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Maurice Gibb 1/2003

Maurice GibbJanuary 12, 2003 – Maurice Ernest Gibb (the BeeGees) was born in Douglas, Isle of Man on 22 December 1949, as the fraternal twin of Robin Gibb, and was the younger of the two by 35 minutes. At that time, he had one sister, Lesley, and one other older brother, Barry.

In January 1955, the Gibbs moved back to Manchester, England. Around 1955, Gibb and his brothers were heard harmonizing by their parents. Also in 1955, he started his music career when he joined the skiffle/rock and roll group the Rattlesnakes with his brothers and two friends, Paul Frost and Kenny Horrocks, who were their neighbours. The group’s first major appearance was on 28 December 1957 when they performed at a local Gaumont cinema where children were invited to sing between films. They had planned to sing along to a 78 rpm record which Lesley had just been given as a Christmas present, but on the way Gibb and his brother Robin dropped and broke it, so they sang live. The audience were pleased by their singing, which reportedly may have been the song “Wake Up Little Susie” by the Everly Brothers.

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Jimmy Dewar 5/2002

Jimmy Dewar (12 October 1942 – 16 May 2002) was a Scottish musician best known as the bassist and vocalist for Robin Trower and Stone the Crows, the latter having its beginnings as the resident band at Burns Howff in Glasgow. He was educated at St. Gerards Senior Secondary School in Glasgow.

There was a strong Scottish music scene in Glasgow in the early 1960s, serving great talents to the burgeoning birth of rock and roll. Alex Harvey, Lulu, Maggie Bell, Frankie Miller, Jimmy Dewar and others. Strangely, Jimmy’s musical career was not to begin with his vocal talents, but as guitar player with Lulu and the Lovers in the early 60’s.
Dewar had started out playing in a local band called the ‘Gleneagles’ in the early sixties but his career began with Lulu and the Luvvers in 1963. From there he joined a band called ‘Sock ‘Em JB’ which included the legendary Scottish rock vocalist Frankie Miller.

In 1967 Jimmy joined a band called ‘Power’ with Maggie Bell, which later turned into  ‘Stone The Crows’ with Jimmy and Maggie on vocal duty, managed by Peter Grant, who also toured the world with Led Zeppelin.

Maggie Bell took him on board with the legendary “Stone the Crows” and the shy man’s voice was soon exposed on classics like “The touch of your loving hand”. Another young singer had exploded onto the music scene, but the best was yet to come. Living in London with his wife Martha and their young family, he was approached by Frankie Miller. The two Glasgow buddies were having a small refreshment when out of the blue Frankie told Jimmy that “there might be a job going” with some guitar player called Robin Trower, that the music industry insiders were raving about. “What kind of job?” asked Jimmy. Frankie laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe playing bass, maybe singing”. Jimmy applied and got both jobs.

Dewars career reached its zenith with Robin Trower, the legendary British rock power trio, especially after the 1974 release of the album Bridge of Sighs, which put Trower in the global limelight as one of rock’s guitar legends, while Jimmy Dewar found recognition as one of the best white soul vocalists on the planet.

Trower History

Trower had joined Gary Brooker’s band Procol Harum following the global success of their debut single “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in 1967, remaining with them until 1971 and appearing on the group’s first five albums. But the fact that Procol Harum was heavily keyboard focused, made Trower committed to find that right combination of artists that would help inspire him to write and play to his potential as a guitarist. He tried with the band ‘Jude’ with Frankie Miller, ex-Jethro Tull drummer Clive Bunker and Jimmy Dewars on bass. This wasn’t working for anyone. The outfit did not record and Trower soon split, taking only Jimmy Dewar with him. The rest is history! 

Dewar made his mark as an acclaimed blue eyed soul singer, performing in front of sold-out stadiums and concert halls at the crest of the 1970s classic rock era. The Scot had a rich, powerful voice, with a soulful timbre, and has been regarded by critics as one of the most under-rated rock vocalists. His vocal sound was deep, gritty, and resonating, his style shows the influence of Ray Charles and Otis Redding. Like Paul Rodgers and Frankie Miller, his voice evoked a bluesy, soul-inspired sound. For a while The Robin Trower Band became the hottest thing on the planet and introduced “Stadium Rock” to the U.S.A. Frankie was right! The R.T.B. were the first band to sell tickets by the hundreds of thousands. Gold and Platinum albums were thrown at them like frizbees.
Amongst James Dewars biggest fans were Frankie Miller, Billy Connolly, Donny Hathaway, Rod Stewart, not forgetting Maggie Bell and Lulu herself.

Dewar recorded his one solo album, “Stumbledown Romancer”, during the 1970s, at the height of his career, but it was not released until two decades later. He collaborated primarily with longtime Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher on the album, with the title track relating a hard-luck story …

…Stumbledown Romancer
I never made the grade
Never on the dance-floor when the music played
Always moving on when I should have stayed…

The famous Scottish screenwriter, Peter McDougall, still talks of his first experience of meeting Jimmy. When having a drink with Frankie, Peter noticed that the man standing next to him was clothed in snakeskin trousers, cowboy boots and not much else. “Who’s that?” Peter asked. Frankie replied “That’s James Dewar”. Peter howled, “ Well, I want to be one of them!”

It says it all. Everyone from Metallica to the Stereophonics were influenced by the voice of the Scotsman.
Jimmy’s honeyed voice and effortlessly dead-on phrasing have received – all true – let’s not overlook that Jimmy’s voice was the soundtrack for the moment when countless people fell in love, much the way Elvis or Sinatra once were. Although it might make a few of us blush, I know I’m not the only person to have indelible, crystal-clear memories of making love while wrapped in the warming coccoon of “Bluebird” and “For Earth Below” and “About To Begin” and “Little Girl”. And that’s not a nudge-of-the-elbow and a lascivious-wink type of comment but simply the highest praise I know to give an artist.

Jimmy had a stroke in 1987 that left him needing constant care. He died 15 years later on May 16, 2002 of a stroke after years of disability resulting from a rare medical condition, CADASIL, which caused a series of strokes.

Some day – maybe even right this moment – some kid who doesn’t know who the heck “Jimmy Dewar'” is, is going to plunk on a vintage Trower album on a whim, hear that voice riding atop Robin’s licks; vistas are going to open up wide and that kid’s world will never be the same again. This is the blessing inside the sadness – that every time that happens, Jimmy will be alive, strong and healthy.

Widely-regarded as one of the most underrated rock vocalists, the late singer for The Robin Trower Band had a rich, soulful and resonating voice as can be heard on all tracks of the break through album “Bridge of Sighs”. and in my opinion one of the all time best rock albums.

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Peggy Lee 1/2002

Peggy Lee21 January 2002 – Peggy Lee was born Norma Deloris Engstrom on May 26th 1920 in Jamestown, North Dakota, the seventh of eight children. Her father was Swedish-American and her mother was Norwegian-American. Her mother died when Peggy was just a four year old toddler. Afterwards, her father married her step-mother Min Schaumber, who treated her with great cruelty while her alcoholic but loving father did little to stop it. As a teenager she developed her musical talent and took several part-time jobs so that she could be away from home to escape the abuse of her step-mother.

Lee first sang professionally over radio in Valley City, North Dakota. She later had her own series on a radio show sponsored by a local restaurant that paid her a salary in food. Both during and after her high school years, Lee sang for small sums on local radio stations. Radio personality Ken Kennedy in Fargo, North Dakota, changed her name from Norma to Peggy Lee. Miss Lee left home and traveled to Los Angeles at the age of 17. Continue reading Peggy Lee 1/2002

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Gilbert Bécaud 12/2001

Gilbert BecaudDecember 18, 2001 – Gilbert Bécaud was born François Silly in Toulon France on October 24, 1927 and became one of France’s most beloved and successful singer, composer and actor.  He learned to play the piano at a young age, and then went to the Conservatoire in Nice.

In 1942, not even 16 years old, he left school to join the French Resistance during WorldWar II.

He began songwriting in 1948, after meeting Maurice Vidalin, who inspired him to write his early compositions. He began writing for Marie Bizet; Bécaud, Bizet and Vidalin became a successful trio, and their partnership lasted until 1950. Continue reading Gilbert Bécaud 12/2001

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George Harrison 11/2001

George HarrisonNovember 29, 2001 – George Harrison was born on February 25, 1943 in Liverpool England. Harrison was not born into wealth and by his own admission, Harrison was not much of a student, and what little interest he did have in his studies washed away with his discovery of the electric guitar and American rock and roll. As Harrison would later describe it, he had an “epiphany” of sorts at the age 12 or 13 while riding a bike around his neighborhood and getting his first whiff of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” which was playing from a nearby house. By the age of 14, Harrison, whose early rock heroes included Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Buddy Holly, had purchased his first guitar and taught himself a few chords. Continue reading George Harrison 11/2001

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Chet Atkins 6/2001

chet-atkinsJune 30, 2001 – Chester Burton “Chet” Atkins was born on June 20th 1924 in Luttrell, Tennessee, near Clinch Mountain. Even though by many considered instrumental in bringing Country music mainstream with the Nashville Sound, Chet’s guitar virtuosity (he also played the mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and ukulele) was recognized with an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which makes him eligible in this website’s line-up.

His parents divorced when he was six, after which he was raised by his mother. He was the youngest of three boys and a girl. He started out on the ukulele, later moving on to the fiddle, but traded his brother Lowell an old pistol and some chores for a guitar when he was nine. He stated in his 1974 autobiography, “We were so poor and everybody around us was so poor that it was the forties before anyone even knew there had been a depression.” Continue reading Chet Atkins 6/2001

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John Lee Hooker 6/2001

John Lee Hooker 500June 21, 2001 – John Lee Hooker was born on August 22, 1912, in Tutwiler or Clarksdale, Mississippi. The Hooker children were home-schooled. Since they were only permitted to listen to religious songs, the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided Hooker with his first introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style).

Moore was his first significant blues influence. He was a local blues guitarist, who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana, to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time. Continue reading John Lee Hooker 6/2001

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Dusty Springfield 3/1999

dusty_springfieldMarch 2, 1999 – Dusty Springfield was born Mary O’Brien on April 16th 1939 in West Hampstead, North London, England. She was given the nickname “Dusty” for playing football with boys in the street, and was described as a tomboy. Springfield was raised in a music-loving family. Her father would tap out rhythms on the back of her hand and encourage her to guess the musical piece. She listened to a wide range of music, including George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller. A fan of American jazz and the vocalists Peggy Lee and Jo Stafford, she wished to sound like them. At the age of twelve, she made a recording of herself performing the Irving Berlin song “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam” at a local record shop in Ealing. Continue reading Dusty Springfield 3/1999

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Frank Sinatra 5/1998

Frank SINATRAMay 14, 1998 – Frank Sinatra  was born on December 12, 1915

American singer and actor; arguably the most important popular music figure of the 20th century, his only real rival for the title being Elvis Presley. He began his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, he became a successful solo artist in the early to mid-40s, being the idol of the “bobby soxers.”

His professional career had stalled by the 1950s, but it was reborn in 1954 after he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his performance in From Here to Eternity. He signed with Capitol Records and released several critically lauded albums, In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, Come Fly with Me, Only the Lonely and Nice ‘n’ Easy. Continue reading Frank Sinatra 5/1998

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John Denver 10/1997

John DenverJohn Denver 10/1997 (53), was born Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. in Roswell, New Mexico on December 31st 1943. At the age of 12, he received a 1910 Gibson acoustic jazz guitar from his grandmother and he taught himself to play it well enough to play locally as a teenager in groups such as the folk-music group “The Alpine Trio”.After traveling and living in numerous locations while growing up in his military family, Denver began his music career with folk music groups during the late 1960s. Starting in the 1970s, he was one of the most popular acoustic artists of the decade and one of its best-selling artists. By 1974, he was one of America’s best-selling performers; AllMusic has called Denver “among the most beloved entertainers of his era”.

John went on to become one of the most popular acoustic artists of the 1970s in terms of record sales, he recorded and released around 300 songs, about 200 of which he composed himself.
He was named Poet Laureate of Colorado in 1977. Songs such as “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, “Rocky Mountain High”, “Sunshine on My Shoulders”, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”, “Annie’s Song” and “Calypso” attained worldwide popularity.

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Tupac Shakur 9/1996

September 13, 1996 – Tupac Amaru Shakur or Tupac Shakur was an American rapper and actor with a net worth of US$40 Million mostly earned since he died. He started his career as a roadie, backup dancer and became one of the best-selling music artist in history, who sold over 75 million of his albums worldwide as of 2010. He ranked at number two in the list of The Greatest MCs of All Time and Rolling Stone named him the 86th Greatest Artist of All Time. He made his debut in the film, “Nothing But Trouble” in 1991. Five years later he was dead.

Shakur was shot several times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada at the intersection of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane on September 7, 1996. He died as a result of multiple gunshot wounds on September 13, 1996. Continue reading Tupac Shakur 9/1996

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Jerry Garcia 8/1995

Jerry Garcia300August 9, 1995 – Jerry Garcia was the frontman/guitarist for the most famous psychedelic jamband in the history of Rock and Roll: the Grateful Dead.

Jerome John Garcia is born on August 1, 1942 in San Francisco, CA to Jose Ramon “Joe” Garcia and Ruth Marie “Bobbie” Garcia, joining older brother Clifford “Tiff” Ramon. “My father played woodwinds, clarinet mainly. He was a jazz musician.”

In 1947 a wood chopping accident with his older brother at the Garcia family cabin causes Jerry to lose much of the middle finger on his right hand at the age of five. That winter, Jerry’s father drowns while on a fishing trip.

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Wolfman Jack 7/1995

wolfman-jackJuly 1, 1995 – Wolfman Jack was born Robert Weston Smith on January 21st 1938 in Brooklyn, New York.

He got his big break when he became a “gofer” at Paramount and began his radio career in 1960 at WYOU in Newport News, Virginia, where he developed his first radio name, Daddy Jules, a tribute to the influence that black DJs had on him in his formative years such as Dr. Jive, Jockey Jack, Professor Bob and Sugar Daddy. He was a fan of disc jockey Alan Freed, the ultimate deejay of New York radio, who helped to turn African-American rhythm and blues into Caucasian rock and roll music. Freed originally called himself the Moondog after New York City street musician Moondog. Freed both adopted this name and used a recorded howl to give his early broadcasts a unique character. Continue reading Wolfman Jack 7/1995

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Rory Gallagher 6/1995

rory-gallagher-stadium-1981-ch-018June 14, 1995 – William Rory Gallagher was an Irish blues-rock multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and bandleader. Born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal on March 2, 1948 and raised in Cork. His father was employed constructing a hydro electric power plant on the nearby Erne river.

Gallagher recorded solo albums throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after forming the band Taste during the late 1960s. He was a phenomenally talented guitarist known for his charismatic performances and dedication to his craft. Gallagher’s albums have sold in excess of 30 million copies worldwide. Gallagher received a liver transplant in 1995, but died of complications later that year in London, UK at the age of 47. Continue reading Rory Gallagher 6/1995

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Kurt Cobain 4/1994

Kurt-Cobain300April 5, 1994 – Kurt Cobain. (Nirvana) A very talented and very troubled rock grunge frontman, Kurt Cobain became a rock legend in the early 1990s with his band, Nirvana. He committed suicide at his Seattle home in 1994. Kurt Cobain was born February 20, 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. In 1988, he started the grunge band Nirvana. Nirvana made the leap to a major label in 1991, signing with Geffen Records. Cobain also began using heroin around this time. Nirvana’s highly acclaimed album In Utero was released in 1993.

On April 5, 1994, in the guest house behind his Seattle home, Cobain committed suicide. Continue reading Kurt Cobain 4/1994

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Frank Zappa 12/1993

Frank ZappaDecember 4, 1993 – Frank Vincent Zappa was born on December 21, 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland with an Italian, Sicilian, Greek and Arab ancestry. With his dad employed as chemist/mathematician in the Defense industry, the family often moved to the extent that he attended at least 6 high schools. He began to play drums at the age of 12, and was playing in R&B groups by high school,

Zappa grew up influenced by avant-garde composers such as Varèse, Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern, as well as R&B and doo-wop groups (particularly local pachuco groups), and modern jazz. His own heterogeneous ethnic background and the diverse social and cultural mix in and around greater Los Angeles in the sixties, were crucial in the forming of Zappa as a practitioner of underground music and of his later distrustful and openly critical attitude towards “mainstream” social, political, religious and musical movements. He frequently lampooned musical fads like psychedelia, rock opera and disco. Television also exerted a strong influence, as demonstrated by quotations from show themes and advertising jingles found in his later works. Continue reading Frank Zappa 12/1993

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Albert Collins 11/1993

Albert CollinsNov 24, 1993 – Albert Collins was born on October 1, 1932  in Leona Texas. The blues guitar came to him through his cousin Lightnin’ Hopkins, who lived in the same town and often played on family gatherings. Although initially a student of piano, he became the bluesmaster who played an altered tuning. Collins tuned his guitar to an open F minor chord (FCFAbCF), and then added a capo at the 5th, 6th or 7th fret. At the age of twelve, he made the decision to concentrate on learning the guitar after hearing “Boogie Chillen'” by John Lee Hooker.

