(Vocals, guitar, mandolin, songwriter, b. 1958) Aged only 13, Mississippi-born Stuart joined bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and Nashville Grass for six years until Flatt’s death. After this he enjoyed a six-year spell in The Johnny Cash Show. His first significant solo album was Busy Bee Café (1982). The title track of Hillbilly Rock (1990) largely sums ...
British singer-songwriter and guitarist John Martyn (b. 1948) was born Iain David McGeachy in England. In his 40-year career he has released 20 studio albums. Martyn’s parents divorced when he was five, and he spent his childhood in England and Scotland. Martyn’s musical career began when he was 17. He blended blues and folk into a unique style, working ...
Many guitarists of the ‘shred’ variety unfortunately stick to scalar lines and diatonic arpeggios in straight major or minor keys. Marty Friedman (b. 1962) is not one of them. Indeed, Friedman’s tendency towards Eastern, Middle Eastern and other ethnic sounds has distinguished him as one of the most musically gifted super-pickers the guitar world has ever seen. Martin Adam ...
(Vocals, songwriter, 1908–89) An early West Coast mover and shaker, Stuart Hamblin was the first cowboy singer to be heard on Los Angeles radio, appearing on KFI as ‘Cowboy Joe’. After a brief spell with the Beverly Hill Billies, he began a 20-year run on his own Lucky Stars show (KFWB) in 1932. Two years later ...
(Vocals, songwriter, 1925–82) One of country music’s most versatile singers and energetic stage performers, Martin David Robison, born near Glendale, Arizona, possessed a fluid, empathetic baritone that enabled him to master a variety of music idioms, including country, pop and western (cowboy) songs. One of the most popular figures on the Grand ...
(Singer-songwriter, b. 1939) London-born Reginald Smith enjoyed 15 UK hit singles between 1958 and 1962. He appeared regularly on early British TV pop shows: 6.5 Special and Oh Boy, and was the star of Boy Meets Girls, where he met and married his wife, a member of The Vernons Girls, but marriage affected his popularity. ...
(Guitar, vocals, 1948–2009) A Scottish singer-songwriter (real name Iain McGeachy) who mixed folk, blues and jazz and developed his trademark guitar sound by use of the Echoplex, a tape delay machine, Martyn made his debut with 1968’s London Conversation and after two albums with then wife Beverly, he released the seminal Solid Air (1973), a ...
Lester Flatt (1914–79) was relieved when Dave ‘Stringbean’ Akeman left Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys in 1945, for Flatt felt the group was better off without a banjo, which had been hindering their efforts to play faster and cleaner than anyone had before. But Monroe agreed to audition a 21-year-old banjoist from western North Carolina, and Earl Scruggs ...
The Lone Star State is steeped in tradition, producing both songwriters and swing bands. In the 1980s, the clean-cut George Strait And His Ace In The Hole band took the baton from such earlier legends as Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price and Hank Thompson. Born on 18 May 1952, in Poteet (south of San Antonio), ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1963) James Travis Tritt burst on to the country-music scene in 1989 with a Top 10 single, ‘Country Club’. Utilizing strains of southern rock and expressing emotions of everyday people, he gained an audience with such singles as 1991’s ‘Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)’, his second chart-topper, ‘Anymore’, and ‘The Whiskey ...
The young country movement was an industry-driven trend aimed at the mass market of teens and twenty-something music fans. Like the urban cowboys, young country artists often contemporized or diluted prevailing styles like honky-tonk and pop country for mass consumption. The early 1990s saw a continuation of the mid- and late-1980s neo-traditionalist movement and produced a glut of gifted young ...
New country took many years and miles of travel before its current evolution – not least the new traditionalist movement of the 1980s, which returned country music to its roots. Garth Brooks (b. 1962) did it far more quickly, but that’s a different story. Sometimes it seemed like these artists were chipping away at a mountain with nothing more ...
The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...
The late Baroque era (1700–50) was a time of major political change throughout Europe, involving a shift in the balance of power between sovereign states. Across the continent it was a period of almost continuous warfare, the effects of which were later felt in other parts of the world as a result of conflicting ambitions among the various trading ...
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera was established in some form in most major European centres. The basic types of serious and comic opera in both Italian and French traditions shared similarities, although the content and style of an operatic entertainment could vary according to whether it was intended to flatter a private patron, resound with ...
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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.