Results for "guitar, acoustic"

Josh White

Born: February 11, 1914

Josh White overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the course of his lifetime. He experienced almost Dickensian privation as a child musician on the open road. Yet before he was twenty this child prodigy significantly influenced the Piedmont musical scene.

When the Great Depression crippled the mainstream recording industry, White's early "race" recordings nevertheless sold briskly. Then, at the peak of his powers, he injured his hand and had to completely reinvent his style of guitar picking.

Despite this, he went on to become an actor, radio, and cabaret star, a ground-breaking performer of powerful protest songs, and an intimate of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Leon Redbone

Born: August 26, 1949

Leon Redbone is a noted American guitarist and singer, known for his stylized performances of early jazz and blues songs.

Redbone usually performs old and often largely unknown songs from vaudeville and minstrel shows of the 1910s and '20s. He sings with a full, expressive baritone, often mumbling incoherently or yodelling. His guitar technique is excellent, with a quick, jaunty bounce.

Early Career

Leon Redbone first became known as a performer in the early 1970s in the Toronto area, playing in clubs, and hanging around the university. After meeting Bob Dylan at the Mariposa Folk Festival, Dylan became impressed with Redbone's talent and mentioned him in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Redbone himself was profiled in Rolling Stone before ever releasing an album.

Baden Powell

Born: August 6, 1937

Baden Powell de Aquino was born in Varre-e-Sai in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father, a scouting enthusiast, named him after Lord Robert Baden-Powell. When he was three, his family relocated to a suburb in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The new surroundings proved profoundly influential. His house was a stop for popular musicians during his formative years. He soon started guitar lessons with Jayme Florence ("Meira"), a famous choro guitarist, in the 1940s. He proved a young virtuoso, having won many talent competitions before he was a teenager. At age fifteen, he was already playing professionally, accompanying singers and bands in various styles

Odetta

Born: December 31, 1930

Odetta, the classically trained folk, blues and gospel singer who used her powerfully rich and dusky voice to champion African American music and civil rights issues for more than half a century starting in the folk revival of the 1950s,died on Dec. 3, 2008, She was 77. She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for a checkup in mid-November but went into kidney failure. She died there Tuesday of heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, told the Associated Press. With a repertoire that included 19th century slave songs and spirituals as well as the topical ballads of such 20th century folk icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Odetta became one of the most beloved figures in folk music

Tommy McClennan

Born: April 8, 1908

Tommy McClennan - Blues Singer, guitarist For a short time, Tommy McClennan had the world of blues in the palm of his hand. Tracked down in rural Mississippi by Bluebird Records, the most prestigious blues label of the day, signed to a recording contract, and brought to Chicago, McClennan escaped the grueling existence of a black farm hand almost effortlessly. In Chicago, he met all the leading blues musicians of the time, including the Chicago blues "Godfathers," Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red. In just over two years with Bluebird, he recorded 40 songs. Then abruptly McClennan's alcoholism gained the upper hand

Mance Lipscomb

Born: April 9, 1895

Mance Lipscomb represented one of the last remnants of the nineteenth-century songster tradition, which predated the development of the blues. Though songsters might incorporate blues into their repertoires, as did Lipscomb, they performed a wide variety of material in diverse styles, much of it common to both black and white traditions in the South, including ballads, rags, dance pieces and popular, sacred, and secular songs. Lipscomb himself insisted that he was a songster, not a guitarist or "blues singer," since he played "all kinds of music." His eclectic repertoire has been reported to have contained 350 pieces spanning two centuries

Furry Lewis

Born: March 6, 1893

Born March 6, 1893, in Greenwood, Mississippi, Lewis acquired the nickname "Furry" from childhood playmates. At the age of seven he and his family moved to Memphis, where young Lewis took up the guitar under the tutelage of a man whose name he recalled as "Blind Joe." Blind Joe apparently was versed in nineteenth century song and taught his protégé "Casey Jones" and "John Henry," songs based around the exploits of heroic figures. Lewis would later record these two songs for the Victor and Vocalion labels respectively. By 1908, he was playing solo for parties, in taverns, and on the street

Earl Klugh

Born: September 16, 1953

In a recording career of over three decades, master guitarist EARL KLUGH has been lauded first as a prodigy and groundbreaker, then a defining figure, and ultimately, as one of the true statesmen of contemporary jazz. With 2008’s THE SPICE OF LIFE, Klugh earns his 12th career Grammy® Nomination - his second nomination and release on the independent Koch label. As follow up to his 2005 masterpiece, Naked Guitar, Klugh succeeds in creating a statement every bit as compelling. After breaking a six-year recording hiatus with the universally-hailed solo album of 2005, Klugh steps back from Naked Guitar’s intimate focus on the unaccompanied guitar to capture the biggest picture possible, and an equally personal one: THE SPICE OF LIFE is a far-reaching account of all his music, marking Klugh’s return to full-scale album production after a nine-year break, with a special guest appearance by flautist Hubert Laws, and with the arrangements of two legendary orchestrators, Don Sebesky and Eddie Horst. It effortlessly segues from jazz to Latin to pop modes through a compositional approach that recalls his Grammy® Award- winning work with Bob James (One on One), spiced with all the lyric flourishes that established Klugh’s distinctive signature all those years ago. Not surprisingly, the adult-aimed radio stations that have followed Klugh’s music through 23 Top Ten Billboard Jazz Chart albums (five of them No

Skip James

Born: June 21, 1902

he haunting quality of Nehemiah “Skip” James’s music earned him a reputation as one of the great early Mississippi bluesmen. James (1902-1969) grew up at the Woodbine Plantation and as a youth learned to play both guitar and piano. At his 1931 session for Paramount he recorded eighteen songs, including the dark-themed “Devil Got My Woman” and “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” He later became a minister, but returned to performing blues during the 1960s “blues revival.” The music of Skip James and fellow Bentonia guitarists such as Henry Stuckey (1897-1966) and Jack Owens (1904-1997) is often characterized as a genre unto itself

Jim Jackson

Born: 1884

Jim Jackson - Blues Singer, guitarist (1884 - 1937) “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues,” was one of the biggest selling blues hits of the 1920’s, and made him quite the popular performer in this time frame. A colorful character known for his sparse accompaniment of guitar, and primordial vocal style, he was an important figure in the evolution of the blues. Born circa 1884, in Hernando, Mississippi, a small town twenty miles south of Memphis, Jackson was raised on a farm. Jackson's father taught the youth to play the guitar, a skill he would use to earn a living. Local guitarist Frank Stokes was also an influential figure to young Jackson