Ritchie Blackmore

English guitar virtuoso, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Ritchie Blackmore is a principal architect of the early hard rock and heavy metal sound. A scholar of blues, heavy metal, progressive rock, folk, and classical, he is a longtime member of Deep Purple, the founder of Rainbow and Blackmore's Night, and is responsible for one of the most enduring riffs of all time, Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water." With the latter group, he has recorded dozens of albums, including the classics Fireball (1971) and Machine Head (1972), and with the supergroup Rainbow (which also featu...