Most listeners hear ‘Black Magic Woman’ and think of Santana, Woodstock, and swirling Latin grooves. Fewer realise the song began life in smoky English blues clubs, written by a painfully shy guitarist who wanted to be less famous, not more.
This is the strange lineage of ‘Black Magic Woman’ – from Otis Rush’s Chicago blues, through Peter Green’s haunted minor-key experiments, to the Latin-psychedelic anthem that made Carlos Santana a star.
The blues band Carlos Santana called ‘the best’
Before the soap-opera years of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac were a hard touring, Peter Green-led blues outfit revered by musicians and record collectors. Their sound was all bite and space: searing Les Paul tones, deep pocket grooves, and songs that stretched like live jazz.
When Nicks and Buckingham joined later, they shifted the band toward radio-ready folk-rock and immaculate pop, the era that produced ‘Rumours’ and permanently rewrote public memory of what Fleetwood Mac sounded like in the first place. The Peter Green years became a cult chapter instead of the main story.
Carlos Santana never forgot that earlier incarnation. In the book ‘The Guitar Greats’ he recalled, ‘I used to go to see the original Fleetwood Mac, and they used to kill me, just knock me out… To me, they were the best blues band.’ For a young guitarist steeped in B.B. King and Tito Puente, this British group was both competition and inspiration.
Otis Rush, John Mayall and the first spark of ‘Black Magic Woman’
The trail really starts in Chicago with Otis Rush’s 1958 single ‘All Your Love (I Miss Loving)’. Its stabbing minor-key riff and tense vocal phrasing were a template for modern electric blues. British players devoured that record like scripture.
John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers cut a fierce cover in 1966 with Eric Clapton on lead guitar. Peter Green stepped into Clapton’s chair soon after, playing that same material night after night. According to Green, Mayall told him that if you really loved a song, you should take the first lines and build a new one from them – advice Green followed directly when writing ‘Black Magic Woman’, lifting Rush’s opening idea and reshaping it into his own composition.
That kind of creative theft was not shady; it was the blues tradition working exactly as intended. One tune mutates into another, the emotional core intact but the clothes completely changed.
‘I Loved Another Woman’: the dry run
Green did not jump straight from Otis Rush to ‘Black Magic Woman’. First he wrote ‘I Loved Another Woman’, recorded for Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1968 debut. It is a slow, minor blues with lyrics about infidelity and regret, but the feel is already different from straight Chicago shuffle.
Listen closely and you can hear the prototype of ‘Black Magic Woman’ in its bones. The song shares a near-identical structure and melodic contour; Green simply had not yet wrapped it in mysticism or Latin psychedelia, as highlighted in overviews of Fleetwood Mac’s essential early tracks. It is like a demo of the spell before he adds the incense and candles.
Guitar-wise, ‘I Loved Another Woman’ is a clinic in restraint. Green leans on vocal-style bends and long, hanging notes instead of busy runs. The rhythm section hints at a Latin lilt by nudging the backbeat and avoiding the standard 12-bar shuffle stomp that every London bar band was bashing out at the time.
‘Black Magic Woman’: Peter Green’s dark love song
By early 1968 Green had refined the idea into ‘Black Magic Woman’, recorded with Fleetwood Mac and released as a single that spring. The track is a minor blues in D, but it sidesteps the usual I-IV-V pattern in favour of a moody cycle built on Dm7, Am7 and Gm7, with guitar and voice gliding together over a gently syncopated groove, as detailed in song histories of ‘Black Magic Woman’.
Crucially, Green kept that hint of Latin rhythm first explored in ‘I Loved Another Woman’, using it to make the song sway instead of stomp. The original British single reached the UK charts and later appeared on the ‘English Rose’ compilation, becoming a fan favourite even before Santana ever touched it, a trajectory also noted in accounts of the song’s chart history.
Lyrically, Green moved from personal confession to something more archetypal and dangerous. Biographers trace the ‘black magic woman’ figure to his girlfriend Sandra Elsdon, nicknamed ‘Magic Mamma’, but instead of a straight breakup song he wrote about possession, spells and turning into a devil. That shift toward occult-tinged storytelling is emphasised in deeper dives into the story behind the song. It sounded less like a diary entry and more like a warning whispered over a candlelit altar.
