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Chet Helms
Chester Leo "Chet" Helms (August 2, 1942 – June 25, 2005), often called the father of San Francisco's 1967 " Summer of Love," was a music promoter and a counterculture figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the mid- to-late 1960s. Helms was the founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company and recruited Janis Joplin as its lead singer. He was a producer and organizer, helping to stage free concerts and other cultural events at Golden Gate Park, the backdrop of San Francisco's Summer of Love in 1967, as well as at other venues, including the Avalon Ballroom. He was the first producer of psychedelic light-show concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom and was instrumental in helping to develop bands that had the distinctive San Francisco Sound. Helms died June 25, 2005, of complications of a stroke. He was 62. Childhood Chester Leo Helms was born in Santa Maria, California, the eldest of three sons. His parents were Chester and Novella H ...
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Santa Maria, California
Santa Maria (Spanish language, Spanish for "Mary, mother of Jesus, St. Mary") is a city near the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of California in northern Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara County. It is approximately northwest of Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara and northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Its population was 109,707 at the 2020 census, making it the most populous city in the county and the Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA Metro Area. The city is notable for its wine industry and Santa Maria-style barbecue. History The Santa Maria Valley, stretching from the Santa Lucia Mountains toward the Pacific Ocean, was the homeland of the Chumash people for several thousand years. The Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans made their homes on the slopes of the surrounding hills among the Quercus agrifolia, oaks, on the banks of the Santa Maria River among the Platanus racemosa, sycamores, and along the coast. They had unique pla ...
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Haight-Ashbury
Haight-Ashbury () is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called The Haight and The Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the counterculture of the 1960s. Location The district generally encompasses the neighborhood surrounding Haight Street, bounded by Stanyan Street and Golden Gate Park on the west, Oak Street and the Golden Gate Park Panhandle on the north, Baker Street and Buena Vista Park to the east and Frederick Street and Ashbury Heights and Cole Valley neighborhoods to the south. The street names commemorate two early San Francisco leaders: pioneer and exchange banker Henry Haight, and Munroe Ashbury, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 1864 to 1870. Both Haight and his nephew, as well as Ashbury, had a hand in the planning of the neighborhood and nearby Golden Gate Park at its inception. The name "Upper Haight" is also used by locals in con ...
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Junior Wells
Junior Wells (born Amos Wells Blakemore Jr., December 9, 1934January 15, 1998) was an American singer, harmonica player, and recording artist. He is best known for his signature song "Messin' with the Kid" and his 1965 album ''Hoodoo Man Blues'', described by the critic Bill Dahl as "one of the truly classic blues albums of the 1960s". Wells himself categorized his music as rhythm and blues. Wells performed and recorded with various notable blues musicians, including Muddy Waters, Earl Hooker, and Buddy Guy. He remained a fixture on the blues scene throughout his career and also crossed over to rock audiences while touring with the Rolling Stones. Not long before Wells died, the blues historian Gerard Herzhaft called him "one of the rare active survivors of the 'golden age of the blues. Life and career Early years Wells may have been born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in West Memphis, Arkansas (some sources report that he was born in West Memphis). Initially taught by his ...
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Buddy Guy
George "Buddy" Guy (born July 30, 1936) is an American blues guitarist and singer. He is an exponent of Chicago blues who has influenced generations of guitarists including Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr. and John Mayer. In the 1960s, Guy played with Muddy Waters as a session guitarist at Chess Records and began a musical partnership with blues harp virtuoso Junior Wells. Guy has won eight Grammy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, and the Kennedy Center Honors. Guy was ranked 23rd in ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's " 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". His song "Stone Crazy" was ranked 78th in the ''Rolling Stone'' list of the "100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time". Clapton once described him as "the best guitar player alive". In 1999, Guy wrote the book ''Damn Right I've Got the Blues'', with Donald Wilcock. His autobiography, ''When I Left Home: My Story'', was publ ...
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Little Walter
Marion Walter Jacobs (May 1, 1930 – February 15, 1968), known as Little Walter, was an American blues musician, singer, and songwriter, whose revolutionary approach to the harmonica had a strong impact on succeeding generations, earning him comparisons to such seminal artists as Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix.Glover, Tony; Dirks, Scott; and Gaines, Ward (2002). ''Blues with a Feeling: The Little Walter Story''. Routledge Press. His virtuosity and musical innovations fundamentally altered many listeners' expectations of what was possible on blues harmonica.Dahl, BilLittle Walter: Biography Allmusic.com. He was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, the first and, to date, only artist to be inducted specifically as a harmonica player. Biography Early years Jacobs' date of birth is usually given as May 1, 1930, in Marksville, Louisiana. He was born without a birth certificate and when he applied for a Social Security card in 1940, his birthdate ...
