American singer Ringo Starr called “one of my heroes”
(Source: Bent Rej)
The life of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr was nothing short of extraordinary. As a child, at the age of six, he suffered from appendicitis and peritonitis, which resulted in a lengthy stay in hospital. At 13, he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend two years in a sanatorium. Strangely enough, Starr would probably never have started playing the drums if it hadn’t been for this second health scare.
Because Starr spent much of his youth in convalescence, he did not receive a good education. At the sanatorium, however, the medical staff made efforts to stimulate the patients’ motor activities and relieve their boredom by encouraging them to play in the hospital band. Starr became interested in percussion and initially used a mallet made from a cotton spool to tap on the cabinet next to his bed.
Starr was surrounded by music since early childhood, but drumming proved to be his true calling. “I was in the hospital band. That’s where I really started playing,” Starr recalls in The Beatles Anthology“From then on, I never wanted anything else. My grandparents gave me a mandolin and a banjo, but I didn’t want them. My grandfather gave me a harmonica. We had a piano – nothing. Just the drums.”
In his late teens, Starr began to make a splash on the Merseyside skiffle scene as the drummer for Al Caldwell’s Texans. He also played with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in the early 1960s, shortly before successfully auditioning to replace Pete Best in the Beatles. The rest, as they say, is history.
During his eight-year tenure with the Beatles, Starr changed the face of pop culture with innovative rhythms and numerous notable contributions as a singer and songwriter. For too many years, the rumor that John Lennon or Paul McCartney said, “Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles” unfairly overshadowed Starr’s efforts. This apocryphal statement was actually part of a comedy gag invented by Jasper Carrott in 1983.
During his speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2015, McCartney recalled Starr’s crucial audition for the Beatles. Starr played Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” and “made it.” “I remember the moment when we just stood there and looked at John and then at George and our faces were like, ‘Shit. What is that?’ And that was the moment. That was really the beginning of the Beatles.”
In addition to being an accomplished drummer, Starr also proved to be a formidable singer. His distinctive voice can be heard on several iconic harmonies and plays the lead role in classic hits such as “Yellow Submarine,” “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and “Octopus’s Garden,” the last of which he wrote himself.
Like his favorite composer, Ray Charles, Starr has been influenced by music of all styles, including jazz, country, folk and blues. However, Starr prefers American blues singing, and no artist receives higher praise than Lightnin’ Hopkins. In conversation with The Daily Beatle In an earlier question-and-answer session, Starr said the Texas singer was “one of my heroes.”
In 1959, the year he joined Al Caldwell’s Texans, Starr made a serious effort to get a little closer to his hero. “At 19, I tried to emigrate to Houston, Texas, because Lightnin’ Hopkins lived there, and I got a list of factories from the British consulate in Liverpool where I could find work and tried to emigrate, like teenagers do, or at least I did as a teenager,” he recalls. “They gave us some forms. This friend of mine and I filled them out and sent them off. If they had just said yes or no, who knows what path my life would have taken.”
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