(Music publisher, songwriter, 1898–1954) Born in Evansville, Indiana, Fred Rose was a key figure in Nashville’s rise from a provincial backwater to an international musical capital. Rose penned a number of country standards, including ‘Wait For The Light To Shine’ and ‘Blue Eyes Cryin’ In The Rain’. He began his career in Chicago as a jazz ...
Freddie (sometimes spelled Freddy) King (1934–76) revitalized the Chicago blues scene in the 1960s. His aggressive playing and piercing solos helped to set up the blues-rock movement, and he was a major influence on 1960s British guitarists like Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor. King’s mother taught him to play guitar as a child in Gilmer, Texas ...
(Fri-drikh Fran’-zhek [Fra-da-rek’ Fran-swa’] Sho-pan) 1810–49 Polish composer Chopin was unique among composers of the highest achievement and influence in that he wrote all his works, with the merest handful of exceptions, for the solo piano. Leaving Warsaw, which at the time offered only restricted musical possibilities, and living most of his adult life in Paris, ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1904–72) Self-taught as a guitarist, music was only a sideline for McDowell for the first 60 years of his life. He worked in the Memphis area before settling in Como, Mississippi to work as a farmer in 1929; he didn’t own a guitar until 1940. Discovered and recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959, McDowell’s ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1915–73) Born in Arkansas, Rosetta Nubin was the daughter of a missionary. She had learned to play guitar by the age of six and accompanied her mother at church functions. The family moved to Chicago and Tharpe signed with Decca in 1938. She was essentially a gospel performer, but with Lucky Millinder’s Orchestra (1941–43) she ...
In the 1960s and early 1970s, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was the primary alternative to Miles Davis’s domination of the field. Hubbard came up in the hard-bop era, blew free jazz with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, and established a body of exemplary compositions, recordings and improvisations with the best of the 1960s Blue Note artists: Art Blakey ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1934–76) Few bluesmen have possessed the bristling intensity of Freddie King, whose stinging vibrato and energetic, soaring vocal style influenced Eric Clapton. King was born in Gilmer, Texas and learned guitar from his mother at age six. He moved to Chicago in 1950, earning a reputation among peers like Buddy Guy and Otis ...
(Tenor saxophone, b. 1929) Admired by post-1960s Chicago improvisers as a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson’s reputation spread after his first trip to Europe in 1977, but he was very sparsely recorded until the 1990s. Since then his huge tone and gutsy, freely associative statements have been ...
(Vocals, fiddle, 1880–1956) Reed, a singer and fiddler from Princeton, West Virginia, made his living playing at dances and church meetings and giving music lessons. Recording in the late 1920s, he observed contemporary life in songs like ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live ?’– a catalogue of the ills that afflicted ...
(Vocals, songwriter, b. 1926) A regular on the Town Hall Party, Alabama-born Freddie Hart arrived in Los Angeles following a troubled childhood, a couple of years in the Marines (enrolling when he was only 15), and travelling across the nation. His 1950s association with Capitol and Columbia resulted in some fine, though overlooked, country and ...
(Vocals, 1925–98) Before rockabilly, hillbilly humour and flashy rhinestone outfits, there was the feisty Rose Maddox and her brothers Cal, Fred and Don. She started singing on radio when she was 11, as part of Maddox Brothers And Rose, gaining popularity with a wild, fast-paced presentation that mixed loud honky-tonk music and almost vaudeville-style ...
(Publisher, 1918–90) The son of legendary songwriter and publisher Fred Rose, Chicago-born Wesley Herman Rose entered the music business in 1945 as general manager of Acuff-Rose, the Nashville publishing company co-founded by his father and singer Roy Acuff. Under the younger Rose’s steady hand, Acuff-Rose (whose crown jewel was the priceless Hank Williams song catalogue) became one ...
(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 ...
‘The Knight of the Rose’ For the follow-up to Elektra, Strauss declared he wanted to write a Mozart opera. Despite Hofmannsthal’s protests about a light, Renaissance subject set in the past, the librettist soon came up with a scenario that delighted Strauss. The correspondence between librettist and composer was good-natured and respectful. Each made suggestions to the other ...
1862–1934 English composer Bradford-born but of German descent, Delius escaped the family wool business to devote himself entirely to music. He studied in Leipzig, where he met Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), and moved to Paris, where his friends included Ravel, but also such painters as Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. Affected by all these figures, and by ...
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An extensive music information resource, bringing together the talents and expertise of a wide range of editors and musicologists, including Stanley Sadie, Charles Wilson, Paul Du Noyer, Tony Byworth, Bob Allen, Howard Mandel, Cliff Douse, William Schafer, John Wilson...
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Classical, Rock, Blues, Jazz, Country and more. Flame Tree has been making encyclopaedias and guides about music for over 20 years. Now Flame Tree Pro brings together a huge canon of carefully curated information on genres, styles, artists and instruments. It's a perfect tool for study, and entertaining too, a great companion to our music books.
David Bowie
Fantastic new, unofficial biography covers
his life, music, art and movies, with a
sweep of incredible photographs.