In the early days Collins worked as a paint mixer and truck driver to make ends meet. In 1971, when he was 39 years old, Collins worked in construction, since he couldn’t make a proper living from his music. One of the construction jobs he worked on was a remodeling job for Neil Diamond. This type of work carried on right up until the late 1970s. It was his wife Gwen that talked him into returning to music. Continue reading Albert Collins 11/1993

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Eddie Hazel 12/1992

eddiehazelDec 23, 1992 – Eddie Hazel was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 10, 1950 but grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey because his mother, Grace Cook, wanted her son to grow up in an environment without the pressures of drugs and crime that she felt pervaded New York City. Hazel occupied himself from a young age by playing a guitar, given to him as a Christmas present by his older brother. Hazel also sang in church. At age 12 he participated in backyard jams, which resulted in Nelson McGee and Hazel forming the Wonders who played around Plainfield in the mid sixties. By early 1967 Hazel’s reputation on guitar had taken him to work with producer George Blackwell in Newark.

In 1967  The Parliaments, a Plainfield-based doo wop band headed by George Clinton, had a hit record with “(I Wanna) Testify“. Clinton recruited a backing band for a tour, hiring Nelson as bassist, who in turn recommended Hazel as guitarist.

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Albert King 12/1992

Albert KingDecember 21, 1992 – Albert King was born Albert Nelson on April 25th 1923 in Indianola, Mississippi, the same town where B.B. King grew up. However, on his Social Security application in 1942, his birthplace was entered as “Aboden, Miss.,” likely based on his pronunciation of Aberdeen. King, who gave his birth date as April 25, 1923, was raised primarily in Arkansas. As a child, he sang with his family’s gospel group at a church where his father played the guitar. When King was eight, his family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas and he would pick cotton on plantations in the area. Around that same time, King bought his first guitar, paying only $1.25. His first inspiration was T-Bone Walker.

King began working as a professional musician when he joined a group called In the Groove Boys in Osceola, Arkansas, in the late Forties. Continue reading Albert King 12/1992

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Ollie Halsall 5/1992

ollie-halsallMay 29, 1992 – Ollie Halsall was born Peter John Halsall on March 14th 1949 in Southport, England.

Halsall started out playing drums and the vibraphone (an instrument on which he became extraordinarily proficient) before taking up the guitar in 1967. By 1970, as a member of the cult-favorite band, Patto, he had evolved into one of the world’s most sensational players. That he never got that recognition can only be explained by the fact that the world had a number of top players already in the marketing line up and there was only so much promotional effort made available by the record companies.

Other guitar gods that didn’t make the Super Stardom Line Up of those early days- but should have- were in my opinion Jan Akkerman from the Dutch prog band Focus, Eddie Hazel with Parliament-Funkadelic who died 7 months after Ollie, Chicago’s Terry Kath, Jimi Hendrix favorite guitar player at the time, and April Lawton from Ramatam.

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Willie Dixon 1/1992

Willie DixonJanuary 29, 1992 – Willie Dixon was born July 1st 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. His mother Daisy often rhymed the things she said, a habit her son imitated. At the age of seven, young Dixon became an admirer of a band that featured pianist Little Brother Montgomery. He sang his first song at Springfield Baptist Church at the age of four. Dixon was first introduced to blues when he served time on prison farms in Mississippi as an early teenager.

He later learned how to sing harmony from local carpenter Leo Phelps. Dixon sang bass in Phelps’ group The Jubilee Singers, a local gospel quartet that regularly appeared on the Vicksburg radio station WQBC. Dixon began adapting poems he was writing as songs, and even sold some tunes to local music groups. By the time he was a teenager, Dixon was writing songs and selling copies to the local bands. With his bass voice, Dixon later joined a group organized by Phelps, the Union Jubilee Singers, who appeared on local radio. Continue reading Willie Dixon 1/1992

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Freddie Mercury 11/1991

freddie-mercury-4November 24, 1991 – Freddie Mercury was born Farrokh Bulsara on September 5th 1946 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania in East Africa.  He spent time in a boarding school in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, where he studied piano and it was not long before this charismatic young man joined his first band, the Hectics. He was of Indian Parsi descent and his early childhood was in India, which gave him the title “Britain’s first Asian rock star.

After moving to London with his family in the 1960s, Mercury attended the Ealing College of Art where he befriended a number of musicians including future bandmates, drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May. Following graduation, he joined a series of bands and sold second-hand clothes in the Kensington Market in London, as well as had a job at Heathrow Airport. In April 1970, he joined with guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor who had previously been in a band called SmileIn 1969, Mercury joined up with a group called Ibex as their lead singer. He played with a few other bands before joining forces with Taylor and May in the early 70s. They met up with bassist John Deacon in 1971, and the quartet—who Mercury dubbed Queen—played their first gig together in June of that year. Continue reading Freddie Mercury 11/1991

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Steve Marriott 4/1991

Steve-MarriottApril 20, 1991 – Steve Marriott (Small Faces and Humble Pie) was born in London on January 30th 1947. He started singing and performing, by busking at local bus-stops for extra pocket money. His father Bill was an accomplished pub pianist and the life and soul of many an ‘East End’ night. Bill bought Marriott a ukulele and harmonica which Marriott taught himself to play. Marriott showed an early interest in singing and performing, busking at local bus-stops for extra pocket money and winning talent contests during the family’s annual holiday to Jaywick Holiday camp near Clacton-on-Sea.

At the age of 12, he formed his first band with school friends Nigel Chapin and Robin Andrews, called ‘The Wheels’, later the ‘Coronation Kids’.

In 1960, his father Bill spotted an advertisement in a London newspaper for a new Artful Dodger replacement to appear in Lionel Bart’s popular musical Oliver!, based on the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, at the New Theatre (now called the Noël Coward Theatre) in London’s West End, and without telling his son, applied for him to audition. At the age of thirteen, Marriott auditioned for the role. He sang two songs, “Who’s Sorry Now” by Connie Francis, and “Oh, Boy!” by Buddy Holly. Bart was impressed with Marriott’s vocal abilities and hired him. Marriott stayed with the show for a total of twelve months, playing various boys’ roles during his time there, for which he was paid £8 a week. Marriott was also chosen to provide lead vocals for the Artful Dodger songs “Consider Yourself”, “Be Back Soon,” and “I’d Do Anything,” which appear on the official album to the stage show, released by World Record Club and recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios. In 1961 the Marriott family moved from Strone Road to a brand new council flat in Daines Close, Manor Park. Continue reading Steve Marriott 4/1991

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Leo Fender 3/1991

LeoFenderMarch 21, 1991 – Clarence Leonidas “Leo” Fender was a Greek-American inventor, born on August 10th 1909. He founded Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company, now known as Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, and later founded MusicMan and G&L Musical Products (G&L Guitars). His guitar, bass, and amplifier designs from the 1950s continue to dominate popular music more than half a century later.

When designing “The Strat”, he asked his customers what new features they would want on the Telecaster. The large number of replies, along with the continued popularity of the Telecaster, caused him to leave the Telecaster as it was and to design a new, upscale solid body guitar to be sold alongside the basic Telecaster instead. Continue reading Leo Fender 3/1991

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Stevie Ray Vaughan 8/1990

Stevie Ray Vaughan 8/1990 (35) (known as SRV) was born October 3, 1954 in Dallas Texas and playing music gave an almost instant meaning to his life. He was real close to brother Jimmie, possibly as a result of his father’s alcohol induced mood swings and him being the primary recipient of his father’s violence.

For his seventh birthday, Vaughan received his first guitar, a 3 string toy guitar from Sears with a Western motif. After short dabbles in drums and the saxophone, initially inspired by his elder brother, Jimmie, Stevie took up guitar playing. Learning by ear he diligently committed himself, following along to songs by the Nightcaps, particularly “Wine, Wine, Wine” and “Thunderbird”. Later he listened to blues artists such as Albert KingOtis Rush, and Muddy Waters, and rock guitarists including Lonnie Mack, as well as jazz guitarists such as Kenny Burrell. In 1963, he received his first electric guitar, a Gibson ES-125T, as a hand-me-down from brother Jimmie and subsequently turned into a force of nature on the instrument.

He honed his chops starting in 1965 at the age of 12 with the Chantones. Their first show was at a talent contest held in Dallas’ Hill Theatre, but after realizing that they could not perform a Jimmy Reed song in its entirety, Vaughan left the band and briefly joined the Eclectic Marshmellows. When his bother Jimmy left home in 1967, Stevie found little support from his parents for his guitar obsession and decided to take a job out of the home at a burger joint where he cleaned dishes and threw out the garbage for $.70 an hour. When he landed in a barrel of grease one day, he quit and decided to commit his life to music and the guitar.

Here is a possibly shortened version of his apprentice years in the music business.  In 1967, only 14 years old he joined the Brooklyn Underground, playing professionally at local bars and clubs. Then in May 1969 he joined the Southern Distributors for an 8 months period after which he moved on to Texas Storm, which also featured his brother Jimmy and Doyle Bramhall. This turned out to be only 2 months. By the spring of 1970 he joined Liberation, a 12 piece band. But by fall that same year he moved on to Lincoln while also doing session gigs for an outfit called Cast of Thousands. In late January 1971, feeling confined by playing pop hits with Liberation, Vaughan formed his own band, Blackbird. After growing tired of the Dallas music scene, he dropped out of school and moved with the band to Austin, Texas, which had more liberal and tolerant audiences. There, Vaughan initially took residence at the Rolling Hills Club, a local blues venue that would later become the Soap Creek Saloon. Blackbird played at several clubs in Austin and opened shows for bands such as Sugarloaf, Wishbone Ash, and Zephyr, but could not maintain a consistent lineup. Late in the fall of that year it was time to move on to join a band called Pecos. But by the time the summer came along he had moved on to Deryk Jones Party. The summer of 1972 was set aside for another Blackbird episode while occasionally guesting for an outfit called Orchrist. Blackbird #3 crossed his road for the first time with later bass player of Double Trouble, Tommy Shannon. Krackerjack was the next outfit on his roster for the fall of 1972. Stump lasted only about a month, before Stevie Ray joined Marc Benno and the Nightcrawlers. Marc Benno left and Stevie Ray gave the band another shot through parts of 1974. A band called Doug Sahm honed Stevie’s technique until the spring of 1975, when Paul Ray and the Cobras got a chance to enjoy his guitar playing. A bit more challenged Stevie Ray stayed until September 1977. In addition to playing with the Cobras, Vaughan jammed with many of his influences at Antone’s, including Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmy Rogers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Albert King. In the fall of 78, when  he formed Triple Threat Revue, which became his “home” until spring 1978. Southern blues sensation Lou Ann Barton fronted the outfit on vocals. In June 1978 the time had arrived for Stevie Ray Vaughan to rename the band to Double Trouble from an Otis Rush song, later to become Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble.

Stevie played with over 20 bands during his career, starting as early as 11 years old. The first known live recording of him was in 1969, when he sat in with Marc Benno’s band “Jomo”. His first studio recording came with Cast of Thousands,in 1971, when they recorded 2 tracks for the A New-Hi compilation album.

In early October 1978, Vaughan and Double Trouble earned a frequent residency performing at one of Austin’s most popular nightspots, the Rome Inn.

During a performance, Edi Johnson, an accountant at Manor Downs, noticed Vaughan. She remembered: “I’m not an authority on music—it’s whatever turns me on—but this did.” She recommended him to Manor Downs owner Frances Carr and GM Chesley Millikin, who was interested in managing artists and saw Vaughan’s musical potential. After Barton quit Double Trouble in mid-November 1979, Millikin signed Vaughan to a management contract. Vaughan also hired Robert “Cutter” Brandenburg as road manager, whom he had met in 1969. Addressing him as “Stevie Ray”, Brandenburg convinced Vaughan to use his middle name on stage.

On December 5, 1979, while Vaughan was in a dressing room before a performance in Houston, an off-duty police officer arrested him after witnessing him using cocaine near an open window. He was formally charged with cocaine possession and subsequently released on $1,000 bail. Double Trouble was the opening act for Muddy Waters, who said about Vaughan’s drug abuse: “Stevie could perhaps be the greatest guitar player that ever lived, but he won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white powder alone.” Vaughan was sentenced with two years’ probation and was prohibited from leaving Texas. Along with a stipulation of entering treatment for drug abuse, he was required to “avoid persons or places of known disreputable or harmful character”; he refused to comply with both of these orders. After  a lawyer was hired, his probation officer had the sentence revised to allow him to work outside the state. But the incident later caused him to refuse maid service while staying in hotels during concert tours.

In October 1980, bassist Tommy Shannon attended a Double Trouble performance at Rockefeller’s in Houston. Shannon, who had played with Stevie Ray in Blackbird, was playing with Alan Haynes at the time, participated in a jam session with Vaughan and Layton halfway through their set. Shannon later commented: “I went down there that night, and I’ll never forget this: it was like, when I walked in the door and I heard them playing, it was like a revelation. ‘That’s where I want to be; that’s where I belong, right there.’ During the break, I went up to Stevie and told him that. I didn’t try to sneak around and hide it from the bass player Jackie Newhouse—I didn’t know if he was listening or not. I just really wanted to be in that band. I sat in that night and it sounded great.”  Almost three months later, when Vaughan offered Shannon the position, he readily accepted.

Although popular in Texas at the time, Double Trouble failed to gain national attention, partly because of Vaughan’s inability to travel beyond Texas at that time. The group’s visibility improved when record producer Jerry Wexler recommended them to Claude Nobs, organizer of the Montreux Jazz Festival. He insisted the festival’s blues night would be great with Vaughan, whom he called “a jewel, one of those rarities who comes along once in a lifetime”, and Nobs agreed to book Double Trouble.

Vaughan opened his first day performance with a medley arrangement of Freddie King’s song “Hide Away” and his own fast instrumental composition, “Rude Mood”. Double Trouble went on to perform renditions of Larry Davis’ “Texas Flood”, Hound Dog Taylor’s “Give Me Back My Wig”, and Albert Collins‘ “Collins Shuffle”, as well as three original compositions: “Pride and Joy”, “Love Struck Baby”, and “Dirty Pool”. The set ended with a mixture of boos and  from the audience.

People‘s James McBride wrote about his performance:

He seemed to come out of nowhere, a Zorro-type figure in a riverboat gambler’s hat, roaring into the ’82 Montreux festival with a ’59 Stratocaster at his hip and two flame-throwing sidekicks he called Double Trouble. He had no album, no record contract, no name, but he reduced the stage to a pile of smoking cinders and, afterward, everyone wanted to know who he was.”

According to road manager Don Opperman: “the way I remember it, the ‘ooos’ and the ‘boos’ were mixed together, but Stevie was pretty disappointed. Stevie just handed me his guitar and walked off stage, and I’m like, ‘are you coming back?’ There was a doorway back there; the audience couldn’t see the guys, but I could. He went back to the dressing room with his head in his hands. I went back there finally, and that was the end of the show.” According to Vaughan: “it wasn’t the whole crowd [that booed]. It was just a few people sitting right up front. The room there was built for acoustic jazz. When five or six people boo, wow, it sounds like the whole world hates you. They thought we were too loud, but shoot, I had four army blankets folded over my amp, and the volume level was on 2. I’m used to playin’ on 10!” The performance was filmed and later released on DVD in September 2004.

On the following 2 nights, Double Trouble was booked in the lounge of the Montreux Casino, with David Bowie in attendance on the first night and Jackson Browne on the second. Browne jammed with Double Trouble until the early morning hours and offered them free use of his personal recording studio in downtown Los Angeles. In late November the band accepted his offer and recorded ten songs in two days. While they were in the studio, Vaughan received a telephone call from David Bowie, who had met him after the Montreux performance, and he invited him to participate in a recording session for his next studio album, Let’s Dance. In January 1983, Vaughan recorded guitar on six of the album’s eight songs, including the title track and “China Girl”. The album was released on April 14, 1983, and sold over three times as many copies as Bowie’s previous album. Double Trouble did an encore at the Montreux Jazz Festival 1985, this time as headliners.

