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Versatile guitarist who had a million-selling hit with Love Is Strange

Mickey Baker, who has died aged 87, was one of the most versatile and prolific guitarists of his era. During the 1950s, any producer making R&B or rock'n'roll records in New York would have Baker's name in his contacts book, and he played on innumerable sessions for Atlantic, Savoy and other labels, accompanying vocal groups including the Drifters and the Coasters and blues singers such as Champion Jack Dupree, Nappy Brown and Lavern Baker. Among the many hit records to which he made original and distinctive contributions were Ruth Brown's (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean, the Coasters' I'm a Hog for You and Joe Turner's Shake, Rattle and Roll.

Inspired by the successful model of the guitarist Les Paul and the singer Mary Ford, he formed a duo with the singer Sylvia Vanderpool (later Sylvia Robinson...

Like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Rev. Gary Davis, also known as Blind Gary Davis, played in the graceful Piedmont blues style of the southeastern U.S., rather than the rawer blues favored in the Mississippi Delta. Completely self-taught, Davis mastered a delicate and expressive fingerpicking style on the guitar, and played with such fluency that he never performed a song exactly the same way twice.accomplishing this despite a slightly maimed left hand which had been broken and badly set when he was young. “I don’t play the guitar,” he once said, “I play with the guitar.” Davis’ parents were both ill-suited to raising a child (“there was no confidence to be put into my mother,” Davis told his student Stefan Grossman in this short interview), and so he was brought up by his grandmother instead, growing up in rural South Carolina. He built his first...