Lonnie Mack

Singer-guitarist Lonnie McIntosh (July 18, 1941 – April 21, 2016), known by his stage name Lonnie Mack, was an influential American pioneer of blues-rock music and rock guitar soloing. Mack arrived on the pop music scene in 1963, with his proto-blues-rock debut LP, The Wham of that Memphis Man. The album's vocals established Mack's renown as a blue-eyed soul singer, but he became more widely-known for its electric guitar instrumentals, including the 1963 hit singles, Memphis and Wham!. In them, he introduced "edgy, aggressive, loud, and fast" blues solos to the prevailing chords-and-riffs format of early rock guitar. The album's guitar tracks played an early leadership role in the electric guitar's rise to the top of melodic soloing instruments in rock and have been credited with raising the bar for rock guitar proficiency. Over the next several years, they served as a "model" for the emerging lead guitarists of two new genres: blues-rock and its stylistic cousin, Southern rock.Only weeks after the album's release, however, the massively popular "British Invasion" arrived on American shores, and Mack's career "withered on the vine". He marked time touring the roadhouse circuit and doing R&B session work until the height of the blues-rock era, in 1968. At that point, Rolling Stone magazine rediscovered his pioneering blues-rock debut album, and Los Angeles' Elektra Records signed him to a three-album contract. He immediately graduated to major performance venues, but his multi-genre Elektra recordings underplayed his blues-rock appeal and were only modestly successful. Disillusioned, Mack left Elektra and Los Angeles in 1971, spending the next fourteen years as a mostly-unnoticed country music recording artist, roadhouse performer, sideman, and music-venue proprietor.In 1985, with encouragement from Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mack resurfaced with a successful blues-rock LP Strike Like Lightning, a promotional tour featuring celebrity guitarist sit-ins, and a concert at Carnegie Hall. In 1990, he released another well-received blues-rock album, Lonnie Mack Live! Attack of the Killer V, after which he retired as a recording artist. He continued to perform, mostly in smaller venues, until 2004.