Now that Europe had experienced Stevie Ray Vaughan, just like with Jimi Hendrix (England), Joe Bonamassa (NorthSea Jazz Festival) and several other guitar slingers, the doors also opened in America.  After Montreux Epic Records signed the band to a record contract and Bowie asked Stevie Ray to join him for his Serious Moonlight Tour, as he realized how essential Stevie Ray’s contribution to the album was. After some back and forth, Stevie Ray however turned the proposition down and said: “I couldn’t gear everything on something I didn’t really care a whole lot about. It was kind of risky (reputation-wise, but I really didn’t need all the headaches. Besides, they only offered union rates.” Although contributing factors were widely disputed, Vaughan soon gained major publicity for quitting the tour. The following May he demolished the stage of the Bottom Line in New York City, opening for Canadian rocker Brian Adams. The New York Post claimed that the stage had been “rendered to cinders by the most explosively original showmanship to grace the New York stage in some time.”

Still as Double Trouble, the band recorded its debut album in less than a week at Jackson Browne’s studio. Texas Flood, was released in the summer of 1983, a few months after Bowie’s Let’s Dance appeared. On its own, Let’s Dance earned Stevie quite a bit of attention, but Texas Flood was a blockbuster blues success; receiving positive reviews in both blues and rock publications, reaching number 38 on the charts and crossing over to album rock radio stations. Stevie and Double Trouble set off on a successful tour and quickly recorded their second album, Couldn’t Stand the Weather, which was released in May of 1984. The album was more successful than its predecessor, reaching number 31 on the charts; by the end of 1985, the album went gold. Double Trouble added keyboardist Reese Wynans in 1985, before they recorded their third album, Soul to Soul. The record was released in August 1985 and was also quite successful, reaching number 34 on the charts.

Although his professional career was soaring, Stevie was sinking deep into alcoholism and drug addiction. Despite his declining health, he continued to push himself, releasing the double live album Live Alive in October of 1986 and touring extensively.

Late in 1986 Stevie collapsed whilst on tour in Germany and was rushed to hospital, where he was warned, that if he didn’t clean up, he would be dead very soon. The rest of the tour was cancelled and then followed time in rehab, before emerging clean and sober, and ready to work again.

The band undertook a US tour in 1987, completing 65 gigs, a somewhat mediocre total by his normal standards.

Stevie performed a number of concerts in 1988, including a headlining gig at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and wrote his fourth album. The resulting record, In Step, appeared in June of 1989 and became his most successful album, peaking at number 33 on the charts, earning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Recording, and going gold just over six months after its release.

In the spring of 1990, Stevie recorded the album Family Style with his brother Jimmie, which was scheduled for release in the autumn of that year.

In the late summer of 1990, Stevie and Double Trouble set out on an American headlining tour, with Joe Cocker. The highlight of the tour was two nights with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Vaughan, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray at Alpine Valley, East Troy, Wisconsin on 25th and 26th August 1990.

After the second show, which climaxed with an encore of Sweet Home Chicago, with everybody on stage, most of the entourage headed to board four chartered helicopters to take them back to the Windy City and a good night’s rest. Clapton later recalled how foggy the early morning of August 27 was.
“I didn’t want to fly at all. I was wiping condensation off the windows and thinking: ‘We’re all gonna die.’ Then they took off and above the weather was clear sky and starlight.”

Stevie was on a flight with three of Clapton’s crew. In the early hours it was reported they never landed in Chicago. In fact their pilot had taken off and crashed into a ski run on the side of a mountain after 42 seconds. Stevie Ray Vaughan was dead at 35.

When his brother Jimmie went to identify Stevie’s body, he had to so by recognizing his distinctive silver jewelry.” Shannon and Layton sat in their hotel room and wept. They’d gone into Stevie’s room hoping he’d be there, but the bed was still made with chocolates on the counterpane and the alarm radio was playing The Eagles’ Peaceful, Easy Feeling.

At Stevie’s funeral the mourners included Stevie Wonder and Dr. John, who sang “Amazing Grace” and “Ave Maria” while Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Nile Rodgers, Eric Clapton and ZZ Top wept in the Laurel Land Memorial chapel. Stevie’s marble and bronze headstone simply gave his dates, his name and the inscription that says ‘Thank you… For all the love you passed our way.’  

But a strange thing happened at that last gig. Those who knew Stevie said he played with a halo of light around him. His guitar tech Rene Martinez remembered him giving everyone a huge hug and telling them how much he loved them. He had an aura about him, like a premonition.

Stevie Ray Vaughan brought physicality and soul to guitar playing, and he brought it in spades. The soul came through the speaker. The physicality was there for all to see. To watch him play, there were occasions in which SRV would throttle the guitar as though it were an arm wrestling contest at last orders in a Nantucket alehouse. His strings were the stuff of legend – Gauge 13s? No, 14s; 17s! Heck, some might argue he used piano wire. Either way, he went down the heavy-gauge route and had the dexterity to manipulate them as though they were dental floss. This, the fire in his belly, and the tone-gussying Tube Screamer playing mediator between Fender Strat and amp give him a range of dynamics that few, if any, players could match.

And yet, there was a tenderness to his playing. There are many who argue that his cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing eclipses the original. Opinions like that are always up for debate. What is not-up-to-debate is that Vaughan, left an over-sized impression on guitar culture in a short space of time. Just like Hendrix. – Total Guitar, chosing Stevie Ray Vaughan as the Number 1 Blues guitarist of all time

As a guitarist myself I feel that Stevie Ray brought more to the table than virtuosity. His whole being was music, which resulted in an endless flow of ideas, executed to perfection on his guitar. He could go on and on creating tasty licks, riff, melodies and raw mind blowing arpeggios, while seemingly never having to think about it. Ask any good or great guitarist about their fear of soloing and you’ll get always the same answer: Running out of ideas! Stevie Ray never ran out of ideas. they just floated into each other, channeled by his charismatic persona and fingers that instinctively knew where to go on the fretboard, far beyond just muscle memory.

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Emily Remler 5/1990

Emily Remler was born September 18, 1957 in Manhattan, New York and raised in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Remler began playing guitar at age ten. Her first guitar was her brother’s cherry-red Gibson ES-330, the guitar she would use for most of her professional career. She listened to pop and rock guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Winter. She learned simple folk tunes, Beatles songs, and Johnny Winter solos note-for-note, but it was just a hobby. She wasn’t serious yet and had other interests, like sculpture and drawing. Remler was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts to finish high school. She graduated high school early, at 16, and applied to music and art schools. She got accepted to one of each: the Berklee College of Music and the Rhode Island School of Design. She had to decide: music or art?  She chose music. 
She told an interviewer for Down Beat magazine in 1985, “I was so frustrated with art. I couldn’t get it the way I wanted it. Music, at least you get more chances and a little more time and have the companionship of the other musicians.”
She wasn’t that good when she got to Berklee, and jazz was an alien art form to her. Miles Davis and John Coltrane were not on her radar. But Berklee was a diverse place, and jazz was more than Coltrane and Miles. She heard Paul Desmond, Pat Martino, and Wes Montgomery. That was more her speed—she loved it and became hooked.
Remler finished a two-year degree and graduated at age 18. She still wasn’t much of a guitarist (at least that’s what she said in interviews) but she’d learned a lot about music, including harmony, reading, and keeping time.
“My teacher told me that I had bad time. I rushed. I went home crying. Crying. But I bought a metronome. I worked with the metronome on two and four. I practiced with that thing and nothing else behind me,” she said in the same 1985 Down Beat interview. She worked hard at it, and eventually great time—her ability to swing—became a hallmark of her playing.
Her boyfriend at the time, guitarist Steve Masakowski, was from New Orleans, and they decided to move there. But she wanted to spend the summer practicing in New Jersey first, so she rented a room on Long Beach Island for eight weeks and worked on chord theory and soloing. She quit smoking. She lost weight. That’s where she learned how to play.
When Remler moved to New Orleans in the fall, she got to work. Reading music got her a lot of gigs: hotel shows, weddings, anniversary parties, rhythm and blues gigs, jazz gigs, and all-night jams with the old-timers on Bourbon Street. She gigged with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin. She backed up singers. She played in blues and jazz clubs, working with bands such as Four Play and Little Queenie and the Percolators before beginning her recording career in 1981. She also supported big names when they came to town: Robert Goulet, Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson. Wilson took her on the road and brought her to the Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Remler was a big fish in a small pond, and because she could play and read, she was a first-call player in New Orleans.
She put together a quartet, and worked, but she only lasted another year there before moving back to New York, but she always valued her New Orleans time—it made her into a musician and helped her find her voice. “In New York, it’s very serious. In New Orleans everybody jumps up and down,” she told Down Beat in a 1982 interview. “There’s an R&B kind of feeling. I sort of stole that rich culture and applied it to my own music. If I had stayed in Boston, I’d be playing ‘Giant Steps’ like a madman—like everybody else.”
When Herb Ellis came to town, Remler had to meet him. She had guts and ambition and was able to finagle a meeting. 
“I asked her to play something for me, and when she did, I couldn’t believe what I heard,” Ellis said. A few years later Ellis told People Magazine, “I’ve been asked many times who I think is coming up on the guitar to carry on the tradition and my unqualified choice is Emily[Remler].” 
He got her an engagement at California’s Concord Jazz Festival, requesting that she join him on a bill called “Guitar Explosion” that also featured such virtuosos as Barney Kessel and Tal Farlow. For Remler it was the beginning of a promising career — one that New Orleans couldn’t contain. Within a year, she had amicably ended her relationship with Masakowski and gone back to New York.
Remler’s return to New York however became a struggle; in New Orleans she was a big fish in a small pond, but like so many aspiring players, here she was a small fish in a big pond. Yet it had an additional layer of difficulty for her. “There are so many bandleaders who have told me face to face that they couldn’t hire me because I was a woman,” she remarked. “So many instances where I wasn’t trusted musically and they handled me with kid gloves.” Remler used the adversity as motivation to get so good that they’d have to hire her.
She landed a job accompanying vocalist Brazilian Bossa nova phenomenon Astrud Gilberto, and began introducing herself to guitarists she heard around town. One was John Scofield, who in 1980 introduced Remler to Clayton, in town from L.A. They jammed together. “She knocked me out,” Clayton says. “I said, ‘Are you gonna be around in a couple months? Because we’re gonna do a Clayton Brothers recording, and it’d be great if you could join us!’ And her eyes widened, and she said, ‘Yeah!’” Remler flew out to California that June to play on the album It’s All in the Family. On the date she again met the president of Concord Jazz Records, Carl Jefferson, whom she’d impressed two years earlier at the Concord Jazz Festival. He signed her to record an album of her own for what was at the time a guitar-centric label. Back in New York she founded the Emily Remler Trio and recorded her first album as a band leader. Firefly gained positive reviews, as did Take Two and Catwalk. She participated in the Los Angeles version of Sophisticated Ladies from 1981 to 1982 and toured for 3 years with Brazilian jazz phenomenon Astrud Gilberto.
From there things moved quickly. The album, Firefly, placed her in the august company of pianist Hank Jones, along with bassist Bob Maize and drummer Jake Hanna. On the strength of Firefly, Jefferson extended her contract for three additional albums. Remler was a headliner at the Berlin and Newport Jazz Festivals, and on a Hawaiian jazz cruise. In a column for the Los Angeles Times, jazz critic Leonard Feather named her 1981’s “Woman of the Year. 
She was featured in the music trade magazines, and in the spring of 1982, Remler crossed over into People magazine, where she uttered her most famous quote: “I may look like a nice Jewish girl from New Jersey. But inside I’m a 50-year-old, heavyset black man with a big thumb, like Wes Montgomery.”
“The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Emily Remler,” Feather wrote, and this was true for her both professionally and personally: Remler met and married the Jamaican jazz pianist Monty Alexander in ’81.
In New York, she had been leading her own trio. When it came time to make her third record for Concord, she had enough clout and confidence to insist that the full quartet make the date. The result was 1983’s acclaimed Transition, which marked an increasing focus on her own compositions and a step away from bebop conservatism.
That progress continued with Catwalk, released in early 1985. It was Remler’s first collection of entirely original compositions, many of them flavored with Latin, Brazilian, Indian and African polyrhythms. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done,” she pronounced in an interview shortly after its release.
Critics agreed. So did guitar great Larry Coryell, who heard Catwalk upon its release. “I … was impressed,” Coryell wrote in his 2007 memoir, Improvising: My Life in Music. “Emily was creative, smart, swung like crazy and had a time feel that was just about the best I had ever heard from any guitarist, male or female.”
Coryell and Remler would soon record a duets album, Together. They hit the touring circuits, playing international festivals as well as clubs and guitar workshops. They also had a brief romance—a new partnership augmented by the dissolution of another. After two and a half years, her marriage to Monty Alexander had ended in divorce. It was, perhaps, a harbinger of more difficult times to come.
In 1985 she won Guitarist of the Year in Down Beat magazine’s international poll, and performed in that year’s guitar festival at Carnegie Hall.
When asked how she wanted to be remembered she remarked, “Good compositions, memorable guitar playing and my contributions as a woman in music…but the music is everything, and it has nothing to do with politics or the women’s liberation movement.”
But by the end of 1986, Remler had had enough. She quit New York and moved to Pittsburgh, becoming an artist-in-residence at Duquesne University and studying at the University of Pittsburgh with Bob Brookmeyer. At night she worked the local clubs. She continued playing festivals and freelancing on records. But as she kept honing her craft, she also went into drug rehab therapy, hoping to beat not only her addiction but the demons that hid behind it.
It seemed to be working. In the spring of 1988, she even moved back to New York, taking an apartment in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She made a bebop record, East to Wes, with Hank Jones, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith, and took some straight-ahead gigs recording behind pianist David Benoit and vocalist Susannah McCorkle.
She had some less conventional ideas brewing as well. Remler began experimenting with the cutting-edge electronics of the day, including a guitar synth—less Montgomery than Metheny. In 1989, she signed a deal with Houston-based Justice Records to release her newly recorded This Is Me, an album that included her passions for the jazz-guitar tradition and for Brazilian and African rhythms, but pushed hard in the direction of crossover jazz-pop.
She never got to see where the new direction would take her. Remler was on a tour of Australia when she was found dead in her Sydney hotel room. The official cause of death was heart failure, with no mention of drug involvement. The jazz world knew better.
Remler bore the scars of her longstanding opioid use disorder, which is believed to have contributed to her death. On May 4, 1990, she died of heart failure at the age of 32 while on tour in Australia.
She took something with her besides her musical gift. “She always had a weakness for the party life, and maybe overdoing it with substances and things like that,” former boyfriend Masakowski said. “When we were first together, it was a very healthy lifestyle. I even got her to quit smoking. But then I think she started playing with the more party-oriented types of groups, and it started to deteriorate.”
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Ron Morgan – 11/1989

Ron Morgan – Electric Prunes/Westcoast Popart Experimental Band/Three Dog Night – was born on June 8, 1945 in Colby, Kansas. His father, an accomplished Jazz Guitarist, brought Ron and his brother Robert into the musical fold early on. They were born with music over their heads. Ron was born to be a guitarist – he breathed, lived, walked and talked it. Yet never did he use his talents in arrogance or displayed himself as a superior player, or as a gifted artist. But he stays criminally underrated.

A contemporary musician once wrote this about him:
I was rehearsing with a group in Golden, CO sometime around 1970, when one afternoon a quiet, almost “shy” dude dropped over to sit in and jam with us.
Hooking up into a Marshall with one cabinet, he proceeded to blow away and amaze everyone within hearing range.
His superior level of competency playing was only matched by the feeling & spirit with which he played. Everyone knew there was a world-class musician in the room.
We jammed for about 2-3 hours until our ears were ringing.
When we finally stopped, I asked our drummer “who was THAT?” They told me his name was Ron Morgan, and that he had recently left 3 Dog Night.
My first thought was: “Boy, that’s THEIR loss.” I played and jammed with lots of guitarists from 1966 thru 1982, but I think it is possible that Ron was likely the best, most inspirational & exciting of all of them.
 
Ron and Robert were tight brothers who had many freedoms that some have only read about – like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Besides practically running wild, they did a lot of Fishing, swimming in lakes, catching – skinning rattle snake [selling skins] and trying to deal with self reliance (yes, motherless children have a hard time) – all was a big part of our younger years.
 
“Ron and Roger Liston co-founded Denver’s The Wild Ones in 1962, when they were only 16. While it is a given that Ron achieved stratospheric levels of excellence, what few people know is how far down he and Roger were talent-wise when they started our garage band ‘Morgan’s Marauders’ back in 1961. Since he and Roger had been kicked out of every band they were in, in that time, they made a solemn pact not to fire each other from their new band, no matter what! 
This first band “Morgan’s Marauders” was simply terrible. So bad that they got fired from almost every bar in the greater Denver area – sometimes during the first set! Worse yet, after they had “played through” every night club around, owners  remembered way too well how bad they were and would not think of taking a chance on hiring them again.
 
Apparently they learned from their failures and then they did something fairly inspired; it happened to be a bold and impressive move. They completely repackaged their “act”, renamed the band, got new suits, took new pictures, learned new songs and sent in a new face to sell the club owners the “new band”. This marketing plan worked and since they were a whole lot better, they were able to keep and even thrive.
 
Ron started performing full time in 1963, just 18 years old.
 
For two years, six nights a week, four hours a night, the Wild Ones played at two great Colorado clubs; Sam’s on Lookout Mountain and Clancy’s in Fort Collins. Even playing this often, Ron put in another 2-4 hours of practicing every day. And after only a few thousand hours of practicing, he “overnight” became master of the instrument and perhaps the genre.
The Wild Ones took every opportunity to showcase Ron. For instance, they arranged a medley of Freddy King classics to feature him. As for a side note, white folks of that era had not even heard of Freddy King, and would not for another ten years, However Ron knew every lick of every Freddy King song even in 1965; talk about being ahead of his time!
Ron would establish this medley by first playing the songs just as Freddy would, then, in the subsequent bridges and turnarounds, Ron would take us to a new level of musical experience, with the medley lasting for 12-15 minutes. Typically several hundred or so patrons of the club would move to the foot of the stage to better watch him perform his magic. What they saw was simply unprecedented; They were watching a world-class guitarist performing songs that mainstream America would not hear for another ten years in a small town Colorado night club. He was simply stellar–the rest of the band would just try to keep up with him and stay “out of the way”.
In 1965 The Wild Ones with Ron opened for British Invasion band Herman’s Hermits at the DU Stadium.
 
A little later, Ron’s musical talents were beginning to emerge beyond the local and regional scenes. He was uniquely gifted, even though Colorado didn’t realize it at the time. However, even accomplished guitarists in other bands were quick to take notice of Ron and were increasingly amazed at what they were hearing. Two years later, even the great Frank Zappa focused his complete attention on Ron when he took center stage.
Zappa first met Ron when the Wild Ones shared the stage with his band, the Mothers of Invention – for two weeks at L.A.’s Whisky A Go Go, where they alternated hourly sets. Zappa did his best to look uninterested when they were playing, but whenever Ron cut loose with a killer lead, Frank stopped moving – not breathing, blinking or drinking (Coors, of course), until Ron finished his lead. Every member of the Wild Ones has said that performing with Ron was truly the best time of their lives.
 
As author of this website, I learned about Ron Morgan during his year stint with the incredible West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. It’s a long way across the ocean from California to a little town in the Dutch hillsides, but when I first heard this band in a tiny listening room in our local record store, I was blown away. The closing lead in “Tracy had a hard day Sunday” was beyond my reach as guitarist for many years.
 
Here it states how Ron Morgan became part of the West Coast Popart Experimental Band.
 
When Ron Morgan was in California he was a member of Moby Grape, and a couple of other bands.  He also did the studio work for Three Dog Night with Jimmy Greenspoon, the red headed organ player. Jimmy and Ron also did the studio work for an attorney named Bob Markley who called his album The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. Ron had come back to Denver broke and when I saw him he asked if I could use him in The Leather Souls.  I helped him out.
Ron asked if the band wanted to tour as the West Coast Pop Experimental Art Band. Bob Markley had called and was looking for a group to learn the album and do the Teenage Fair Tour. Ron Morgan would come into the band via Hollywood contacts and provide them with some of the finest and most innovative lead guitar work being put forth in southern California. The liner notes of the band’s long plays often give the impression that Ron wasn’t involved with the recordings. But his guitar work was present on all of their LP’s.
Ron was working around the industry in California and had just finished some work with the Standells of “Dirty Water” fame when he was brought into the WCPAEB. Ron would not only provide the lead guitar, complete with all the special effects he could muster, but he would often contribute songs and could provide vocal support.
Morgan was brought in to replace Michael Lloyd who clashed badly with Markley. Ron lasted a little over a year and 3 albums.
 
In 1968 Ron became a very instrumental part and founding member of Three Dog Night. Their musical direction was quite contrary to his and Ron’s preference to the recording studio, rather than live performances was only one example of why he didn’t stay with Three Dog Night. Ron was then developing into a very versatile, progressive and experimental hard rocking Guitarist.
In 1968, TDN openend for Electric Flag at Hollywoods’ top bill venue The Kaleidoscope. The audience was a blues/rock crowd and seemed not too fond of an almost “lounge singer” sound. Shortly after, Ron returned home with a binding contract before he was to go into the studio with Three Dog Night – a Family Lawyer advised Ron not to sign, which he did not due to a clause that defined the band (musicians) as secondary. Upon his return to LA he was no longer in the band.
He never mentioned any regret for leaving. After all, TDN then was a cover band and Ron wanted to create, not recreate.
 
Almost immediately another opportunity arose in the form of established Reprise act, the Electric Prunes, but unfortunately for Ron the group was about to hit the buffers. According to Dick Whetstone, drummer and vocalist with the final Prunes line-up, Ron became involved after John Herron quit unexpectedly during the sessions for the ‘Just Good Old Rock And Roll’ LP: “We knew Ron from a Denver band called Superband that included Jimmy Greenspoon on keyboards.
The two of them had landed a gig with the original version of Three Dog Night prior to the first album release. Ron however was anxious to play in a less structured band – he wanted more solos! He was a world-class guitar player. He joined the Prunes in time to help finish the last tracks on the album and began touring with us, along with his Harley. Ron lived to play music, but the lifestyle contributed greatly to his death.” After Three Dog Night and the Electric Prunes Ron moved back to Denver. 
 
Ron never seemed unreasonable, just true to his mission. Early in his career, Ron ran in to Dick Clark while doing a bit on the hip show “Where The Action Is”. Ron declined an offer to join Paul Revere & the Raiders before Doug Heath joined – Ron thought the “Minuteman” garb was silly, quite uncomfortably warm and The Raiders to Ron was a commercially driven hype machine.
Later in the early 70′s, Ron declined Tommy Bolin’s request to join him in L.A. for one of his solo mid-seventy albums. Although Ron revered Tommy as an awesome Guitar Player/ Singer/ Songwriter – Ron commented, “two powerful lead guitarists might clutter things up”. Ron at that time had fallen onto some hard financial times as well and didn’t seem to warm up to an excursion to LA for a session. Ron and Tommy jammed together in Tommy’s Boulder Colorado based “Zephyr” band. Ron and Tommy on the same stage, was almost scary. Ron added later that it seemed more like a contest than an exchange of giving each other room to lay down a groove. This may explain the “clutter part” Ron had reluctance to work with Tommy, but always spoke of Tommy with utmost admiration.
 
According to his brother “He was disenchanted, but he wasn’t going to sell out. He did drive a cab for a while – he loved the freedom of it, there were no pressures and he was his own boss – but Ron got in a bad way. He was strung out on ‘reds’ – addictive sleeping pills – which he had been popping with Three Dog Night and he ended up on the street. He had no skills apart from music, but after he got married in ’76 he sorted his life out for a while and became a janitor. He still played and we used to jam a lot.
 
Then life had another tragedy in store for him when he had a motorcycle accident and things went down hill quick. He got put in a psychiatric ward for a time. His wife divorced him and kicked him out of the house. It was while he was in hospital that he was diagnosed with Hepatitis C. The worst thing you can do with that is drink, but he had a strong constitution – he could always put away the drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately he didn’t know until it was too late. 
Ron Morgan died in his sleep in 1989 at 44. 
 
Ron was a perfectionist and a bit of a loner. It was difficult for him to fit in to the California music industry way of doing things. He longed to create great music but was often shackled by over-bearing controllers.

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John Cipollina 5/1989

May 29, 1989 (aged 45) John Cipollina and his twin sister Manuela were born in Berkeley, California, on August 24, 1943. Cipollina attended Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California, as did his brother, Mario(born 1954), and sister, Antonia (born 1952). Their father, Gino, was of Italian ancestry. He was a realtor, and his mother, Evelyn, and godfather, José Iturbi, were concert pianists. John showed great promise as a classical pianist in his youth, but his father gave him a guitar when he was 12 and this quickly became his primary instrument.

Trained as a classical pianist, John Cipollina however didn’t just play the usual pentatonic rock and blues riffs; he meandered about the fretboard, producing a plethora of melodic and evocative notes, inflected with plenty of whammy bar, his signature, particularly during the psychedelic era. Simply stated, nobody played lead guitar like John Cipollina!

One of the forerunners of the San Francisco Bay Area sound in the middle 1960s, Cipollina played lead guitar for the fabulous Quicksilver Messenger Service, until the band went “poppy” in the early 1970s. Man do I remember playing Who do you love and Mona. Epic.

Cipollina had a unique guitar sound, mixing solid state and valve amplifiers as early as 1965. He is considered one of the fathers of the San Francisco sound, a form of psychedelic rock.

I like the rapid punch of solid-state for the bottom, and the rodent-gnawing distortion of the tubes on top.

To create his distinctive guitar sound, Cipollina developed a one-of-a-kind amplifier stack. His Gibson SG guitars had two pickups, one for bass and one for treble. The bass pickup fed into two Standel bass amps on the bottom of the stack, each equipped with two 15-inch speakers. The treble pickups fed two Fender amps: a Fender Twin Reverb and a Fender Dual Showman that drove six Wurlitzer horns.

After leaving Quicksilver in 1971, Cipollina formed the band Copperhead with early Quicksilver member Jim Murray (who was soon to leave for Maui, Hawaii), former Stained Glass member Jim McPherson, drummer David Weber, Gary Phillipet (AKA Gary Phillips (keyboardist), later a member of Bay Area bands Earthquake and The Greg Kihn Band), and Pete Sears. Sears was shortly thereafter replaced by current and longtime Bonnie Raitt bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson who played on the Copperhead LP and stayed with the band for its duration. Copperhead disbanded in mid 1974 after becoming a staple in the SF Bay Area and touring the West Coast, Hawaii (Sunshine Crater Fest on New Years Day of 1973 with Santana), the South (opening dates for Steely Dan) and the Midwest.

In May 1974 Cipollina and Link Wray, whose playing and style had influenced John as a young musician and who he had met through bassist Hutch Hutchinson, performed a series of shows together along the West Coast (with Copperhead rhythm section Hutchinson & Weber and keyboardist David Bloom) culminating at The Whiskey in LA where they performed for four nights (May 15–19) on a bill with Lighthouse (band). Cipollina continued to occasionally perform with Wray for the next couple of years.

In 1975, the Welsh psychedelic band Man toured the United States, towards the end of which, they played two gigs at the San Francisco Winterland (March 21 and 22), which were such a success that promoter Bill Graham paid them a bonus and rebooked them. While waiting for the additional gigs, the band met and rehearsed with John Cipollina, who played with them at Winterland in April 1975. After this, Cipollina agreed to play a UK tour which took place in May 1975, during which their “Roundhouse gig” was recorded.

Rumors that Micky Jones had to overdub Cipollina’s parts, as his guitar was out of tune, before their Maximum Darkness album could be released are exaggerated; only one track, “Bananas”, was to have his track replaced, per Deke Leonard. “Everything … which sounds like Cipollina is Cipollina.”

During the 1980s, Cipollina performed with a number of bands, including Fish & Chips, Thunder and Lightning, the Dinosaurs and Problem Child. He was a founding member of Zero and its rhythm guitarist until his death. Most often these bands played club gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Cipollina was well-known

Cipollina died on May 29, 1989, at age 45. His cause of death was alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, a lung disease, which he suffered from most of his life and which is exacerbated by smoking.

Quicksilver Messenger Service fans paid tribute to him the following month in San Francisco at an all-star concert at the Fillmore Auditorium which featured Nicky Hopkins, Pete Sears, David Freiberg, and John’s brother Mario, an original member of Huey Lewis and the News. Cipollina’s one of a kind massive amplifier stack was donated, along with one of his customized Gibson SG guitars, and effects pedals, for display in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in 1995.

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Roy Orbison 12/1988

roy orbisonDecember 6, 1988 – Roy Kelton Orbison was born on April 23, 1936, in Vernon, Texas to Nadine and Orbie Lee. He formed his first band at age 13. The singer-songwriter dropped out of college to pursue music. He signed with Monument Records and recorded such ballads as “Only the Lonely” and “It’s Over.”

Born to a working-class Texan family, Orbison grew up immersed in musical styles ranging from rockabilly and country to zydeco, Tex-Mex and the blues. His dad gave him a guitar for his sixth birthday and he wrote his first song, “A Vow of Love,” in 1944 while staying at his grandmothers. In 1945 he entered and won a contest on KVWC in Vernon and this led to his own radio show singing the same songs every Saturday. By the time Roy was 13 he had formed his own band “The Wink Westerners”. The band appeared weekly on KERB radio in Kermit, Texas. Roy graduated from Wink High School in 1954. He attended North Texas State College in Denton, Texas for a year, and enrolled at Odessa Junior College in 1955 to study history and English. Continue reading Roy Orbison 12/1988

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Roy Buchanan 8/1988

Roy Buchanan Guitar virtuosoAugust 14, 1988 – Leroy “Roy” Buchanan was born on September 23rd 1939 in Ozark, Arkansas and was raised there and in Pixley, California, a farming area near Bakersfield. His father was a sharecropper in Arkansas and a farm laborer in California.

His first musical memories were of racially mixed revival meetings he attended with his mother Minnie. “Gospel,” he recalled, “that’s how I first got into black music.” He in fact drew upon many disparate influences while learning to play his instrument (though he later claimed his aptitude derived from being “half-wolf”). He initially showed talent on steel guitar before switching to guitar in the early 50s, and started his professional career at age 15, in Johnny Otis’s rhythm and blues revue.

In 1958, Buchanan made his recording debut with Dale Hawkins, including playing the solo on “My Babe” for Chicago’s Chess Records. Two years later, during a tour through Toronto, Buchanan left Dale Hawkins to play for his cousin Ronnie Hawkins and tutor Ronnie’s guitar player, Robbie Robertson. Buchanan plays bass on the Ronnie Hawkins single, “Who Do You Love?”. Buchanan soon returned to the U.S. and Ronnie Hawkins’ group later gained fame as The Band.

By the dawn of the ’60s, Buchanan had relocated once more, this time to Canada, where he signed on with rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins. The bass player of Ronnie Hawkins’ backing band, the Hawks, studied guitar with Buchanan during his tenure with the band. Upon Buchanan’s exit, bassist-turned-guitarist Robertson would become the leader of the group, which would eventually become popular roots rockers the Band, and back up band for Bob Dylan..

In 1961 he released “Mule Train Stomp”, his first single for Swan, featuring rich guitar tones. Buchanan’s 1962 recording with drummer Bobby Gregg, nicknamed “Potato Peeler,” first introduced the trademark Buchanan “pinch” harmonic. An effort to cash in on the British Invasion caught Buchanan with the British Walkers. Buchanan spent the ’60s as a sideman with obscure acts, as well as working as a session guitarist for such varied artists as pop idol Freddy Cannon, country artist Merle Kilgore, and drummer Bobby Gregg, among others, before Buchanan settled down in the Washington, D.C., area in the mid- to late ’60s and founded his own outfit, the Snakestretchers. Despite not having appeared on any recordings of his own, word of Buchanan’s exceptional playing skills began to spread among musicians as he received accolades from the likes of John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Merle Haggard, as well as supposedly being invited to join the Rolling Stones at one point (which he turned down). In the mid-1960s, Buchanan settled down in the Washington, D.C. area, playing for Danny Denver’s band for many years while acquiring a reputation as “...one of the very finest rock guitarists around”.

Reputedly Jimi Hendrix would not take up the challenge of a ‘pick-off’ with Roy. The facts behind that claim are that in March 1968 a photographer friend, John Gossage gave Buchanan tickets to a concert by the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Washington Hilton. Buchanan reportedly was dismayed to find his own trademark sounds, like the wah-wah that he’d painstakingly produced with his hands and his Telecaster, was created by electronic pedals. He could never attempt Hendrix’s stage show, and this realization refocused him on his own quintessentially American roots-style guitar picking.

