https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lonnie-mack-blues-rock-guitar-great-dead-at-74-178000/

LONNIE MACK, THE blues-rock pioneer who influenced an entire generation of guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duane Allman, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, died Thursday at a medical facility near his home in Smithville, Tennessee. Mack was 74. Alligator Records confirmed the guitar great’s death, adding that Mack had died of natural causes.

In Mack’s bio, he claims he started learning guitar at the age of five and, after dropping out of school in the 7th grade, pursued a professional music career as a young teenager. He played bars around the Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky stateliness before signing with Cincinnati’s Fraternity Records. Mack also served as a session guitarist for artists like James Brown, Hank Ballard and Freddie King.

Mack’s 1963 LP The Wham of That Memphis Man!, recorded for the Cincinnati-based Fraternity Records, boasted Mack’s instrumental rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis,” which became a surprise Billboard Top Five hit. Mack soon became known for his “blue-eyed soul” style of singing and his virtuosic guitar abilities that straddled genres like country, blues and R&B and, as Rolling Stone noted in a 1968 review, “a pioneer in rock guitar soloing.”

The Wham of That Memphis Man!‘s single “Wham!” also found the guitarist making groundbreaking use of a Bigsby tremolo bar that he appended to his trademark Flying V guitar; because of his work on the album, the Bigsby tremolo bar was unofficially dubbed the “Whammy bar” by a generation of guitarists. “Nobody can play with a whammy-bar like Lonnie. He holds it while he plays and the sound sends chills up your spine,” Stevie Ray Vaughan, an acolyte of Mack’s, would later say.