Eric Clapton

Clapton left the Yardbirds in 1965 because they were veering too far from the blues-style rock he really enjoyed playing. He almost immediately joined another band, the Bluesbreakers. Due to that band's d... ... middle of paper ... ...s and fans once again. However, in 1997, Clapton marked his final departure from his blues-laced rock with his techno-pedigreed Retail Therapy. From that point, he released one more album on his own in 1998 and played with BB King in 2000, once again in a traditional blues style.

In the late 1950’s Jimi joined the 101st airborne division, but he was discharged due to a back injury. That’s when his life started new, and he decided to become a musician. By this time he had already become a pretty good guitar player, and had dreams of something bigger. Jimi started out playing backup for little R&B groups. Some of the best known artists, such as BB King, Ike and Tina Turner, and Little Richard wanted him to play with them.

Elvis’ fusion of country music and rhythm and blues made him the most successful rocker of all, he brought forth the clearest fusion of black blues music into the newly formed genre of rock and roll (Clarke). In a recent article done on the impact of Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Iovine, the Chairman of Interstate A & M Records writes on Elvis “He didn't invent rock & roll, but he defined it in a way that everyone who followed him owes him a debt”(Iovine). One of rockabilly’s main appeals was the way it sounded on tape. Ma... ... middle of paper ... ...tview, 1997. Print.

Having the opportunity to work with artists like Sam Cooke and Little Richard, he wanted to start a name for himself. During a July performance the “Animals” Bassist Chas Chandler was impressed with Jimi’s Talents and decided to switch roles of a musician to a manager for Jimi’s career. Chas changed Jimmy to “Jimi” and formed the “Jimi Hendrix Experience” with Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noal Redding in London. The same country the worldwide known Beatles are from. This made Jimi a star in Britain and later on America.

They used many of the instruments that eventually were used in rock music. Guitars, drums, keyboards, and singing all led to people starting to play rock and roll music. Artists that became rock gods like Jimi Hendrix were influenced by soulful music played by earlier jazz groups. Blues was also one of the main genres that helped start rock. The blues, like jazz, used many of the same instruments that developed into the main formula in making the sound of rock music.

Among the many songs he eternalized, "The Thrill Is Gone" is perhaps his most enduring, he aslo won several Grammy's for that song and the albums "There Must Be a Better World Somewhere", "My Guitar Sings The Blues", "Live at San Quentin", "Live at the Apollo", and "Blues Summit". He received along with other numerous awards the Grammy Lifetime Achievments Award in 1987. Still on the road and recording for MCA, with Lucille , B.B. King is still showing the world the blues is here to stay. 	King started his career as a teenage professional musician on the streets of Memphis during the 1940s.

It was his guitar playing that left a large influence in the coming decades. Robert Christgau states, “Berry's limited but brilliant vocabulary of guitar riffs quickly came to epitomize rock 'n' roll...every great white guitar group of the early Sixties imitated Berry's style”. The riffs from his famous

Great Rock Musicians: Their Achievements and Effect on Rock and Roll The blues are undeniably the roots of early rock and roll. Rock today has mutated so much that the basic blues patterns have been all but lost. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the birth of, and evolution of rock and roll by focusing on three of the arguably greatest rock musicians of the sixties and seventies. The origin of the blues can be traced to the emancipation of the slaves in the rural black areas of the south, where most of the people worked on share- cropping farms. Musically the blues are defined as a 12-bar chord progression, harmonized with the corresponding scales and patterns.

Some of the typical instruments used in a blues-rock band would be electric guitar, bass guitar, a drum kit, vocals, a Hammond organ and a harmonica. In the 1970s the line between hard rock and blues-rock had become so thin it was almost unnoticeable. By the early 1980s blues-rock had a falling out of the mainstream of music. But in the late 1980s early 1990s blues-rock went mainstream again thanks to bands such as Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughn who made there way to rock stardom once again. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues-rock) Psychedelic rock the definition of this interesting and influential genre is a style of rock music that attempts to reproduce the mind-altering experiences of many different hallucinogenic drugs.

After high school Joel immediately joined a very popular band called The Hassels for which he recorded two albums with. Within two years Joel was on to a new band which he named Attila, and featured heavy metal drummer Jon Small who he played with during his time with The Hassels. Despite the previous release of two albums Joel still needed to bring in more money so he worked many music related jobs and gigs. He even wrote a rock and roll criticism piece in a weekly column for a magazine. By 1972 Billy Joel was finally on to the big stage when he released his first solo album named, Cold Spring Harbor.