Gossage recalls how Roy was very impressed by the Hendrix 1967 debut album Are You Experienced?, which was why he made sure to give Roy a ticket to the early show at the Hilton. Gossage went backstage to take photos and tried to convince Jimi to go and see Roy at the Silver Dollar that night after the show, but Jimi seemed more interested in hanging out with the young lady who was backstage with him. Gossage confirms Hendrix never showed up at the Silver Dollar, but he did talk to Roy about seeing the Hilton show. That same night at the Silver Dollar, Roy did several Hendrix numbers and “from that point on, had nothing but good things to say about Hendrix”. He later released recordings of the Hendrix composition “If 6 Was 9” and the Hendrix hit “Hey Joe” (written by Billy Roberts).

At the end of the 1960s, with a growing family, Buchanan left the professional music industry for a while to learn a trade and trained as a hairdresser. In the early ’70s, Roy Buchanan performed extensively in the Washington D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area with the Danny Denver Band, which had a large following in the area. He became widely appreciated as a solo act in the DC area at this time.

Buchanan’s life changed in 1971, when he gained national notice as the result of an hour-long PBS television documentary. Entitled Introducing Roy Buchanan, and sometimes mistakenly called The Best Unknown Guitarist in the World, it earned a record deal with Polydor Records and praise from John Lennon and Merle Haggard, besides an alleged invitation to join the Rolling Stones which he turned down and which gave him the nickname “the man who tumbled the stones down“. In 1977 he appeared on the PBS music program Austin City Limits during Season 2. Buchanan spent the remainder of the decade issuing solo albums, including such guitar classics as his 1972 self-titled debut (which contained one of Buchanan’s best-known tracks, “The Messiah Will Come Again”), 1974’s That’s What I Am Here For, and 1975’s Live Stock, before switching to Atlantic for several releases. But by the ’80s, Buchanan had grown disillusioned by the music business due to the record company’s attempts to mold him into a more mainstream artist, which again led to a four-year exile from music between 1981 and 1985.

Buchanan vowed never to enter a studio again unless he could record his own music his own way. Four years later, Alligator Records coaxed Buchanan back into the studio.

His first album for Alligator, When a Guitar Plays the Blues, was released in the spring of 1985. It was the first time he had total artistic freedom in the studio. The album entered Billboard’s pop charts and remained on the charts for 13 weeks.  His second Alligator LP, Dancing on the Edge (with vocals on three tracks by Delbert McClinton), was released in the fall of 1986. The album also charted, on the Billboard album chart for 8 weeks. He released the twelfth and last album of his career, Hot Wires, in 1987.

Although playing a number of guitars, he was most often associated with a 1953 Fender Telecaster guitar nicknamed “Nancy”, the one he used to produce his trebly signature tone

But just as his career seemed to be on the upswing once more, tragedy struck on August 14, 1988, when Buchanan was picked up by police in Fairfax, VA, for public intoxication. Shortly after being arrested and placed in a holding cell, a policeman performed a routine check on Buchanan and was shocked to discover that he had hung himself in his cell. Buchanan’s stature as one of blues-rock’s all-time great guitarists grew even greater after his tragic death, resulting in such posthumous collections as Sweet Dreams: The Anthology, Guitar on Fire: The Atlantic Sessions, Deluxe Edition, and 20th Century Masters and the live When a Telecaster Plays the Blues, which appeared in 2009. He was 48 at the time of his death.

Buchanan has influenced many guitarists, including Gary Moore, Danny Gatton, Arlen Roth, and Jeff Beck. Beck dedicated his version of “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” from Blow by Blow to him. His work is said to “stretch the limits of the electric guitar,” and he is praised for “his subtlety of tone and the breadth of his knowledge, from the blackest of blues to moaning R&B and clean, concise, bone-deep rock ‘n’ roll.” Danny Gatton, who was also featured as “the World’s Greatest Unknown Guitar Player”, committed suicide in 1994.

In 2004, Guitar Player listed his version of “Sweet Dreams,” from his debut album on Polydor, Roy Buchanan, as having one of the “50 Greatest Tones of All Time.” In the same year, the readers of Guitar Player voted Buchanan #46 in a top 50 readers’ poll. Roy Buchanan is the subject of Freddy Blohm’s song “King of a Small Room.”

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Jaco Pastorius 9/1987

Jaco PastoriusSeptember 21, 1987 – John Francis Anthony Pastorius III aka Jaco Pastorius changed the way the bass was played. Born in Pennsylvania on December 1, 1951, Jaco’s family moved south and he grew up in Fort Lauderdale, where he first took on the drums. Being a direct descendant of poet Francis Daniel Pastorius, who drafted the first  protest against slavery in the US in 1688!, artistry ran in the family. His dad was a big band leader and singer.

During his formative years drums, like his dad, but a football injury made him move to bass. Upright bass at first but after his bass cracked because of the ocean front humidity in Florida he bought an electric bass. Continue reading Jaco Pastorius 9/1987

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Peter Tosh 9/1987

peter toshSeptember 11, 1987 – Winston Hubert McIntosh better known as Peter Tosh/Stepping Razor was a Jamaican guitarist and singer in the original Wailers of Bob Marley & the Wailers fame.  Born in Petersfield on October 19th 1944, he became a pioneer reggae musician, as the original guitarist for The Wailers and he is actaully considered as one of the originators of the choppy, syncopated reggae guitar style, and as trailblazer for the Rastafari movement and the fight to legalize cannabis.

He was a target for the police and underwent many beatings. In the early 60s Winston met Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer through his vocal teacher, Joe Higgs. Continue reading Peter Tosh 9/1987

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Big Mama Thornton 7/1984

July 25, 1984 – Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton was born on December 11, 1926 in Ariton, Alabama. She was introduced to music in a Baptist church, where her father was a minister and her mother a singer. She and her six siblings began to sing at early ages. Her mother died young, and Willie Mae left school and got a job washing and cleaning spittoons in a local tavern. In 1940 she left home and, with the help of Diamond Teeth Mary, joined Sammy Greens Hot Harlem Revue and was soon billed as the “New Bessie Smith”. Her musical education started in the church but continued through her observation of the rhythm-and-blues singers Bessie Smith and Memphis Minnie, whom she deeply admired.

Thornton’s career began to take off when she moved to Houston in 1948. “A new kind of popular blues was coming out of the clubs in Texas and Los Angeles, full of brass horns, jumpy rhythms, and wisecracking lyrics.” Continue reading Big Mama Thornton 7/1984

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Marvin Gaye 4/1984

Marvin GayeApril 1, 1984 – Marvin Pentz Gay was born April 2, 1939 in Washington, D.C., he later added the “e” due to childhood teasing and to appear more professional (akin to his childhood idol Sam Cooke’s addition of an “e”). His father , Reverend Marvin Gay, Sr., was an ordained minister in the House of God, a small, conservative sect spun off from the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
The church, borrowing some elements of Pentecostalism and Orthodox Judaism, has very strict codes of conduct and does not celebrate any holidays. Gaye got his start singing in the church choir and later learned to play the piano and drums to escape from his physically abusive father. Continue reading Marvin Gaye 4/1984

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Muddy Waters 4/1983

Muddy WatersApril 30, 1983 – Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield on April 4th 1913 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. He taught himself harmonica as a child. He later took up guitar, eagerly absorbing the classic delta blues styles of Robert Johnson and Son House and went on to become known as “the Father of Chicago blues”.

Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age seventeen was playing the guitar at parties, emulating local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson. His grandmother, Della Grant, raised him after his mother died shortly following his birth. Grant gave the boy the nickname “Muddy” at an early age, because he loved to play in the muddy water of nearby Deer Creek. He later changed it to “Muddy Water” and finally “Muddy Waters”. Continue reading Muddy Waters 4/1983

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Karen Carpenter 2/1983

karen carpenterFebruary 4, 1983 – Karen Carpenter was born in New Haven, Connecticut on March 2nd 1950. When she was young, she enjoyed playing baseball with other children on the street. On the TV program This Is Your Life, she stated that she liked pitching and later, in the early 1970s, she would become the pitcher on the Carpenters’ official softball team. Her brother Richard developed an interest in music at an early age, becoming a piano prodigy. The family moved in June 1963 to the Los Angeles suburb of Downey.

In 1964 when Carpenter entered Downey High School, she joined the school band. Bruce Gifford, the conductor (who had previously taught her older brother) gave her the glockenspiel, an instrument she disliked and after admiring the performance of her friend, Frankie Chavez (who idolized famous jazz drummer Buddy Rich), she asked if she could play the drums instead. Continue reading Karen Carpenter 2/1983

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Randy Rhoads 3/1982

Randy RhoadsMarch 19, 1982 – Randall “Randy” Rhoads (Quiet Riot/the Blizzard of Ozz) was born in Santa Monica, California on December 6, 1956.

Randy started taking guitar lessons around the age of 6 or 7 at a music school in North Hollywood called Musonia, which was owned by his mother. His first guitar was a Gibson (acoustic) that belonged to Delores Rhoads’ father. Randy and his sister (Kathy) both began folk guitar lessons at the same time with Randy later taking piano lessons (at his mother’s request) so that he could learn to read music. Randy’s piano lessons did not last very long. At the age of 12, Randy became interested in rock guitar. His mother, Delores, had an old semi-acoustic Harmony Rocket, that at that time was almost larger than he was. For almost a year Randy took lessons from Scott Shelly, a guitar teacher at his mother’s school. Scott Shelly eventually went to Randy’s mother explaining that he could not teach him anymore as Randy knew everything that he knew.

When Randy was about 14, he and his brother formed their first band, Violet Fox, named after his mother’s middle name, Violet. With Randy playing rhythm guitar and his brother Doug playing drums, Violet Fox were together about 4 to 5 months. Randy was in various other bands, such as “The Katzenjammer Kids” and “Mildred Pierce”, playing parties in the Burbank area before he formed Quiet Riot in 1976 with longtime friend and bassist Kelly Garni. Randy Rhoads and Kelly Garni (whom Randy taught to play bass guitar) met Kevin DuBrow through a mutual friend from Hollywood.

Around that same time Randy began teaching guitar in his mother’s school during the day and playing with Quiet Riot at night. Originally called “Little Women”, Quiet Riot were quickly becoming one of the biggest acts in the Los Angeles area and eventually obtained a recording contract with CBS/Sony records, releasing two full length l.p.’s and one e.p. in Japan.

Quiet Riots two records, Quiet Riot 1 (1978), which was originally recorded for an American record label,and Quiet Riot 2 (1979), received rave reviews in the Japanese press, claiming them to be the “next big thing”. Unfortunately these recordings were never released in the United States. While there were plans for Quiet Riot to tour Japan, their management turned down the offer and Quiet Riot stayed in the United States continuing to sell out college and high school auditoriums as well as clubs in the Los Angeles area. Randy was very into his look on stage. He would dress excentric, often wearing polka dotted outfits. He would also sit and draw his name in various designs. One of those now famous designs can be seen on Ozzy’s tribute album: the “RR” was Randy’s creation. About 5 months before Randy left Quiet Riot, he went to Karl Sandoval to have a custom guitar made. Several meetings and drawings later they would ultimately create a black and white polka-dot flying “V” guitar that would become synonymous with the name Randy Rhoads. The guitar would cost Randy $738 and was picked up by Randy on September 22,1979. (September 22, 1979 saw Quiet Riot playing at the “Whiskey a go-go” in Los Angeles, California,… so chances are, that was probably the first place he ever played that guitar in front of an audience.)

In late 1979, at the encouragement of a friend (Dana Strum), Randy went to audition for a band being put together by former Black Sabbath lead singer, Ozzy Osbourne. As the story goes: Ozzy had auditioned just about every guitarist in Los Angeles and was about to go home to England, the hopes of a new band washed away. Enter Randy Rhoads. Randy wasn’t completely interested in auditioning, he was happy with his current band and thought that this audition wouldn’t amount to much. Randy walked into Ozzy’s hotel room late one evening with a guitar and a small Fender practice amp, plugged in and started tuning his guitar and began to do a few warm up exercises. Ozzy was so impressed with his warm up that he instantly gave him the job as lead guitarist at the age of 22.

Ozzy began to assemble a band that would (ultimately) record his first two solo albums.

How the band was formed is a story within a story. There are a few variations:

A) With Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads, bassist Dana Strum (Slaughter), and drummer Frankie Bannalli (Quiet Riot, W.A.S.P.), the band began to rehearse in Los Angeles, California. However, when it came time to go to England, where Ozzy’s albums would be recorded, the record company could only obtain a work permit for one non-English band member, Randy Rhoads.

B) Drummer Lee Kerslake (who played on both of Ozzy’s solo albums) auditioned and got the position. A few weeks later while in England, Ozzy happened across Bob Daisley. Boasting about this guitar player he’d found, Ozzy convinced Bob to join his band. A few weeks later they began to rehearse for the first album in Los Angeles, California.

C) Ozzy already had a few band members when he met Bob Daisley, who would be the only one to continue on in the band. Randy Rhoads was added shortly thereafter. Lee Kerslake was the last member to join as well as the last drummer to audition. They rehearsed and wrote the first song in England before embarking on a UK tour towards the end of 1980.

Randy was whisked off to England shortly before Thanksgiving of 1979 where, at Ozzy’s home in England, they began to write the “Blizzard of Ozz” album and audition drummers. While the band rehearsed at John Henrys, a rehearsal hall in London, the earliest public performances of Randy Rhoads and Ozzy Osbourne came after they’d complete a song, then go to a local pub to play the song for whoever was there. They played under the name “Law”. One such song – Crazy Train, appeared to get the audience moving, leading them to believe that they “had something”. With ex-Uriah Heap members: Lee Kerslake (drums) and Bob Daisley (bass), the Ozzy Osbourne Band entered Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, England on March 22, 1980 and began recording for almost a month.

“Blizzard of Ozz” was originally to be mixed by Chris Tsangarides who was fired after one week because Ozzy felt that it “was not happening” with him. Max Norman, Ridge Farm Studio’s resident engineer, was then hired to pick up where Chris left off and would play an integral part of both Ozzy Osbourne studio albums and the live EP, as well as later down the road with “Tribute”. After the finishing touches had been put on “Blizzard of Ozz”, Randy Rhoads returned home to California in May of 1980, where he teamed up one last time with the members of Quiet Riot at the Starwood club in Hollywood for their final show. However, this would not be the last time he played with Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo, who would later join Ozzy Osbourne’s band just before the start of the United States Blizzard of Ozz tour. Once back in England, the Ozzy Osbourne Band surfaced for their first official show on September 12, 1980 when 4,000 fans broke the box office record at the Apollo Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland. “Blizzard of Ozz” went straight into the U.K. charts at number 7 as they toured around the United Kingdom for close to three months playing 34 shows. Sales of Blizzard of Ozz more than doubled with each U.K.town they played.

December of 1980 brought Randy Rhoads back home to California for Christmas. Once again Randy wanted a custom guitar built, this time he went to Grover Jackson of Charvel guitars, about a week before Christmas. With a drawing scribbled on a piece of paper, Randy Rhoads and Grover Jackson created the very first “Jackson” guitar to ever be made. Randy’s white flying V type guitar was yet another guitar that would become synonymous with the Rhoads name. The finished guitar was sent to Randy in England about two months later.

During the months of February and March of 1981, the Osbourne band once again entered Ridge Farm Studios to record their second album titled “Diary of a Madman”. With an impending U.S. tour to follow soon after the recording of “Diary”, the actual recording of the album became rushed. (Randy’s solo on “Little Dolls” was actually a scratch solo and was not intended to be the solo for the finished song.) None of the bandmembers could be present for the mixing of “Diary”, which only furthered their already mixed feelings of the album.

With “Diary of a Madman” already recorded but not yet released, the Osbourne Band began it’s North American tour in support of “Blizzard of Ozz”, beginning in Towson, Maryland on April 22, 1981. Though they did not play on either studio efforts, Tommy Aldrige (drums) and Rudy Sarzo (bass) joined Ozzy’s band in time for the North American tour. They toured across North America from May through September of ’81 playing songs from “Blizzard of Ozz” as well as “Diary of a Madman”, with a few Sabbath songs thrown in to close their shows.

Choosing to headline their tour instead of going on a bigger tour as a support act paid off as “Blizzard of Ozz” went gold (500,000 albums sold) in 100 days, though in some of the smaller cities in the United States, their shows were threatened to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales. In one such city, Providence, Rhode Island, the Ozzy Osbourne Band (along with opening act Def Leppard) was informed by the concerts promoter that (due to poor ticket sales) he did not have enough money to pay either band.

