Born in Henderson, Tennessee, in 1918, Eddy Arnold has not only shown remarkable longevity as an artist (his career spans seven decades and he has sold more than 80 million records); he was also a pivotal figure in country music’s dramatic stylistic shift during the 1950s from rough and rural to urbane and sophisticated. Speaking Through Song A ...
Rock’n’roll guitarist Duane Eddy was born in Corning, New York in 1938. His interest in the guitar began when he was five, inspired by singing film-cowboy Gene Autry. In 1951, the family moved to Arizona. While playing guitar in a country duo, Duane met songwriter, producer and disc jockey Lee Hazelwood. The pair embarked on a ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1901–68) Born and raised in Georgia, James Arnold was taught to play guitar by his cousin. He moved to Buffalo, New York in his late teens and to Chicago in 1929. He worked outside music, making bootleg whiskey, but also played occasional jobs. He first recorded for Victor in 1930 as Gitfiddle Jim ...
(Piano, 1912–86) Although the physical brilliance of Art Tatum may have eluded most pianists in the 1930s, the more practical possibilities offered by Teddy Wilson made him the most influential pianist of the decade. Softening Earl Hines’ emphasis on the beat still further, Wilson’s style was centred almost wholly in his right hand, which spun smooth, ...
(Guitar, vocals, b. 1933) Mississippi-born Eddy Harrington left the South in 1950 and established himself on Chicago’s West Side as a Chuck Berry imitator named Guitar Eddy. He later took the stage name Clear Waters as a takeoff on Muddy Waters, but finally settled on Eddy ‘The Chief’ Clearwater, a nickname he got from his penchant for ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1937) Fender was born Baldemar Huerta in the southernmost tip of Texas, but adapted his Anglo stage name in the late 1950s as he shifted from the Tex-Mex music he grew up on to rockabilly. After a marijuana conviction, however, he was reduced to working as an auto mechanic when producer Huey Meaux ...
1874–1951, Austrian One of the most important and controversial figures of twentieth-century composition, Schoenberg was a true visionary who paved the way for serialism – a system that, while abandoning traditional western harmony and melody, gave direction to the chaos of atonality. In so doing, he attracted plaudits and outright vitriol, for although serialism has ...
Composed: 1930–32 Premiered: 1957, Zurich Libretto by the composer Act I Moses prays in the desert. He is answered by voices from the Burning Bush telling him to become a prophet and the leader of the Israelites. He pleads that he does not have the eloquence to explain God’s will in terms they can understand, but is told that ...
1921–2006 English composer Arnold began his career as an orchestral trumpet player, but soon attracted attention with music that combined tunefulness, orchestral brilliance and engaging humour (the comedy overture Beckus the Dandipratt and two sets of English Dances). His symphonies and concertos combine these qualities with deeper emotions; they have attracted a smaller, but admiring, audience. Among ...
1883–1953 English composer Bax was strongly affected by Richard Strauss, Debussy and Ravel, but the formative influence on him was a Romantic image of Ireland, first encountered through the poetry of W. B. Yeats and reflected in such tone-poems as The Garden of Fand (Fand was the goddess of the Western Sea). His music is passionate (the tone-poem ...
(Är’-nolt Shön’-bârg) 1874–1951 Austrian composer Together with Stravinsky, Schoenberg has become the most influential figure in twentieth-century music. In his youth he wrote music in a ripe and sumptuously orchestrated late-Romantic style, but came to believe that the later music of Wagner, and that of Mahler and Richard Strauss, as well as his own, was undermining ...
(Vocals, b. 1940) Massachusetts-born Frederick Picariello got his nickname Freddy ‘Boom Boom’ Cannon from the bass drum sound on his hits, which began in 1959 with ‘Tallahassee Lassie’, a US Top 10 item written by his mother. His only million-seller, the same year’s ‘Way Down Yonder In New Orleans’, continued his place-name fixation, but thereafter his hits ...
(Guitar, b. 1938) With producer/co-writer Lee Hazlewood, Eddy scored 20 US hits between 1958 and 1961, showcasing his ‘twangy’ guitar on the Jamie label, part-owned by Hazlewood. Eddy’s US Top 10 hits were 1958’s ‘Rebel Rouser’, 1959’s ‘Forty Miles Of Bad Road’ and 1960’s ‘Because They’re Young’. After signing with RCA in 1962, his appeal largely ...
(Vocals, b. 1946) This LA-born former member of The Ikettes was Ike and Tina Turner’s backing vocalist. Remaining in London after a UK tour, she signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, capitalizing on Britain’s love affair with American soul. She is best known for her 1967 hit, Cat Stevens’ ‘The First Cut Is The Deepest’. She ...
(Songwriter, vocals, b. 1935) One-time member of the Cochran Brothers (with rock‘n’roller Eddie Cochran, no relation), Isola, Mississippi-born Garland Perry Cochran was one of the most-oft-recorded songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘She’s Got You’ (a hit for Patsy Cline), ‘Make The World Go Away’ (a hit for both Ray Price and Eddy Arnold) and Willie Nelson’s ...
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