(Vocals, 1932–2006) One of the Bakersfield Sound’s few females, Owens began her career singing with Buck Owens in Mesa, Arizona, and married him in 1948. Three years later they moved to Bakersfield, where she worked as a singer and waitress at the Clover Club, and made her recording debut with ‘A Dear John Letter’ (1953), ...
Blue-eyed soul and country guitarist and singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt was born in Burbank, California in 1949, the daughter of Broadway vocalist John Raitt and pianist-singer Marge Goddard. At the age of eight, she was given a Stella guitar as a Christmas present, which her parents insisted she play at family gatherings. Raitt became a devotee of blues ...
(Zhak Shamp-yôn’ Syör da Shan-bun-yâr) c. 1601–72 French composer Chambonnières is generally considered the founder of the French harpsichord school. He developed a style in harpsichord writing adapted from the lute idiom of style brisé, characterized by broken, arpeggiated chordal textures. In 1641, he began a twice-weekly series of concerts, later inheriting his father’s position as gentilhomme ordinaire of ...
(Guitar, vocals, b. 1949) During the 1960s, while attending college in Cambridge, Massachussetts, Raitt learned the ropes firsthand from slide masters Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell. She began appearing on the folk and blues festival circuit in the late 1960s, sometimes encouraging elderly, rediscovered blues legends (such as Sippie Wallace) to join her ...
Although Bakersfield had already played host to a number of country-music artists, it was Buck Owens (1929–2006) who not only put it on the map, but also spread its name around the world. So great was his impact, some even called it ‘Buckersfield’. The Road To Bakersfield Hailing from Sherman, Texas, and born Alvis Edgar Owens ...
(Record producer, b. 1911) A major force in country music’s development during the post-war years, Minnesota-born Kenneth F. Nelson began his days at Capitol Records on the behest of old friend Lee Gillette, handling transcriptions. When Gillette took over the label’s pop division in 1951, Nelson took over the A&R country responsibilities, having first become involved ...
Country music and gospel have always been close partners, since many gospel acts come from the American South, and Nashville, the home of country music, lies in the heart of the Bible Belt. Numerous influences abound within the Church, stretching from traditional shape-note singing that goes back several hundred years, to today’s contemporary and Christian ...
Country music has been euphemistically called ‘white man’s blues’ or ‘the poetry of the common man’. While both descriptions have elements of truth, neither is quite accurate. It is, in fact, a broad, nebulous, over-reaching category with no exact boundaries or parameters. Over the decades country music has grown to encompass a greatly varied assortment of ...
Although one tends to think of Nashville as the primary source for country music, many other regions contributed to this music’s growth, especially the West Coast, where migrant workers from Oklahoma, Texas and other regions of the Southwest played a vital role in putting California on the country-music map. With Los Angeles as its focal point, ...
Bessie Smith was one of the greatest vocalists of the twentieth century; her emotional delivery and exquisite phrasing has been an influence on instrumentalists as well as innumerable singers, both male and female. Many of her records, including ‘Gimmie a Pigfoot’, ‘Woman’s Trouble Blues’, ‘St. Louis Blues’ and the song that became an anthem of the Great Depression, ...
(Musician, bandleader, 1924–2000) Merle Haggard called him the ‘Grandpappy of Bakersfield’ and, during his 14 years leading The Orange Blossom Playboys at the town’s hottest honky-tonk, the Blackboard, he employed both Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, who were to define the Bakersfield Sound. A Texan by birth, he perfected his musical skills by entertaining ...
Observers who saw him in his prime have likened the charisma of the ‘king of western swing’ Bob Wills to that of latter-day superstars such as Elvis and The Beatles. The Texas fiddler, with his trademark high-pitched folk hollers and jivey, medicine-show asides, was an irresistible force of nature. Although he was, in the earliest days of ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1952) Miller is short and stocky, just like Buck Owens, and applies a similar thick hillbilly twang to similar down-to-earth, hard-country songs. Julie Miller (vocals, b. 1956) is as tall and willowy as Joni Mitchell, and writes the same sort of poetic, folk-rock songs for the same sort of reedy ...
(Tenor and soprano saxophones, bass clarinet, b. 1964) Starting out in reggae and funk bands in school, the British saxophonist became interested in jazz in the early 1980s and eventually gravitated towards the music of his biggest influences, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. He began playing with John Stevens’s Freebop band and by the mid-1980s had formed ...
(Vocal/instrumental duo, 1940s–50s) The hard-driving, bluesy fiddling of Tennessee-born Curly Fox (1910–95) had been heard on radio, and on records by The Shelton Brothers, but his career took an upswing around 1936 when he teamed with Texan singer-guitarist Ruby Owens (1909–63), whom he subsequently married. Over 25 years they had spells on the Grand Ole Opry and ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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