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On this day in 1945, one of the world’s most influential guitarists was born.
Eric Clapton turns 75 today.
Known for co-writing popular songs Tears in Heaven, Cocaine and Layla, the English rock and blues guitarist, singer and songwriter is the only musician to be inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times – once as a solo artist and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and of Cream.
On the day of his birth in Surrey, in the final year of World War II, no one could have predicted Clapton would live a life of stardom.
He was the son of 16-year-old Patricia Clapton and a 24-year-old Canadian soldier stationed in England.
His father was shipped off to war before Clapton’s birth and returned to his wife in Canada – never meeting his son.
Abandoned and left to fend for herself as a single teenage mother, it was incredibly difficult for Patricia to raise Clapton on her own so her parents stepped up as surrogate parents.
Many of his most popular songs have a tragic meaning behind them.
The hit song Layla was inspired by the classic poet of Persian literature, Nizami Ganjavi’s The Story of Layla and Majnun, a book that moved Clapton deeply about a young man who fell in love with an unavailable woman and went crazy because he could not marry her.
The 1991 song Tears in Heaven was written as a memorial to Clapton’s four-year-old son Conor who fell 50 storeys to his death from a New York City apartment building.
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1 Reply
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Hi Howard, not sure where I had read/seen this, but I think Eric wanted to meet his Dad in person but sadly his Dad had died before it could occur… Eric looked very much like his father and at young age, lied to about his true parents identity until he was older… I had no idea his Dad was Canadian until I had read it from the same place where I had seen about wanting to meet his Dad but it was too late…. Perhaps it was his autobiography… His current wife was a fan of his and then as fate would have it, found love with each other and have 2-3 children now….
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