Towards the end of the United States “Blizzard of Ozz” tour, Randy once again went to Grover Jackson to have another custom guitar made. He complained that too many people thought his white Jackson was a flying-V. He wanted something more distinctive. A few weeks later, Randy and Kevin DuBrow went to look at the unfinished guitar that Grover Jackson had begun to work on. Once in the wood shop, Randy and Grover Jackson began drawing on this unfinished guitar for close to an hour before a final design was decided upon. Ultimately they came up with a variation of his white Jackson, only with a more defined look to the upper wing of the guitar. Randy would receive this guitar, the 2nd Jackson ever made, just before the start of the “Diary of a Madman”tour. At the time, there were three guitars being made for Randy. He received the first one, the black custom, as they continued to finish the other two.(Unfortunately, one of the two guitars, that were being built for Randy at the time of his death, was accidentally sold at an NAMM show by Grover Jackson.) The third guitar, which Jackson stopped working on at the time of Randy’s death, was later owned by Rob Lane of Jacksoncharvelworld.com.

Ironically, as with Quiet Riot, Randy Rhoads’ guitar playing would be heard on two full length albums and one EP, while in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. The “Mr. Crowley” EP featured live performances of three songs including “You said it all”, a song previously unreleased, recorded in October of 1980 in South Hampton, England, during the United Kingdom “Blizzard” tour. (‘You said it all’ was actually recorded during the band’s sound check, with the crowd noise added at the time of mixing.)

With the release of “Diary of a Madman”, Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads, Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldrige set off to Europe in November of 1981 for a tour that would end after only three shows. The tour had to be cancelled after Ozzy collapsed from both mental and physical exhaustion. The entire band went back to the United States so that Ozzy could rest. They would come back a little over a month later with a four month United States tour to start December 30, 1981 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco and a single (Flying High Again) that was making it’s way up the charts.

Traveling with a crew of approximately 25 Las Vegas and Broadway technicians, Randy Rhoads went from selling out Los Angeles area clubs with Quiet Riot to selling out the biggest arenas in the United States on one of the most elaborate stage sets with Ozzy Osbourne. When the “Diary” tour began, their first album, “Blizzard of Ozz” was selling at the rate of 6,000 records a week. Backstage opening night in San Francisco, Randy was awarded with Guitar Player Magazine’s Best New Talent Award. He would also later win best new guitarist in England’s Sounds magazine. With that, the band began an exhausting yet memorable tour that seemed to be plagued with problems. Their concerts were boycotted by many cities while others were attended by local S.P.C.A. officials due to claims of animal abuse. Meanwhile “Diary of a Madman” was well on it’s way to platinum status.

With all of this going on around him, Randy Rhoads’ interest for classical guitar was consuming him more each day. Often times Randy would have a classical guitar tutor in each city the band played. It became common knowledge that Randy wanted to quit rock and roll temporarily so that he could attend school to get his masters in classical guitar. Randy also wanted to take advantage of some of the studio session offers he was receiving. There is a rumor that Ozzy once punched him in the face to “knock some sense into him” (literally).

March 18, 1982, the Ozzy Osbourne band played what would be their last show with Randy Rhoads at the Civic Coliseum in Knoxville, Tennessee. From Knoxville, the band was headed to Orlando, Florida for Saturday’s Rock Super Bowl XIV with Foreigner, Bryan Adams and UFO. On the way to Orlando they were to pass by the home of bus driver Andrew C. Aycock, who lived in Leesburg, Florida, at Flying Baron Estates. Flying Baron Estates consisted of 3 houses with an aircraft hanger and a landing strip, owned by Jerry Calhoun, who along with being a country western musician in his earlier days, leased tour buses and kept them at the Estate. They needed some spare parts for the bus and Andrew Aycock, who had picked up his ex-wife at one of the bands shows, was going to drop her off in Florida.

The bus arrived at Flying Baron Estates in Leesburg at about 8:00 a.m. on the 19th and parked approximately 90 yards away from the landing strip and approximately 15 yards in front of the house that would later serve as the accident site. On the bus were: Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon Arden, Rudy Sarzo, Tommy Aldrige, Don Airey, Wanda Aycock, Andrew Aycock, Rachel Youngblood, Randy Rhoads and the bands tour manager. Andrew Aycock and his ex-wife, Wanda,went into Jerry Calhoun’s house to make some coffee while some members of Ozzy Osbourne’s band slept in the bus and others got out and stretched. Being stored inside of the aircraft hanger at Flying Baron Estates, was a red and white 1955 Beechcraft Bonanza F-35 (registration #: N567LT) that belonged to Mike Partin of Kissimmee, Florida. Andrew Aycock, who had driven the groups’ bus all night from Knoxville and who had a pilots license, apparently took the plane without permission and took keyboardist Don Airey and the band’s tour manager up in the plane for a few minutes, at times flying low to the ground. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Andrew Aycock’s medical certificate (3rd class) had expired, thus making his pilots license not valid.

Approximately 9:00 a.m. on the morning of March 19th, Andrew Aycock took Rachel Youngblood and Randy Rhoads up for a few minutes. During this trip the plane began to fly low to the ground, at times below tree level, and “buzzed” the band’s tour bus three times. On the fourth pass (banking to the left in a south-west direction) the planes left wing struck the left side of the bands tour bus (parked facing east) puncturing it in two places approximately halfway down on the right side of the bus. The plane, with the exception of the left wing, was thrown over the bus, hit a nearby pine tree, severing it approximately 10 feet up from the bottom, before it crashed into the garage on the west side of the home owned by Jerry Calhoun. The plane was an estimated 10 feet off the ground traveling at approximately 120 – 150 knots during impact.The house was almost immediately engulfed in flames and destroyed by the crash and ensuing fire, as was the garage and the two vehicles inside, an Oldsmobile and a Ford Granada. Jesse Herndon, who was inside the house during the impact, escaped with no injuries. The largest piece of the plane that was left was a wing section about 6 to 7 feet long. The very wing that caught the side of the tour bus, was deposited just to the north of the bus. The severed pine trees tood between the bus and the house.

Ozzy Osbourne, Tommy Aldrige, Rudy Sarzo and Sharon Arden, who were all asleep on the bus, were awoken by the planes impact and (at first) thought they had been involved in a traffic accident. Wanda Aycock had returned to the bus while keyboardist Don Airey stood outside and witnesses the accident, as did Marylee Morrison, who was riding her horse within sight of the estate. Two men, at the west end of the runway, witnessed the plane buzzing the area when the plane suddenly went out of sight as it crashed.

Once outside of the bus the band members learned of the catastrophic event that had just taken place. The bus was moved approximately 300 feet to the east of the house that was engulfed in flames. The band checked into the Hilco Inn in Leesburg where they mourned the death of Randy and Rachel and would wait for family members to arrive. While Orlando’s Rock Super Bowl XIV scheduled for later that day, was not canceled, the Ozzy Osbourne band would not play and the promoters offered refunds to all ticket holders.

Randy Rhoads died on March 19, 1982 at age 25 but Randy Rhoads’ guitar playing could not be silenced as “Tribute” was released in 1987. Tribute, recorded live, much of it in Cleveland, OH on May 11, 1981 and Randy’s solo in Montreal in July of 1981, continued to earn him recognition as a true guitar virtuoso.

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Bob Marley 5/1981

Bob MarleyMay 11, 1981 – Bob Nesta Marley – One of the world’s best-selling artists of all time with sales totaling to over 100 million albums and singles, Bob Marley is a true legend.  So much so that even 37 years after his death, his name recognition is higher than his landsman Usain Bolt, the three times Olympic Gold Medallist and fastest man in the world. (Bob was know to also be a very fast runner and great soccer player.)

The singer-songwriter, musician and guitarist achieved international fame starting out with his group the Wailers in 1963. The band lasted 11 years before disbanding and Marley began his solo career that gathered a quick following. He was known for infusing his spirituality into his hits like “No Woman, No Cry”, “Is This Love” and “Three Little Birds” to create true musical poetry. Continue reading Bob Marley 5/1981

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Mike Bloomfield 2/1981

Michael BloomfieldFeb 15, 1981 – Michael Bernard ‘Mike’ Bloomfield was born on July 28th, 1943, in Chicago, on the wrong side of the blues. His father, Harold, ran Bloomfield Industries, a successful restaurant-supply firm. The older of two sons, Michael rebelled against school, discipline and his family’s wealth, seeking solace and purpose in the music coming from the city’s black neighborhoods on the South and West sides.
A grandfather, Max, owned a pawnshop, and Bloomfield got his first guitar there. Born left-handed, he forced himself to play the other way around. “That’s how strong-willed he was,” says Goldberg. “When he loved something so much, he just did it.”
Hanging out at the pawnshop, Bloomfield also “got a certain empathy, for people on the skids, on the down and out, looking for $5,” Gravenites says. “He got to know that kind of life.Continue reading Mike Bloomfield 2/1981

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Bill Haley 2/1981

bill-haleyFebruary 9, 1981 – Bill Haley was born on July 6th 1925. He was born in Highland Park, Michigan, but because of the Great Depression on the Detroit area, his father moved the family to Boothwyn, Pennsylvania. For six years Bill was a musical director of Radio Station WPWA in Chester, Pennsylvania, leading his own band The Saddlemen all through this period and in 1951 they made their first recordings. They renamed themselves Bill Haley with Haley’s Comets on Labour Day 1952.

Bill Haley and his Comets were there before Presley, Holly and Berry, playing rock & roll before it even had a name, and is credited by many for being the first popularizing this form of music in the early 1950s. Their hit song “Rock Around the Clock”, which was propelled by the movie Blackboard Jungle to global recognition, went around the world for many decades. Continue reading Bill Haley 2/1981

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John Lennon 12/1980

LennonDecember 8, 1980 – John Winston Lennon was born on October 9, 1940 at Liverpool’s Oxford Hospital. His father Alfred abandoned him and his mother Julia when John was three years old. Shortly thereafter, Julia gave up custody of John to her sister Mimi and her husband George, who then would raise him. As he entered his teens it became clear that John had a higher intellect than others his age. He hated school but was part of the school’s newspaper staff and he would contribute to it with his own illustrated short stories. Those short stories showed off just some of his emerging talent.

He also had a love for music. As a child he had learned how to play the harmonica from his Uncle George. In the early ’50s, the new sound of rock ‘n roll was taking over and he decided he wanted to be a part of it. After talking his Aunt Mimi into buying him a guitar, John taught himself how to play it after applying the banjo chords his mother had previously showed him. His interest in the guitar took over everything else in his life. In 1955, at the age of 15, he formed his own band and called them The Quarryman, named after the school he attended. It was in this band that he would meet Paul McCartney and George Harrison and the Beatles would form from it. Continue reading John Lennon 12/1980

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John Bonham 9/1980

John BonhamSeptember 25, 1980 – John Henry “Bonzo, The Beast” Bonham was a natural phenomenon on the drums. All the accolades surrounding this man’s drumming point at one thing: He was and probably forever will be the best rock drummer of all time. Hard to accept that Vodka killed him; well 40 shots of the stuff made him vomit and then choke and did not only end his life, but also the best Rock Band that ever existed: Led Zeppelin.

Born in Redditch, UK on May 31, 1948, he started to learn drumming at the age of 5 and in 1964, he joined his first semi-professional band, Terry Webb and the Spiders. He also played in other Birmingham bands, The Nicky James Movement and The Senators, who released a fairly successful single “She’s a Mod,” in 1964. John then took up drumming full-time. Two years later, he joined A Way of Life, before he joined a blues group called Crawling King Snakes, whose lead singer was a young Robert Plant. Continue reading John Bonham 9/1980

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Bon Scott 2/1980

bon scottFebruary 19, 1980 – Bon Scott was born July 9, 1946 in Kirriemuir, Scotland, and moved to Melbourne, Australia with his family in 1952 at the age of six. In 1956, the family moved to Fremantle, Western Australia, and Scott joined the associated Fremantle Scots Pipe Band, learning the drums. Scott attended North Fremantle Primary School and later John Curtin College of the Arts until he dropped out at the age of 15 and spent a short time in Fremantle Prison’s assessment centre and nine months at the Riverbank Juvenile Institution relating to charges of giving a false name and address to the police, having escaped legal custody, having unlawful carnal knowledge and stealing twelve gallons of petrol.

He attempted to join the Australian Army, but was rejected for being deemed “socially maladjusted.”

Scott’s vocals were inspired by his idol, Little Richard. After working as a postman, bartender and truck packer, Scott started his first band, The Spektors, in 1966 as drummer and occasional lead singer. One year later the Spektors merged with another local band, the Winstons, and formed The Valentines, in which Scott was co-lead singer with Vince Lovegrove. The Valentines recorded several songs written by George Young of The Easybeats. “Every Day I Have to Cry” (a song originally written and sung by Arthur Alexander) made the local top 5. In 1970, after gaining a place on the National Top 30 with their single “Juliette”, the Valentines disbanded due to artistic differences after a much-publicized drug scandal.

Scott moved to Adelaide in 1970 and joined the progressive rock band Fraternity. Fraternity released Livestock and Flaming Galah before touring the UK in 1973, where they changed their name to “Fang”. During this time they played support slots for Status Quo and Geordie. During this time, on 24 January 1972, Scott married Irene Thornton.

In 1973, just after returning to Australia from the tour of the UK, Fraternity went on hiatus. Scott took a day job at the Wallaroo fertiliser plant and began singing with the Mount Lofty Rangers, a loose collective of musicians helmed by Peter Head (né Beagley) from Headband, who explained, “Headband and Fraternity were in the same management stable and we both split about the same time so the logical thing was to take members from both bands and create a new one … the purpose of the band was for songwriters to relate to each other and experiment with songs, so it was a hotbed of creativity”. Other ex-Fraternity members also played with the band as did Glen Shorrock pre-Little River Band. During this time, Head also helped Scott with his original compositions.

Vince Lovegrove said “Bon would go to Peter’s home after a day (of literally) shovelling shit, and show him musical ideas he had had during his day’s work. Bon’s knowledge of the guitar was limited, so Peter began teaching him how to bridge chords and construct a song. One of the songs from these sessions was a ballad called “Clarissa”, about a local Adelaide girl. Another was the country-tinged Bin Up in the Hills Too Long, which for me was a sign of things to come with Bon’s lyrics; simple, clever, sardonic, tongue-in-cheek …

“About 11 pm on 3 May 1974, at the Old Lion Hotel in North Adelaide, during a rehearsal with the Mount Lofty Rangers, a very drunk, distressed and belligerent Bon Scott had a raging argument with a member of the band. Bon stormed out of the venue, threw a bottle of Jack Daniels on to the ground, then screamed off on his Suzuki 550 motorbike.” Scott suffered serious injuries from the ensuing motorcycle accident, spending three days in a coma and a further 18 days in the hospital. Vince Lovegrove and his wife, by then running a booking/management agency, gave Scott odd jobs, such as putting up posters and painting the office during his recovery, and shortly after introduced him to AC/DC who were on the lookout for a new lead singer.

“There was a young, dinky little glam band from Sydney that we both loved called AC/DC … Before another AC/DC visit, George Young phoned me and said the band was looking for a new singer. I immediately told him that the best guy for the job was Bon. George responded by saying Bon’s accident would not allow him to perform, and that maybe he was too old. Nevertheless I had a meeting with Malcolm and Angus, and suggested Bon as their new singer. They asked me to bring him out to the Pooraka Hotel that night, and to come backstage after the show. When he watched the band, Bon was impressed, and he immediately wanted to join them, but thought they may be a bit too inexperienced and too young. After the show, backstage, Bon expressed his doubts about them being “able to rock”. The two Young brothers told Bon he was “too old to rock”. The upshot was that they had a jam session that night in the home of Bon’s former mentor, Bruce Howe, and at the end of the session, at dawn, it was obvious that AC/DC had found a new singer. And Bon had found a new band.”

Bon replaced Dave Evans as the lead singer of AC/DC in September 1974, he performed on AC/DC’s first 7 albums from High Voltage in 1975 to Highway to Hell released in 1979. It became AC/DC’s first LP to break the U.S. top 100, eventually reaching #17, and it propelled AC/DC into the top ranks of hard rock acts.

During rehearsing sessions in London for the album “BLACK ON BLACK, Scott passed out after a night of heavy drinking in a London club called the Music Machine (later known as the KOKO). He was left to sleep in a Renault 5 owned by an acquaintance, who found him the next afternoon lifeless.

