(Vocals, guitar, b. 1935) Bluegrass was an all-boys club when Hazel Dickens came along from the coalfields of West Virginia with a ‘high, lonesome’ soprano that grabbed the attention of anyone who tried to ignore her. Her singing was powerful enough, but she also developed into a terrific writer of songs about coalmining tragedies and mistreated women ...
Eddie Hazel (1950–92) was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey. He played guitar and sang in church. At the age of 12, he met Billy ‘Bass’ Nelson, and the pair sang and played guitar together. In 1967 the Parliaments, a Plainfield-based doo-wop band headed by George Clinton, hit the charts with ‘I ...
(Vocals, b. 1920) West Virginia-born James Cecil Dickens was a long-time fixture on the Grand Ole Opry and is best known for the novelty hits he released in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including ‘Sleepin’ At The Foot Of The Bed’, ‘I’m Little But I’m Loud’ and ‘Take An Old Cold Tater And Wait’. Dickens was inducted into ...
(Banjo, guitar, vocals, b. 1937) James Dee Crowe was just a 19-year-old kid from Kentucky when he was hired by Jimmy Martin in 1956. By 1966 he had developed a banjo style that combined Earl Scruggs’ tumbling roll with Martin’s bouncy pulse. The line-up of Crowe, Bobby Slone, Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1943) James Talley grew up in Oklahoma near Woody Guthrie’s birthplace and carried on Guthrie’s legacy with acoustic songs that were tough in their attacks on social injustice, irreverent in their attacks on pomposity and tender in their defence of love. Though he had songs recorded by Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck and Hazel Dickens ...
The 1860s saw a number of major reorganizations in European politics. Italy became a united country under the king of (former) Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, in 1861 and its new national government tried to retain the kingdom’s liberal ideals, such as removing instances of operatic and intellectual censorship. However, Italy’s liberalism was not aspired to by other ...
(Vocals, songwriter, 1905–84) Born Clarence Albert Poindexter, in Troup, Texas, Dexter recorded a string of hits that were part of the early foundation of honky-tonk, including ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’ (1944), ‘So Long Pal’ (1944), ‘Guitar Polka’ (1946), ‘Wine, Women And Song’ (1946) and ‘Honky-Tonk Blues’ (1936). Styles & Forms | War Years | Country ...
Davey Graham (b. 1940) (originally Davy Graham) is a guitarist who is credited with sparking the folk-rock revolution in the UK in the Sixties. He inspired many of the famous fingerstyle guitarists, such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, Paul Simon and even Jimmy Page, who heavily based his solo ‘White Summer’ on Graham’s ‘She ...
Hank Williams Jr. (b. 1949) was only three years old when his daddy died, and he barely knew the man who was, arguably, the greatest honky-tonker of them all. But his widowed mother groomed her baby boy to imitate his papa as closely as possible. He was on stage by eight, in the recording studio by 14 ...
The nineteenth century was the age of the great diva, the female opera-singer who performed roles in which she usually ended up mad, abandoned or dead, but who mesmerized audiences with the power of her voice. The theatre was not seen as a respectable work-place and for most of the century female opera-singers were not regarded as reputable ...
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David Bowie
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