that, if Peel played it for long enough (for example, if there was time remaining before the pips at the end of his show), he referred to as “the good bit.”

It turns out that members of Grinderswitch were once roadies for The Allman Brothers Band. They recorded this instrumental blues for their 1975 album Macon Tracks (Macon – pronounced ‘Makin’ – being their hometown in Georgia).

Years after he had stopped using the tune, Peel produced an anecdote about it in response to a listener query. He recalled that Grinderswitch had once brought him “an extravagant present” as thanks for using their tune so long.

The Americans planned to present it to him at the Reading Festival but before the festival began they tuned in to his radio show for the first time. “They must have listened to the programme and hated what they heard,” Peel recalled in 2002. “They decamped in horror and took the present away with them, so I never got it.”

The song itself appears to have been first performed by Elmore James, possibly written with or by his producer Bobby Robinson, and recorded in 1962 or 1963. Grinderswitch credited their recording to a different songwriter, “Cowboy” Lloyd Copas, but the version he recorded bears little resemblance to theirs.

Trivia fact: in 1979, as part of their fourth Peel session, XTC made an entire spoof of the opening to a Peel show, including their own version of Pickin’ The Blues. Three years later, on another Peel session, The Redskins recorded it at the end of their track Unionized.

And finally… The Housemartins, billed as The Fish City Five, made an a cappella version on a Peel session, which the DJ used to open his show in 1986.