Bon Scott died on 19 February 1980 at age 33. Although there are many conspiracy theories surrounding his death, mostly based on inconsistent reporting, the coroner’s report stated that he had “drunk himself to death”, suffocating on his own vomit. The official cause was listed as “acute alcohol poisoning” and “death by misadventure”.

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Lowell George 6/1979

Lowell GeorgeJune 29, 1979 – Lowell Thomas George (Little Feat) was born on April 13th 1945 in Hollywood, California, the son of Willard H. George, a furrier who raised chinchillas and supplied furs to the movie studios.

George’s first instrument was the harmonica. At the age of six he appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour performing a duet with his older brother, Hampton. As a student at Hollywood High School (where he befriended future bandmate Paul Barrere as well as future wife Elizabeth), he took up the flute in the school marching band and orchestra. He had already started to play Hampton’s acoustic guitar at age 11, progressed to the electric guitar by his high school years, and later learned to play the saxophone, shakuhachi and sitar. During this period, George viewed the teen idol-oriented rock and roll of the era with contempt, instead favoring West Coast jazz and the soul jazz of Les McCann & Mose Allison. Following graduation in 1963, he briefly worked at a gas station (an experience that inspired such later songs as “Willin'”) to support himself while studying art and art history at Los Angeles Valley College for two years. Continue reading Lowell George 6/1979

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Jacques Brel 10/1978

JACQUES BRELOctober 9, 1978 – Jacques Brel was born on April 8th 1929 near Brussels Belgium. He composed and recorded his songs almost exclusively in French, although he recorded a number of songs in Dutch, which was his original mother’s tongue. His father Romain Brel as well as his mother Mouky Lambertine Vanneste, both have Flemish roots, anchored in the west Flemish town of Zandvoorde, where his great grandfather was even mayor. His dual identity has majorly ruled his artistic life and trying to find some kind of balance between his Flemish birth environment versus his French raising, comes throughin many of his beautiful , but complex chansons.

Brel’s songs (poems actually) are not especially well known in the English-speaking world except in translation and through the interpretations of other singers, maybe most famously Scott Walker and Judy Collins. The range of superstars who however have covered his work, is other worldly. Much as a reminder how Leonard Cohen‘s epic Hallelujah is covered by dozens of other stars.

Others who have sung his work in English include Karen Akers, Marc Almond, Momus/Nick Currie, Beirut, Bellowhead, David Bowie, Ray Charles, John Denver, The Dresden Dolls, Gavin Friday, Alex Harvey, Terry Jacks, Alan Clayson, Barb Jungr, The Kingston Trio, Jack Lukeman, Amanda McBroom, Rod McKuen, Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Spencer Moody, Camille O’Sullivan, Dax Riggs, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Laurika Rauch and Dave Van Ronk. Continue reading Jacques Brel 10/1978

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Keith Moon 9/1978

Keith MoonSeptember 7, 1978 – Keith Moon. Keith John Moon was born to working class parents in Wembley, London, England, on the 23rd August, 1946. At the age of 12, he had joined the Sea Cadet Corp and was given his first musical instrument, the bugle. He left school by 15 and was in his first band, The Beachcombers; this was around the summer of 1963. There was rumour that Keith was self-taught, but history says otherwise, he was shown how to play by the late Carlo Little (1938-2005), Carlo was the original drummer in The Rolling Stones and David Sutch’s band, The Savages.

By the age of 18, he had joined a local London band, The High Numbers; this was to consist of what is now known as The Who.

With his own unique style of drumming, rolling the sticks along the skins as to banging the typical beat, he was to become extrovertly charismatic in his life as well as his playing. He was one of the first to play drums as a lead instrument in an era when drums were supposed only to keep the back beat. With a desire, more of an obsession, to be the center of attention, this hyperactive, and largely, self destructive personality became his own worst enemy.
With a flair for theatrical and ridiculous behavior, he was the center point and self-publicist for, like it or not, The Who. Continue reading Keith Moon 9/1978

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Terry Kath 1/1978

Terry KathJanuary 23, 1978 – Jan Terry Alan Kath was Jimi Hendrix favorite guitar player. Born on January 31, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, he became best known as the original guitarist, co-lead singer and founding member of the rock band Chicago. He has been praised by the band for his guitar skills and Ray Charles-influenced vocal style.

Growing up in a musical family, Kath took up a variety of instruments in his teens, including the drums and banjo. He acquired a guitar and amplifier when he was in the ninth grade, and his early influences included the Ventures, Dick Dale and Howard Roberts. He later became influenced by George Benson, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. He played bass in a number of bands in the mid-1960s, before settling on the guitar when forming the group that would become Chicago. Unlike several other Chicago members who received formal music training, Kath was mostly self-taught and enjoyed jamming. In a 1971 interview for Guitar Player, he said he had tried professional lessons but abandoned them, adding “all I wanted to do was play those rock and roll chords”.

Continue reading Terry Kath 1/1978

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Ronnie Van Zant 10/1977

ronnie-van-zantOctober 20, 1977 – Ronald Wayne “Ronnie” Van Zant was born on January 15, 1948 in West Jacksonville, Florida. As a member of a very musical family, brother Donnie became frontman for 38 Special, another Jacksonville based band and youngest brother Johnny took Roonie’s shoes and hat when Lynyrd Skynyrd reformed in 1987.

Ronnie however was the nucleus founding member and frontman of the Southern rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd that formed in 1964.

Friends and schoolmates Allen Collins, Gary Rossington, Larry Junstrom, and Bob Burns made up the original band. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s name was inspired by a gym teacher the boys had in high school, Leonard Skinner, who disapproved of students with long hair.

Their fan base grow rapidly throughout 1973, mainly due to their opening slot on The Who’s Quadrophenia tour in the United States. Their debut self titled album produced the hit Freebird, the track achieved the No. 3 spot on Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Guitar Solos. Continue reading Ronnie Van Zant 10/1977

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Marc Bolan 9/1977

Marc Bolan16 September 1977 – Marc Bolan, born Mark Feld on September 30, 1947, became the well-known singer/songwriter, poet and guitarist frontman of T. Rex or Tyrannosaurus Rex, a 1970s glam rock band. He was killed in an automobile crash in 1977 a mere two weeks before his 30th birthday.

Marc Bolan looked like a rock star. And he usually sang about the usual rock-star things in his songs with T. Rex. He inspired a whole legion of glitter-wearing fans to follow his every word. And on the 1972 single ‘Solid Gold Easy Action,’ he seemed to have a knack for predicting the future — even foreshadowing his own demise five years later.

Look no further than the opening line of ‘Solid Gold Easy Action,’ a single-only release that eventually showed up on the same year’s ‘Great Hits’ compilation. ”Life is the same and it always will be / Easy as picking foxes from a tree,” Bolan sings as typically glammy guitars spill out a riff.

Turns out that the license plate on the car that Bolan was killed in on Sept. 16, 1977, was “FOX 661L.” And oh yeah, it was wrapped around a tree.

A famous quote: “I feel there is a curse on rock stars”

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Elvis Presley 8/1977

elvisAugust 16, 1977 – Elvis Aaron Presley, more commonly known as “The King of Rock and Roll,”  is arguably the single most important figure in the global spreading of American 20th century popular music. Besides pop and rock ‘n roll, he brought the blues, black music and gospel to the world. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8, 1935, he made his first public performance on October 3rd 1945, in a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, dressed as a cowboy. Elvis had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone and sang Red Foley’s “Old Shep.” He came in fifth, winning $5 and a free ticket to all the Fair rides.

He began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and R&B with a strong back beat. Continue reading Elvis Presley 8/1977

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Freddie King 12/1976

Freddie KingDecember 29, 1976 – Freddie King was born September 3, 1934 in Gilmer, Texas. His mother told him that her father (who was a full-blooded Choctaw Indian) prophesied to her that she would have a child that will stir the souls of millions and inspire and influence generations. So she mother and his uncle Leon began teaching him to play guitar at the age of six.

His first guitar was a Silvertone acoustic. His most prized guitar at that time was his Roy Roger acoustic. In a interview years later he recalled going to the general store to order it. The store owner asked him if his mother knew he was trying to order a guitar on her store account. Freddie replied ” no”. The store owner told him to get permission. His mother said “no”. She told him, “if you want a new guitar you will have to work for it.” He stated that he picked cotton just long enough to earn the money to purchase a Roger’s guitar. Continue reading Freddie King 12/1976

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Jimmy Reed 8/1976

Jimmy Reed, blues greatAugust 29, 1976 – Mathis Jimmy Reed was born on September 6, 1925 on a plantation in or around the small burg of Dunleith, Mississippi. He stayed around the area until he was 15, learning the basic rudiments of harmonica and guitar from his buddy Eddie Taylor, who was then making a name for himself as a semi-pro musician, working country suppers and juke joints.

Reed moved up to Chicago in 1943, but was quickly drafted into the Navy where he served for two years. After a quick trip back to Mississippi and marriage to his beloved wife Mary (known to blues fans as “Mama Reed”), he relocated to Gary, Indiana, and found work at an Armour Foods meat packing plant while simultaneously breaking into the burgeoning blues scene around Gary and neighboring Chicago. Continue reading Jimmy Reed 8/1976

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Howlin’ Wolf 1/1976

Howlin' WolfJanuary 10, 1976 – Howlin’ Wolf  was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910 in White Station, Mississippi, near West Point. He was named Chester Arthur Burnett, after Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States. His physique garnered him the nicknames of Big Foot Chester and Bull Cow as a young man: he was 6 feet 3 inches (191 cm) tall and often weighed close to 275 pounds (125 kg). He explained the origin of the name Howlin’ Wolf: “I got that from my grandfather”, who would often tell him stories about the wolves in that part of the country and warn him that if he misbehaved then the “howling wolves would get him”. Burnett once claimed to have been given his nickname by his idol Jimmie Rodgers. Continue reading Howlin’ Wolf 1/1976

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T-Bone Walker 3/1975

T-Bone WalkerMarch 16, 1975 – T-Bone Walker was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker on May 28, 1910 in Linden, Texas. American blues guitarist, pianist and singer/ songwriter.

In the early 1920s, as a teenager learned his craft amongst the street-strolling stringbands of Dallas. Walker’s parents were both musicians. His stepfather, Marco Washington, taught him to play the guitar, ukulele, banjo, violin, mandolin, and piano.

Walker left school at the age of 10, and by 15 he was a professional performer on the blues circuit. Initially, he was Blind Lemon Jefferson’s protégé and would guide him around town for his gigs and by 1929, Walker made his recording debut with Columbia Records billed as Oak Cliff T-Bone, releasing the single “Wichita Falls Blues”/”Trinity River Blues”.  Continue reading T-Bone Walker 3/1975

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Mama Cass 7/1974

July 29, 1974 – Mama Cass aka Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen on September 19th 1941 in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up in the Washington D.C. environs and in her senior year of high school, she performed in a summer stock production of “The Boyfriend” at the Owings Mills Playhouse where she played the French nurse who sings “It’s Nicer, Much Nicer in Nice.” After this experience, even though her family anticipated her to seek a college education in pursuit of a career, Cass forged ahead in the world of performance.

“Elliot adopted the name “Cass” in high school, possibly borrowing it from actress Peggy Cass, as Denny Doherty tells it. She assumed the surname Elliot some time later, in memory of a friend who had died. Elliot attended George Washington High School, along with Jim Morrison of The Doors.
While still attending George Washington High School, Elliot became interested in acting and was cast in a school production of the play The Boy Friend. She left high school shortly before graduation and moved to New York City to further her acting career (as recounted in the lyrics to “Creeque Alley, a nightclub in Charlotte Amalie-St.Thomas Virgin Islands waterfront alley“).

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Sister Rosetta Tharpe 10/1973

sister Rosetta Tharpe, the first heroine of rock and rollSister Rosetta Tharpe 10/1973 (58) was born Rosetta Nubin, on March 20, 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas from parents who were cotton pickers. Little is known of her father except that he was a singer. Tharpe’s mother Katie was also a singer and a mandolin player, deaconess-missionary, and women’s speaker for the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which was founded in 1897 by Charles Harrison Mason, a black Pentecostal bishop, who encouraged rhythmic musical expression, dancing in praise and allowing women to sing and teach in church. Encouraged by her mother, Tharpe began singing and playing the guitar as Little Rosetta Nubin at the age of six and was soon cited as a musical prodigy.Tharpe’s father was not involved in her life; even so, her mother’s influence alone set Tharpe on the path of becoming a performer. Tharpe and her mother continued to perform together throughout the 1930s.

About 1921, at age six, Tharpe had joined her mother as a regular performer in a traveling evangelical troupe. Billed as a “singing and guitar playing miracle,” she accompanied her mother in performances that were part sermon and part gospel concert before audiences across the American South. In the mid-1920s, Tharpe and her mother settled in Chicago, Illinois, where they performed religious concerts at the Roberts Temple COGIC on 40th Street, occasionally traveling to perform at church conventions throughout the country. Tharpe developed considerable fame as a musical prodigy, standing out in an era when prominent black female guitarists were rare. At age 19, she married Thomas Thorpe, a preacher, who accompanied her and her mother on many of their tours. The marriage lasted only a few years, but she decided to adopt a version of her husband’s surname as her stage name, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In 1938, she left her husband and moved with her mother to New York City. Although she married several times, she performed as Rosetta Tharpe for the rest of her life. Continue reading Sister Rosetta Tharpe 10/1973

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Duane Allman 10/1971

duane allmanOctober 29, 1971  – Duane “Skydog” Allman was born November 20th 1946 in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1960, Duane was motivated to take up the guitar by the example of his younger brother, Gregg. In the twelve years that followed until his sadly untimely passing, he left a great body of work and a legacy as one of the best rock guitar players ever.

He and his brother Gregg played in several bands while in school before forming the Escorts which eventually became the Allman Joys. In 1965, the Allman Joys went on the road, performing throughout the Southeast and eventually based themselves in Nashville and St. Louis.

After a short stint with The Hour Glass, he was hired by FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1966 when he was just 19, to play on Wilson Pickett’s Hey Jude album. Continue reading Duane Allman 10/1971

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Louis Armstrong 7/1971

July 6, 1971 – Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong  was officially born on August 4, 1901 in New Orleans, Louisiana, eleven months later than he claimed.

Armstrong often stated that he was born on July 4, 1900, a date that has been noted in many biographies. Although he died in 1971, it was not until the mid-1980s that his true birth date of August 4, 1901 was discovered by researcher Tad Jones through the examination of baptismal records.
Armstrong was born into a poor family in New Orleans, Louisiana, and was the grandson of slaves. He spent his youth in poverty, in a rough neighborhood known as “the Battlefield”, which was part of the Storyville legal prostitution district. His father, William Armstrong (1881–1933), abandoned the family when Louis was an infant and took up with another woman. His mother, Mary “Mayann” Albert (1886–1927), then left Louis and his younger sister, Beatrice Armstrong Collins (1903–1987), in the care of his grandmother, Josephine Armstrong, and at times, his Uncle Isaac. At five, he moved back to live with his mother, her relatives and a parade of “step-fathers”. Continue reading Louis Armstrong 7/1971

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Janis Joplin 10/1970

Janis Joplin in SanFranOctober 4, 1970 – Janis Lyn Joplin was truly one of the most remarkable rock and blues performers of the 1960s and the decades following. Born in Port Arthur Texas, on January 19, 1943, she escaped the small town prejudices and took off for the San Francisco counter culture, dominated by Love and Peace and Alcohol and Drugs. Janis unfortunately became a member of the infamous forever 27 Club as she passed on October 4, 1970, just a short 3 weeks after her brief former love interest and famous 27 Club member Jimi Hendrix. She was no. 4 to join the club after Robert Johnson, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix.

Her Texas upbringing put Joplin under the sway of Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and Big Mama Thornton in her teens, and the authenticity of these voices strongly influenced her decision to become a singer. A self-described “misfit” in high school, she suffered virtual ostracism, but dabbled in folk music with her friends and painted. She briefly attended college in Beaumont and Austin but was more drawn to blues legends and beat poetry than her studies; soon she dropped out and, in 1963, headed for San Francisco, eventually finding herself in the hippie filled Haight Ashbury neighborhood. She met up with guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (later of the legendary San Francisco rock outfit Jefferson Airplane) and the pair recorded a suite of songs with Jorma’s wife, Margareta, providing the beat on her typewriter. These tracks – including blues standards like “Trouble in Mind” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” – would later surface as the infamous “Typewriter Tapes” bootleg. Continue reading Janis Joplin 10/1970

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Jimi Hendrix 9/1970

jimi-hendrix-1September 18, 1970 – James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, was born Johnny Allen Hendrix on November 27, 1942 and became without discussion one of the top electric guitarists Rock and Roll has produced.

