(Vocals, b. 1967) Born Audrey Faith Perry, Hill moved to Nashville in 1986, where she was discovered singing back-up to singer-songwriter Gary Burr at the Bluebird Café. Hill made an instant and huge impact when in 1994 her debut single, ‘Wild One’, topped the country chart for four weeks. Effortlessly crossing over to pop, her Take ...
Highly respected blues guitarist Rory Gallagher was born in Ballyshannon, Ireland in 1948, and grew up in Cork. After learning his trade as a teenager playing in Irish show bands, Gallagher formed the power trio Taste in 1966. The band released two studio and two live albums. Shortly after their appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival ...
1728–1804 German composer Hiller worked for most of his life in Leipzig, where he directed concerts, had charge of the music for various churches, founded choirs, a music school and a musical society, wrote criticism for an influential music periodical, published musical treatises and eventually became Kantor of St Thomas’s Church (the post once held ...
(Guitar, vocals, b. 1952) Michael Hill’s Blues Mob earned an international cult following with a gritty, aggressive, expansive style well-tailored to Hill’s lyrics, which often focus on urban social issues. Born in the south Bronx into a family with roots in North Carolina and Georgia, Hill began playing blues after hearing Jimi Hendrix and Cream. ...
In the nineteenth century, country music belonged to fireside and family, to the frontier town and the backwoods hamlet. Four decades into the twentieth, it was utterly transformed, driven headlong into the new world of the new century. First, fiddlers’ conventions and other public events provided a context of competition and offered the musician the chance ...
‘The fiddle and guitar craze is sweeping northward!’ ran Columbia Records’ ad in Talking Machine World on 15 June 1924. ‘Columbia leads with records of old-fashioned southern songs and dances. [Our] novel fiddle and guitar records, by Tanner and Puckett, won instant and widespread popularity with their tuneful harmony and sprightliness… The records of these quaint musicians which ...
If you look for country music’s Big Bang, there is nothing more momentous than Bristol, 1927. Within four summer days, two stars appeared that would change the cosmology of country – remap the sky. And it all happened in a disused office building in a quiet mountain town perched on the state line between Virginia and Tennessee. Why ...
If Jimmie Rodgers is the father of country music, Uncle Dave Macon its first radio star and the Carters its first family group, Roy Acuff (1903–92) has a claim to be called the father of the country-music business. Not only was he a key figure in the Grand Ole Opry – indeed, for many, its figurehead – ...
The Carters (A. P. 1891–1960, Sara 1899–1979 and Maybelle 1909–78) are the most extensive clan in country music, encompassing three generations of performers and connections by marriage to other artists. This is fitting, for their musical influence is pervasive, too. Near the dawn of country music as a commercial entity, they were its first successful family ...
Uncle Dave Macon (1870–1952) was the first star of country music. Other artists got on disc first: men like Eck Robertson, Henry Whitter, Fiddlin’ John Carson, Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett. Uncle Dave didn’t enter a recording studio until July 1924 – whereupon he proved to be quite productive – but he had another route to the affections ...
Although routinely – and fairly – described as the father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933) was actually something more. Having established himself in that genre, he gradually moved towards mainstream popular music and, but for his early death, would probably have found a niche there. So far as country music is concerned, though, his ...
(Vocals, banjo, 1895–1967) Tom Ashley (as everyone but record companies called him) learned his trade as an entertainer by working on travelling shows. In the 1920s he played in The Carolina Tar Heels and recorded exceptional banjo-accompanied versions of ‘The Coo Coo Bird’ and the traditional ballad ‘The House Carpenter’. As late as the 1950s he was working with ...
(Vocal duo, 1936–76) This prettiest and most poignant of country harmony duos was first heard on southern radio in 1935. The North Carolina-born Bolick brothers – Bill (b. 1917) and Earl (1919–98) – also recorded prolifically, accompanying themselves on mandolin and guitar, from 1936 to 1951, making definitive discs of traditional Americana like ‘Down On The Banks ...
(Vocals, banjo, 1898–1971) Boggs grew up in south-western Virginia at a time when mountain people were reluctantly quitting the backwoods for the hell of the coalmines. His music, too, reflects adaptation – ‘Country Blues’, ‘Pretty Polly’ and ‘Down South Blues’ making an eerie connection between the dispassionate narrative of the hillbilly ballad and the personal testimony of ...
(Vocals, banjo, guitar, 1883–1977) A singer, banjoist and guitarist from southern Kentucky, blinded in a shooting accident in his early twenties, Burnett wrote (but did not record) ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, made famous again through its use in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou ? He and his playing partner, the fiddler ...
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David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
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sweep of incredible photographs.