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Muddy Waters
McKinley Morganfield (April 4, 1913 April 30, 1983), known professionally as Muddy Waters, was an American blues singer and musician who was an important figure in the post-war blues scene, and is often cited as the "father of modern Chicago blues". His style of playing has been described as "raining down Delta beatitude". Muddy Waters grew up on Stovall Plantation near Clarksdale, Mississippi, and by age 17 was playing the guitar and the harmonica, emulating the local blues artists Son House and Robert Johnson."His thick heavy voice, the dark colouration of his tone, and his firm, almost solid, personality were all clearly derived from House," wrote the music historian Peter Guralnick in ''Feel Like Going Home'', "but the embellishments, which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson." He was recorded in Mississippi by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941. In 1943, he moved to Chicago to become a full-time professi ...
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Bo Diddley
Ellas McDaniel (born Ellas Otha Bates; December 30, 1928 – June 2, 2008), known professionally as Bo Diddley, was an American guitarist who played a key role in the transition from the blues to rock and roll. He influenced many artists, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, George Thorogood, and The Clash. His use of African rhythms and a signature beat, a simple five- accent hambone rhythm, is a cornerstone of hip hop, rock, and pop music. In recognition of his achievements, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, the Blues Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2017. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Diddley is also recognized for his technical innovations, including his use of tremolo and reverb effects to enhance the sound of his distinctive rectangular-shaped guitars. Early life ...
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Howlin' Wolf
Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910January 10, 1976), better known by his stage name Howlin' Wolf, was an American blues singer and guitarist. He is regarded as one of the most influential blues musicians of all time. Over a four-decade career, he recorded in genres such as blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and psychedelic rock. He also helped bridge the gap between Delta blues and Chicago blues. Born into poverty in Mississippi as one of six children, he went through a rough childhood where his mother kicked him out of her house, and he moved in with his great-uncle, who was particularly abusive. He then ran away to his father's house where he finally found a happy family, and in the early 1930s became a protégé of legendary Delta blues guitarist and singer, Charley Patton. He started a solo career in the Deep South, playing with other notable blues musicians of the era, and at the end of a decade had made a name for himself in the Mississippi Delta. After going t ...
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Albert Grossman
Albert Bernard Grossman (May 21, 1926 – January 25, 1986) was an American entrepreneur and manager in the American folk music and rock and roll scene. He was famous as the manager of many of the most popular and successful performers of folk and folk-rock music, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Band, Odetta, Gordon Lightfoot and Ian & Sylvia. Early life Albert Grossman was born in Chicago on May 21, 1926, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who worked as tailors. He attended Lane Technical High School and graduated from Roosevelt University, Chicago, with a degree in economics. Career After finishing college Grossman worked for the Chicago Housing Authority, leaving in the late 1950s to go into the club business. Seeing folk star Bob Gibson perform at the Off Beat Room in 1956 prompted Grossman's idea of a 'listening room' to showcase Gibson and other talent, as the American folk-music revival movement grew. The result was the Gate of Horn in the b ...
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Monterey Pop Festival
The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience. The festival embodied the theme of California as a focal point for the counterculture and generally is regarded as one of the beginnings of the " Summer of Love" in 1967 and the public debut of the hippie, flower power and flower children movements and era. Because Monterey was widely promoted and heavily attended, featured historic performances, and was the subject of a popular theatrical documentary film, it became an inspiration and a template for future music festivals, including the Woodstock Festival two years later. ''Rolling Stone'' publisher Jann Wenner said "Monterey wa ...
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Bill Graham (promoter)
Bill Graham (born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca; January 8, 1931 – October 25, 1991) was a German-American impresario and rock concert promoter from the 1960s until his death in 1991 in a helicopter crash. On July 4, 1939, he was sent from Germany to France due to political uncertainty in his home country. At age 10, he settled into a foster home in the Bronx, New York. Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and subsequently from City College with a business degree. In the early 1960s, Graham moved to San Francisco, and in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter Chet Helms to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts. This eventually turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff. Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance of the '60s from the epicenter, San Francisco. Chet Helms and then Bill Graham made famous t ...
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