As his mainstream career spanned roughly only 4 years, something can be said for the fact that he was the right man at the right time and in the right place in the socio-cultural explosion of the late 1960s.
His early sixties performing career consisted mostly of the chitlin’ circuit between Clarksville and Nashville in Eastern Tennessee, backing start-ups like Little Richard, Curtis Knight, Wilson Pickett, Slim Harpo, Sam Cooke and even an occasional gig with Roy Orbison. Early 1964 he found himself in the New York Village scene, where his girlfriend Faye got him a number of introductions, one of which got him to play with the Isley Brothers Band. His big break however came in a round about way, when he made it over to London, where he bedazzled the blues rock scene led by the then Superstars likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page and became an overnight success. Continue reading Jimi Hendrix 9/1970

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Jim Morrison 7/1970

Jim MorrisonJuly 3, 1971 – Jim Morrison was born James Douglas “Jim” Morrison on December 8, 1943 in Melbourne, Florida

Paris, France. July 2, 1971, early evening. Jim Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela Courson went to the cinema to see Pursued, a western starring Robert Mitchum. At another theater, Jim Morrison sat alone, watching a documentary called Death Valley. Across town, at the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus nightclub, Jim Morrison scored some heroin and OD’d in the bathroom. At the same time, Jim Morrison walked the streets of Paris and shot up with some junkies on skid row. Meanwhile, at Orly Airport, Jim Morrison boarded a plane for an unknown destination.

No one knows for sure where the 27-year-old Jim was or what he did that evening, but by the next morning, one thing was certain: He was dead. Continue reading Jim Morrison 7/1970

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Brian Jones 7/1969

brian-jones-with-mick-jaggerJuly 3, 1969 – Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones (Rolling Stones) was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England on 28 February 1942. An attack of croup at the age of four left him with asthma, which lasted for the rest of his life. His middle-class parents, Lewis Blount Jones and Louisa Beatrice Jones (née Simmonds) were of Welsh descent. Brian had two sisters: Pamela, who was born on 3 October 1943 and died on 14 October 1945 of leukemia; and Barbara, born on 22 August 1946.

Both Jones’s parents were interested in music: his mother Louisa was a piano teacher, and in addition to his job as an aeronautical engineer, Lewis Jones played piano and organ and led the choir at the local church.

In 1957 Jones first heard Cannonball Adderley’s music, which inspired his interest in jazz. Jones persuaded his parents to buy him a saxophone, and two years later his parents gave him his first acoustic guitar as a 17th birthday present. Continue reading Brian Jones 7/1969

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Otis Redding 12/1967

Otis ReddingDecember 10, 1967 – Otis Redding was born on Sept 9, 1941 in Dawson, Ga., Otis Redding, Jr. and his family moved to Macon when he was five years old. At an early age he began his career as a singer and musician in the choir of the Vineville Baptist Church. Otis attended Ballard Hudson High School and participated in the school band. He began to compete in the Douglass Theatre talent shows for the five-dollar prize. After winning 15 times straight, he was no longer allowed to compete.

Otis joined Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers in 1960, and would also sing at the “Teenage Party” talent shows sponsored by local celebrity disc jockey King Bee, Hamp Swain, on Saturday mornings initially at the Roxy Theater and later at the Douglass Theatre in Macon.

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Woody Guthrie 10/1967

Woody GuthrieOctober 1, 1967 – Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie was born on July 14 1912. American singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical legacy includes 100s of political, traditional and children’s songs, ballads and improvised works. He frequently performed with the slogan This Machine Kills Fascists displayed on his guitar.

His best-known song is “This Land Is Your Land”, which is regularly sung in American schools. Many of his recorded songs are archived in the Library of Congress. Such songwriters as Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton have acknowledged their debt to Woody as an influence. Continue reading Woody Guthrie 10/1967

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Nat King Cole 2/1965

Nat King ColeFebruary 15, 1965 – Nat King Cole was born Nathaniel Adams Coles on March 17, 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama.  Cole had three brothers: Eddie, Ike, and Freddy and a half-sister, Joyce Coles. Each of Cole’s brothers would later pursue careers in music as well. When Cole was four years old, he and his family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where his father, Edward Coles, became a Baptist minister. Cole learned to play the organ from his mother, Perlina Coles, the church organist. His first performance was of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” at age four. He began formal lessons at 12, eventually learning not only jazz and gospel music, but also Western classical music, performing, as he said, “from Johann Sebastian Bach to Sergei Rachmaninoff”. Continue reading Nat King Cole 2/1965

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Alan Freed 1/1965

Alan FreedJanuary 20, 1965 – Alan Freed also known as Moondog, was born on December 15, 1921 in Windber, Pennsylvania, commonly referred to as the “father of rock and roll”, became internationally known for promoting African-American R & B music on the radio in the USA and Europe under the name of Rock and Roll. That is why his inclusion into Rock and Roll Paradise.

In 1933, Freed’s family moved to Salem, Ohio where Freed attended Salem High School, graduating in 1940. While Freed was in high school, he formed a band called the Sultans of Swing in which he played the trombone. Freed’s initial ambition was to be a bandleader; however, an ear infection put an end to this dream.

The Origins of the Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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Sam Cooke 12/1964

sam-cookeDecember 11, 1964 – Sam Cooke was born on January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale Mississippi. He was the son of Reverend Charles Cook, Sr., (a Baptist minister) and Annie May Cook was born January 22, 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1933. He had four brothers and three sisters – Willie, Charles Jr., L.C., David, Mary, Hattie and Agnes. Sam graduated from Wendell Phillips High School in 1948, where he distinguished himself as an “A” student as well as being voted “most likely to succeed.” During his formative years, Sam, together with his brothers Charles Jr., L.C. and sisters Mary and Hattie, performed as a gospel group “The Singing Children.” At the age of 15, Sam became lead singer of the famous “teenage” gospel group the “Highway QC’s” until he was 19 when he was hand-picked by Roy (S.R.) Crain, manager of the “Soul Stirrers,” to replace the legendary R.H. Harris as lead singer. Continue reading Sam Cooke 12/1964

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Edith Piaf 10/1963

Edith PiafOctober 11, 1963 – Édith Piaf born Edith Giovanni Gassion on Dec 19, 1915 became a legendary French singer and actress; one of the most popular French singers of the 1940s and ’50s, famous internationally for her husky, mournful voice and her songs of loneliness and despair.

At aged 14, she joined her father in his acrobatic street performances all over France, where she first sang in public, before going it alone as a street singer at the age of 16.

In 1935 she was discovered in the Pigalle area of Paris by nightclub owner Louis Leplée, whose club Le Gerny off the Champs-Élysées was frequented by the upper and lower classes alike. Louis taught her stage presense and nicknamed her La Môme Piaf …The Waif Sparrow or Little Sparrow as she was only 4ft 8in tall. Continue reading Edith Piaf 10/1963

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Patsy Cline 3/1963

Patsy ClineMarch 5, 1963 – Patsy Cline was born Virginia Patterson Hensley on September 8th 1932 in Gore Virginia. Her parents, forty-three-year-old Samuel Lawrence Hensley, a blacksmith, and his second wife, sixteen-year-old Hilda Virginia Patterson Hensley, had married six days before the birth. Until 1937 Hensley lived on her paternal grandparents’ farm near Elkton and with her maternal grandparents in Gore, just outside Winchester in Frederick County. The Hensley family moved nineteen times in sixteen years to various towns in the Shenandoah Valley, including Lexington, and during World War II to Portsmouth.

Patsy had been introduced to music at an early age, singing in church with her mother. She liked stars such as Kay Starr, Jo Stafford, Hank Williams, Judy Garland, and Shirley Temple. She also as it turned out had perfect pitch. Self-taught, she could not read music. Continue reading Patsy Cline 3/1963

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Eddie Cochran 4/1960

Eddie_CochranApril 17, 1960 – Eddie Cochran was born on October 3rd 1938 in Minnesota but moved with his family to California in the early 1950s. He was involved with music from an early age, playing in the school band and teaching himself to play blues guitar. In 1954, he formed a duet with the guitarist Hank Cochran (no relation), and when they split the following year, Eddie began a song-writing career with Jerry Capehart. His first success came when he performed the song “Twenty Flight Rock” which also later came out in the film The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield. Soon afterwards, Liberty Records signed him to a big recording contract. Like so many of his contemporaries like Elvis and Ricky Nelson, his music career ran parallel with a budding movie career.

His songs have influenced bands and artists such as The Who, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Tom Petty, The Stray Cats, Motörhead, Rod Stewart, Humble Pie, Lemmy Kilmister, T. Rex, The White Stripes, Brian Setzer, Cliff Richard, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, UFO, The Sex Pistols and many more. Continue reading Eddie Cochran 4/1960

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Billie Holiday 7/1959

Billy Holiday -44- drug overdoseJuly 17, 1959 – Billie Holiday was born Eleanora Fagan Goughy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The singer also nicknamed ‘Lady Day’ by her musical partner Lester Day, was a JAZZ/BLUES/SOUL POWERHOUSE, who collapsed at age 44, under her own virtuosity fed by an uncontrollable urge for alcohol and drugs.

Holiday spent much of her childhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie, was only a teenager when she had her. Her father is widely believed to be Clarence Holiday, who eventually became a successful jazz musician, playing with the likes of Fletcher Henderson. Unfortunately for Billie, he was only an infrequent visitor in her life growing up. Sadie married Philip Gough in 1920 and for a few years Billie had a somewhat stable home life. But that marriage ended a few years later, leaving Billie and Sadie to struggle along on their own again. Sometimes Billie was left in the care of other people. Continue reading Billie Holiday 7/1959

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Buddy Holly 2/1959

Buddy Holly Rock and roll paradiseFebruary 3, 1959 – Buddy Holly was born Charles Hardin Holley on September 7, 1936; known as Buddy Holly, was an American musician and singer-songwriter, often considered one of the main figures of the rock and roll genre in the mid-1950s.

Buddy Holly was a singer/songwriter whose records, conveying a sense of the wide-open spaces of West Texas and unstoppable joie de vivre, remain vital today.
Buddy Holly learned to play piano and fiddle at an early age, while his older brothers taught him the basics of guitar. A 1949 home recording of “My Two-Timin’ Woman” showcases Holly’s skilled, if prepubescent, singing voice.

Holly’s mother and father, a tailor by trade, both proved to be very supportive of their son’s burgeoning musical talents, generating song ideas and even penning a letter to the editor of Lubbock’s newspaper in defense of rock ‘n’ roll-loving teenagers lambasted in a conservative editorial. Despite his parents’ support, Holly couldn’t have become a founding father of rock ‘n’ roll without engaging in some degree of rebellion. Once a preacher at the local Tabernacle Baptist Church asked him, “What would you do if you had $10?” The young rocker reportedly muttered, “If I had $10, I wouldn’t be here.” Holly had clearly set his sights on something other than growing up to join his brothers in their tiling business. Continue reading Buddy Holly 2/1959

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Django Reinhardt 5/1953

django-reinhardtMay 16, 1953 – Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt  was born on January 23, 1910 in Liberchies, Pont-à-Celles, Belgium, into a French family of Manouche Romani descent. His father was named Jean Eugene Weiss, but used the alias “Jean-Baptiste Reinhard” on the birth certificate to hide from French military conscription. His mother, Laurence Reinhardt, was a dancer.

The birth certificate refers to: « Jean Reinhart, son of Jean Baptiste Reinhart, artist, and Laurence Reinhart, housewife, domiciled in Paris. Reinhardt’s nickname “Django”, in Romani means “I awake.” Reinhardt spent most of his youth in Romani encampments close to Paris, where he started playing violin, banjo, and guitar. His family made cane furniture for a living, but its members included several keen amateur musicians. Continue reading Django Reinhardt 5/1953

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Sonny Boy Williamson I 6/1948

sonny-boy-williamson-1June 1, 1948 – “Sonny Boy” Williamson was born John Lee Curtis on March 30, 1914 near Jackson Tennessee. While in his teens he joined Yank Rachell and Sleepy John Estes, playing with them in Tennessee and Arkansas. In 1934 he settled in Chicago.

Williamson first recorded for Bluebird Records in 1937, and his first recording, “Good Morning, School Girl”, became a standard. He was popular among black audiences throughout the southern United States and in midwestern industrial cities, such as Detroit and Chicago, and his name was synonymous with the blues harmonica for the next decade. Other well-known recordings of his include “Sugar Mama Blues”, “Shake the Boogie”, “You Better Cut That Out”, “Sloppy Drunk”, “Early in the Morning”, “Stop Breaking Down”, and “Hoodoo Hoodoo” (also known as “Hoodoo Man Blues”). In 1947, “Shake the Boogie” made number 4 on Billboard’s Race Records chart. Williamson’s style influenced many blues harmonica performers, including Billy Boy Arnold, Junior Wells, Sonny Terry, Little Walter, and Snooky Pryor. Continue reading Sonny Boy Williamson I 6/1948

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Robert Johnson 8/1938

Blues Legend Robert Johnson with Johnny ShinesAugust 16, 1938 – Robert Leroy Johnson was allegedly born on May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

Charles and Harriet Dodds and Gabriel and Lucinda Brown Majors were all born into slavery -Mr. Dodds in North Carolina, all the others in Mississippi. Their children, Charles Dodds, Jr. and Julia Ann Majors, were married in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in February 1889.

Charlie Dodds, Jr. became a successful and well-respected, land-owning farmer, carpenter, and wicker furniture maker, and he and his wife raised six daughters and a son. Illness put an early end to the lives of two of the daughters, and Charlie’s mistress, Serena, gave birth to two sons before a personal vendetta with the prominent Marchetti Brothers forced Dodds to flee Mississippi and take up residence in Memphis around 1907 under the assumed name of Spencer. Continue reading Robert Johnson 8/1938

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Bessie Smith 9/1937

220px-BessiesmithSeptember 26, 1937 – American jazz singer Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 15th, 1894. She was often referred to as “The Empress of the Blues”, and was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. She is often regarded as the greatest singers of her era, and, along with Louis Armstrong, she was a major influence on subsequent jazz and blues vocalists.

The 1900 census indicates that Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in July 1892, a date provided by her mother. However, the 1910 census recorded her birthday as April 15, 1894, a date that appears on all subsequent documents and was observed by the entire Smith family. Census data also contribute to controversy about the size of her family. The 1870 and 1880 censuses report three older half-siblings, while later interviews with Smith’s family and contemporaries did not include these individuals among her siblings. Continue reading Bessie Smith 9/1937

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Jimmie Rodgers 5/1933

country cross over superstarMay 26, 1933 – Jimmie Rodgers was born James Charles Rodgers on September 8, 1897 near Meridian, Mississippi. His work is often categorized as a country music from  the early 20th century, as he was known most widely for his rhythmic yodeling. But his work was much, much more than that. Among the first country music superstars and pioneers, Rodgers was also known as “The Singing Brakeman”, “The Blue Yodeler”, and “The Father of Country Music”. Unfortunately this qualification does very little to support Rodgers’ reputation as a cross over musical giant of early American music.

The Jimmie Rodgers’ music tradition “crosses over several lines of blues, rock and country and we could have added gospel as well. Some of this diversity may not win applause from staunched rockers but it would be sadly inconsistent with Jimmie Rodgers’ openness to multiple influences not to mention him here. While the Blue Yodeler did have a huge “hillbilly” following, his musical appeal was not limited to the sons of Appalachia. Continue reading Jimmie Rodgers 5/1933

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Stevie Ray Vaughan went far beyond prodigy or natural talent.

Stevie_Ray_Vaughan_And_Double_Trouble-Texas_Flood_(1999)-Interior_TraseraAugust 27, 1990 – Stephen “Stevie” Ray Vaughan was born October 3, 1954 in Dallas Texas, Stevie grew up in the musical shadow of his older brother Jimmie, but he had a knack for guitar playing that went far beyond prodigy or natural talent.

He was three-and-a-half years younger than his brother Jimmie (born 1951)(Fabulous Thunderbirds). Their dad, Big Jim secured a job as an asbestos worker, an occupation that involved rigorous manual effort. The family moved frequently, living in other states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma before ultimately moving to the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. A shy and insecure boy, Vaughan was deeply affected by his childhood experiences. His father struggled with alcohol abuse, and often terrorized his family and friends with his bad temper. In later years, Vaughan recalled that he had been a victim of Big Jim’s violence. Continue reading Stevie Ray Vaughan went far beyond prodigy or natural talent.