Taking its lead from the loud blues rock of late-1960s bands such as Cream and The Grateful Dead, southern rock materialized with the release of The Allman Brothers Band’s eponymous 1969 debut album, which embellished a fusion of rock’n’roll, blues, country and jazz with a distinct good ol’ boy edge from directly below the Mason-Dixon Line. Natives ...
Alternative-rock guitarist Peter Buck (b. 1956) was born in Berkeley, California. After dropping out of college, he moved to Athens, Georgia, where he met singer Michael Stipe while working in a record shop. The pair discovered that they had similar tastes in music: punk rock, Patti Smith and Television. Together with Mike Mills (bass) and ...
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 ...
One of the founding fathers of rock’n’roll, Charles Edward (Chuck) Berry was born in 1926 in St Louis, Missouri, to a middle-class family. His interest in the blues began in high school, where he gave his first public performance. In 1944, he was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to three years in an Intermediate Reformatory ...
A pioneering guitarist and the principal creative force behind The Who, Pete Townshend was born in Chiswick, London in 1941. The Townshends were a musical family – Pete’s grandfather was a musician, his father a dance-band saxophonist and his mother a singer. Consequently, a career in music seemed natural for Pete, and his parents encouraged him. ...
Southern-rock guitarist Duane Allman was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1946. Allman was inspired to take up the guitar by his brother Gregg. At first, they played country music, their initiation into the blues coming when the brothers saw B.B. King performing in Nashville. The pair began playing professionally in 1961, first in The Allman Joys ...
Lita Rossana Ford (b. 1958) was born in London. After her family settled in Los Angeles in the 1960s, she took up guitar at the age of 11, inspired by Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore. When she was 16, she met novelty-music producer Kim Fowley, who helped recruit her, along with Joan Jett, Sandy West, ...
For over 30 years, guitarist Alex Lifeson has quietly served as the cohesive key to success for progressive rockers Rush – arguably the most enduring and successful hard-rock band of all time. A guitarist always more interested in finding the right chord voicing or textural effect to make a chorus work than in shredding the frets off his axe du ...
Clad head-to-toe in studded black leather and featuring a thundering rhythm section, a dynamic twin-guitar assault and one of the purest rock vocalists in music history, it simply doesn’t get any more ‘metal’ than Judas Priest. And the man behind many of the band’s greatest riffs and solos is guitarist Glenn Tipton (b. 1947). Born in Blackheath, England ...
Producer-performer Lenny Kravitz (b. 1964) has explored multiple genres during his 25-year career as a music star, but has often been thought of as married to retro styles. Born in New York, Kravitz was raised in Los Angeles. His parents, a television producer and an actress, were well connected in show business. Kravitz decided to pursue rock’n’roll ...
In his short life, California guitarist-mandolinist Clarence White (1944–73) conceived innovations that would inspire country and rock guitarists from both a stylistic and technical perspective long after his death. He brought bluegrass picking to the forefront of rock, turning acoustic guitar into a solo instrument. He developed a device for electric guitar that let traditional guitarists sound like pedal-steel ...
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 ...
Although he did not coin the term ‘rock’n’roll’ – which was an African-American slang term for sex – New York disk jockey Alan Freed did popularize it when he attached it to a teen-oriented form of music that evolved from a fusion of rockabilly, R&B and, to a lesser extent, gospel and boogie-woogie. In its early forms, ...
A slapped upright bass, twanging lead guitar and acoustic rhythm guitar; a blues structure with country and blues inflections; a strong beat and moderate-to-fast tempo; a wild, yelping, often stuttering vocal style, together with plenty of echo on the recordings are the main ingredients of rockabilly. The rockabilly style was an eclectic hybrid of R&B, hillbilly ...
During the mid-1960s, America’s military action in Vietnam was escalating out of control; students around the world were becoming more politically involved, civil rights and feminism were hot issues and the burgeoning youth movement was turning onto the effects of mind-bending drugs. Accordingly, certain strains of popular music melded attitude, experimentation and a social conscience, and ...
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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.