Lonnie McIntosh (July 18, 1941 – April 21, 2016), known as Lonnie Mack, was an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He was an early influence in the development of blues rock music, Southern rock music, and rock guitar soloing.
Mack emerged in 1963 with his breakthrough LP, The Wham of that Memphis Man. It earned him lasting renown as both a blue-eyed soul singer and a lead guitar innovator. The album's instrumental tracks included two hit singles, "Memphis" and "Wham". In them, Mack, using "top-quality technique" and "pristine" phrasing, added "edgy, aggressive, loud, and fast" melodies and runs to the predominant chords-and-riffs pattern of early rock guitar. Mack's early instrumentals raised the bar for rock guitar proficiency, helped launch the electric guitar to the top of soloing instruments in rock, and served as prototypes for the lead guitar styles of blues rock and Southern rock.
Shortly after the album's release, however, the British Invasion hit American shores, and Mack's recording career "withered on the vine". He regularly toured small venues until 1968, when Rolling Stone magazine rediscovered him, and Elektra Records signed him to a three-album contract. He was soon performing in major venues, but his multi-genre Elektra albums downplayed his lead guitar and blues rock appeal and record sales were modest. He became increasingly unhappy with the music business during this period and finally left Elektra in 1971. Over the next fourteen years, he functioned as a low-profile multi-genre recording artist, roadhouse performer, sideman, and music-venue proprietor.
In 1985, Mack resurfaced with a successful blues rock LP, Strike Like Lightning, a promotional tour featuring celebrity guitarist sit-ins, and a Carnegie Hall concert with Roy Buchanan and Albert Collins. In 1986, he headlined the Great
American Guitar Assault Tour with Buchanan and Dickey Betts. In 1990, he released another well-received blues rock album, Lonnie Mack Live! Attack of the Killer V, then retired from recording. He continued to perform, mostly in small venues, until 2004.
Early life and musical influences
Shortly before Mack's birth, his family moved from Appalachian (eastern) Kentucky to Dearborn County, Indiana, on the banks of the Ohio River. One of five children, he was born to parents Robert and Sarah Sizemore McIntosh on July 18, 1941, in West Harrison, Indiana, near Cincinnati, Ohio. He was raised on a series of nearby sharecropping farms.
Using a floor-model radio powered by a truck battery, his family routinely listened to the Grand Ole Opry country music show. Continuing to listen after the rest of the family had retired for the night, Mack became a fan of rhythm and blues and traditional black gospel music.
He began playing guitar at the age of seven, after trading his bicycle for a Lone Ranger model acoustic guitar. His mother taught him basic chords, and he was soon playing bluegrass guitar in the family band. Mack recalled that when he was "seven or eight years old" an uncle from Texas introduced him to blues guitar and that when he was about ten years of age, an "old black man" named Wayne Clark introduced him to "Robert Johnson style guitar". He soon taught himself to merge finger-picking country guitar with acoustic blues-picking, to produce a hybrid style which, Mack said, "sounded like rockabilly, but before rockabilly".
His musical influences remained diverse as he refined his playing and singing styles. In his pre-teen years, Mack was mentored by blind singer-guitarist Ralph Trotto, a country-gospel performer. Mack would skip school to play music with Trotto at the latter's house. Mack cited country picker Merle Travis, blues guitarist T-Bone Walker, R&B guitarist Robert Ward, and pop/jazz guitarist Les Paul as significant guitar influences. Significant vocal influences included R&B singers Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Hank Ballard, country singer George Jones, traditional black gospel singer Archie Brownlee, and soul music singer Wilson Pickett. Mack recorded tunes associated with most of these artists.
Mack's career-long pattern of switching and mixing within the entire range of white and black Southern roots music genres made him "as difficult to market as he was to describe." He enjoyed periods of significant commercial success as a rock artist in the 1960s and 1980s, but was mostly absent from the rock spotlight for two long stretches of his career (1971–1984 and 1991–2004), during which he continued to perform, mostly in small venues, as a roots-rock "cult figure". In the end, his "influence and standing among musicians far exceeded his (commercial) success."
In 1954, at age 13, Mack dropped out of school after a fight with a teacher. Large and mature-looking for his age, he obtained a counterfeit ID and began performing professionally in bars around Cincinnati with a band led by drummer Hoot Smith. As a 14-year-old professional electric guitarist in 1955, he "was earning $300. per week—more than most workers in the area's casket and whiskey factories." At 15, he was performing on local TV with his band, the Twilighters. He played guitar on several low-circulation recordings in the late 1950s.
In the early 1960s he became a session guitarist with Fraternity Records, a small Cincinnati label. In 1963, he recorded two hit singles for Fraternity, the proto-blues-rock guitar instrumentals "Memphis" and "Wham!". He soon recorded additional tunes to flesh out his debut album, The Wham of that Memphis Man. Mack made some notable recordings later, particularly in the 1980s, but his debut album (released October 1963) is widely considered the centerpiece of his career. It became a perennial critics' favorite:
1968: Guitar: "...in a class by himself."...Vocals: "...sincerity and intensity that's hard to find anywhere." – Alec Dubro, Rolling Stone, calling for re-issuance of Mack's discontinued 1963 debut album.
1987: "With so many trying to copy this same style, this album sounds surprisingly modern. Not many have done it this well, though." – Gregory Himes, The Washington Post
1992: "The first of the guitar-hero records is also one of the best, and for perhaps the last time, the singing on such a disc is worthy of the guitar histrionics." – Jimmy Guterman, ranking the album No. 16 in The 100 Best Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time
2007: "...a spectacular feast of down-home blues, gospel, R&B, and country chicken-pickin'...a unique vision of American roots music [that was] five years ahead of the British blues-rockers." – Dave Rubin, Inside the Blues, 1942–1982
2016: "Of all the Mack material available this is the one [album] I'd regard as absolutely essential." – Dave Stephens, Toppermost