Santana’s alchemy: from Soho clubs to Latin ritual
Two years later, Santana took Green’s simmering blues and set it on fire. Their version of ‘Black Magic Woman’ on the album ‘Abraxas’ is fused to Gabor Szabo’s instrumental ‘Gypsy Queen’, layering Hungarian folk lines and extended percussion breaks over Green’s core song. Suddenly this tight British single became an eight-minute ritual in a San Francisco ballroom.
Recorded in 1970, the track became Santana’s breakthrough hit in North America: the single spent weeks on the Billboard charts, peaking at number 4, while ‘Abraxas’ itself hit number 1 and eventually went multi-platinum. The band kept Green’s melody and lyrics almost intact but flooded the arrangement with organ, congas, timbales and modal soloing, creating a hybrid of blues, jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythm that was unlike anything on rock radio.
If you mute the vocal and just tap along, you can still hear Otis Rush hiding inside the rhythm guitar figure. What Santana did was to tilt the accent pattern toward Latin clave, stretch the harmony, and invite the percussion to talk back to the guitar. It is respectful theft, but theft all the same – and Green loved it enough to play the song with Santana at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decades later, a reunion mentioned in retrospectives on Fleetwood Mac’s early years.
Black magic, real occultism and the cost of genius
The cruel twist in this story is that ‘Black Magic Woman’ maybe saved Peter Green’s life, but not his mind. Shortly after the song’s early success, he drifted away from Fleetwood Mac, giving away much of his money in pursuit of a purer, more spiritual existence and falling in with people rumoured to be dabbling in occultism and heavy LSD use.
Christine McVie later recalled that these acquaintances introduced Green to acid, kicking off the mental health spiral that led to his exit from the band. Away from the spotlight he picked up odd jobs, including working as a grave digger, while the group he founded slowly transformed into a glamorous California soap opera without him.
Royalties from songs like ‘Black Magic Woman’ kept the bills paid during those wilderness years, a bittersweet detail often highlighted in discussions of the song’s legacy. Think about that: the very track that flirted with demonic imagery is what allowed its author to walk away from rock stardom and live a quieter, if troubled, life on his own terms.
How to hear the evolution (and steal a few tricks)
If you want to really feel the DNA of ‘Black Magic Woman’, listen to the songs in this order and keep a guitar or bass in your lap:
- ‘All Your Love (I Miss Loving)’ – Otis Rush
- ‘All Your Love’ – John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton
- ‘I Loved Another Woman’ – Fleetwood Mac
- ‘Black Magic Woman’ – Fleetwood Mac
- ‘Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen’ – Santana
Notice how the opening guitar phrase evolves, how the rhythm loosens from strict blues time into a Latin sway, and how the harmony stays mostly the same while the texture around it becomes more elaborate. You are essentially hearing one idea travel across three continents and a dozen recording sessions.
For players, the real magic is not mystical at all. It is in how Green and Santana both squeeze maximum emotion out of very simple materials: a handful of chords, a vocal line you can hum after one listen, and tone that borders on vocal. If you can make D minor feel that dangerous, you do not need many notes.
A quick comparison for gear and tone nerds
| Track | Year | Core feel | What to listen for |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Your Love (Otis Rush) | 1958 | Chicago minor blues | The stabbing intro lick and vocal phrasing that seed everything. |
| I Loved Another Woman | 1968 | Mellow minor blues | Early Latin pulse, Green’s ultra-minimal vibrato and sustain. |
| Black Magic Woman (Fleetwood Mac) | 1968 | UK blues with Latin tint | D minor vamp, twin guitars shadowing the vocal, air between the notes. |
| Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen (Santana) | 1970 | Latin rock-psychedelia | Organ swells, congas and timbales, modal solos riding the same changes. |
Why this story still matters
Strip away the mythology and ‘Black Magic Woman’ is a case study in how great music actually gets made. A Chicago bluesman cuts a single. A British kid rewrites its first lines into two new songs. A Mexican-American guitarist hears one of them at a club and turns it into a global hit.
In an industry obsessed with originality, this chain of influence looks almost subversive. Yet it is how most of the classic canon from the 50s through the 90s really worked: ideas borrowed, bent, revoiced and sent back into the night. Carlos Santana did not write ‘Black Magic Woman’ – he did something harder. He recognised the power of Peter Green’s spell and amplified it for the whole world to hear.
