Eric Patrick Clapton was born on March 30, 1945 in England. Clapton's musical career has developed from band member to solo artist and has allowed Clapton to be considered one of the premiere rock and blues guitarists in history. Clapton was raised by his grandmother who he thought was his mother until age 9 when he learned that (or this, or whatever) his "sister" was actually is mom and he was an illegitimate child. By the time Clapton was 15, he was fascinated with the blues and playing guitar (a gift for his 13th birthday) and by age 17, he had dropped out of Kingston College of Art to focus on a career in music in London.

Click here for an excellent Eric Clapton timeline of his career.

While The Yardbirds would go on to recruit fellow guitar (normally having six strings) heroes Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, Clapton had joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, and would soon emerge at the heart of one of the late 1960s' most important rock bands, Cream.

Co-founded with bass player Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, Cream combined the era's psychedelic influence with hard-rocking remakes of blues standards such as Crossroads and Born Under A Bad Sign.

Before the decade was over, Clapton and drummer Baker joined multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood and bassist Ric Grech in the so-called supergroup Blind Faith, recording a number one album that was hailed by critics.

After a spell in Delaney and Bonnie & Friends, Clapton began to test his vocal skills, recording a 1970 solo album and the widely-admired track Layla on an album recorded under the name of Derek and the Dominos.

Throughout the 1970s he enjoyed continued success with a string of solo albums featuring hits such as I Shot the Sheriff and Lay Down Sally.

During that time he has sold millions of albums and known worldwide fame - but also experienced the pain of drug and alcohol addiction and the tragic death of his son.

Born in Ripley, Surrey, on 30 March, 1945, Eric Patrick Clapton began learning the guitar as a result of his love for blues and US R&B in the shape of artists such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

He became a serious scholar of the blues, learning about its history, listening to legendary exponents such as Robert Johnson and discovering the work songs of the US deep south.

"It did something to me emotionally," he later said of his affinity with practitioners of the blues sound.

"The blues are what I've turned to, what has given me inspiration and relief in all the trials of my life."

After brief spells with various British blues bands in the early 1960s, Clapton rose to public acclaim in 1964 as a member of The Yardbirds, playing lead guitar at London's Marquee club on the band's first album, Five Live Yardbirds.

At the height of his fame Clapton was devastated by the death of his four-year-old son Conor, who fell from the 53rd-storey window of a New York City apartment in 1991. Clapton later recorded the song Tears in Heaven in tribute.

He has acknowledged a drug habit that began at art school at the age of 15. By 1969, he was drinking two bottles of vodka a day, and five years later his heroin addiction was costing him £1,500 a week.

He has been sober since 1982 and now raises millions of dollars for his drink and drugs rehabilitation centre in the Caribbean.

A winner of eight Grammys and the only triple inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Clapton, now 58, married American Melia McEnery, 27, the mother of his daughters Ella and Julie, in Surrey a year ago.

For nine years he was married to Patti Boyd, previously the wife of former Beatle George Harrison and the subject of Layla.

The Slim Shady (Universal, 1999) highlights Mathers' carefree and sarcastic attitude (the hit single My Name Is., the follow-up Just Don't Give A F**k), besides his tormented youth (Brain Damage, Rock Bottom), his freudian sense of guilt (Guilty Conscience and his questionable antisocial preaching his perverted fantasies, which frequently involve his own daughter (97' Bonnie & Clyde, in which his baby's mother gets killed and the baby helps him throw the body in the ocean, Bad Meets Evil). Mathers' songs are crafted with a parsimonious choice of instruments and a modicum of syncopated rhythms. Notwithstanding Mathers' macho humour (particularly bitter when addressing pop icons like Spice Girls or Pamela Anderson), a sense of desolation and even loneliness permeates the music, which ultimately reflects the doom and weltanschaung of the urban misfits. And the closing Still Don't Give A recapitulates this tragic leitmotiv in a quasi-classical epic. The album will top the charts for weeks in 2000.

The single Without Me is the only "consummable" song on Eminem's third album, Show (Columbia, 2002), which, for the most part, is busier promoting himself than in creating art.

Compared with the previous output, this is Eminem's "serious", "mature", "adult" album. Like David Bowie and other pop stars before him, he is beginning to worship his own life/art relationship, in a subtle bid to self-craft a personality cult. Alas, it is also the one in which the listener is subjected to an endless, unbearable rosary of his heroic attitudes in a hostile and hypocritical world (Without Me, Squaredance, Soldier, Cleaning Out My Closet, Say Goodbye Hollywood, When The Music Stops).

It is not a coincidence that Mathers' tragic peak comes with the post-Morrison Freudian nightmare of Kill You, a rap (paced by brutal pauses) that sweeps away any remaining taboos about sex and violence, a conversation piece in which vulgar language becomes "the" poetic language. To emphasize the melodrama, The Way I Am employs even death bells and a Beethoven-ish piano figure, and its rap is as visceral and desperate as Eminem music can be. When it works, Eminem's pantomime is a force of nature.

Eminem's artistic collapse continued on Encore (Shady, 2004), on which the provocative angst of the early albums was replaced by a sort of parody of such angst (Rain Man). A few rhymes (Crazy in Love), rhythms (Evil Deeds) and melodies (Yellow Brick Road) are genuinely inspired, but, let's face it, his Freudian self-analysis stinks, his Slim Shady alter-ego is yesterday's news, his self-reflections about his own celebrity are becoming quite annoying. His attempt at politics in Mosh is childish at best. He seems to thrive on controversy, not art. But then, maybe, that's precisely what his career is all about: turning controvery into an art.

The Blues. it's 12-bar, bent-note melody is the anthem of a race, bonding itself together with cries of shared self victimization. Bad luck and trouble are always present in the Blues, and always the result of others, pressing upon unfortunate and down trodden poor souls, yearning to be free from life's' troubles. Relentless rhythms repeat the chants of sorrow, and the pity of a lost soul many times over. This is the Blues.

The Blues are the essence of the African American laborer, whose spirit is wed to these songs, reflecting his inner soul to all who will listen. Rhythm and Blues, is the cornerstone of all forms of African American music.

From the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, and the platform of the Clarksdale Railway Station, the blues headed north to Beale Street in Memphis. The blues have strongly influenced almost all popular music including jazz, country, and rock and roll and continues to help shape music worldwide.

In the delta of the Mississippi River, where Robert Johnson was born, they said that if an aspiring bluesman waited by the side of a deserted country crossroads in the dark of a moonless night, then Satan himself might come and tune his guitar, sealing a pact for the bluesman's soul and guaranteeing a lifetime of easy money, women, and fame. They said that Robert Johnson must have waited by the crossroads and gotten his guitar fine-tuned.

Not much is known about Johnson other then after the death of his wife in 1930 he decided to become a bluesman. Wandering around the Delta in 1933, he met Son House and Willie Brown. When they heard him play on the guitar startled them. In an amazingly short time, Johnson had turned into a blues guitar master, hence the myth that he made a deal with the Devil.

Many of Memphis' best Blues artists left the city at the time, when Mayor "Boss" Crump shut down Beale Street to stop the prostitution, gambling, and cocaine trades, effectively eliminating the musicians, and entertainers' jobs, as these businesses closed their doors. The Blues migrated to Chicago, where it became electrified, and Detroit.

In northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire.