Who do you think influenced music more than anyone?

The problem is you can just keep going back until the early 20th Century.

I don't think anyone did influence more than anyone else as you are going to be biased on the genre that you listen to. Obviously we are talking in opinions here, so I am going to say Rock music was probably most heavily influenced by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson.
 
It depends a lot on the type of music you are talking, but I will assume popular music. I don't think you could ever narrow it down to a single musician, music is an evolution. Certainly not since the early Rock n Roll bands has anyone dramatically changed or shaped the face of popular music. And even the early rock n rollers had easily tracable roots in folk/blues/jazz music.

Personally I don't think the British music scene would be what it is today without the Beatles, but having said that, if they had never existed I'm sure someone would have sprung up to fill the void.

A few I would say had massive influences not mentioned:

The Byrds, Johnny Cash & Rolling Stones
 
Going to have to say The Beatles.
Although I'm willing to expand it to many of the groups of the 60s - The Kinks, The Stones etc.
As for Hendrix - Don't get me wrong, as a musician he was good, he was one of the best.
Anybody who says he was a bad musician - well please, hearing test.
As an influence I'm really not so sure - who did he really leave in his wake, bands that were directly influenced by his music?

It is going to be these old bands that continue to influence the music of tomorrow.
There really is nobody around at the moment or over the past 20+ years who you could really consider influential.
 
Elvis - fact and everyone of the artists above will tell you the same.
You might not like him and he didn't write his own material but without him music wouldn't have happened like it did.
I'm surprised you didn't do this at school in history.
 
Its not fact. Elvis took black music and made it popular, the band/person I mentioned created an entire new genre. In fact, more than one.
 
dmpoole said:
Elvis - fact and everyone of the artists above will tell you the same.
You might not like him and he didn't write his own material but without him music wouldn't have happened like it did.
I'm surprised you didn't do this at school in history.
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Actually Elvis was heavily influenced by Elmore James and other old blues/roots dudes.
 
Undoubtedly Elvis. I can't stand his music but I'm confident that every journo and music historian will say the same. He did more for modern music than anybody as ever done. It doesn't matter what influences he had its what came after. Before Elvis the public were made to put up with some of the most dire music ever and Elvis changed how we would listen to music. Of course he didn't know this was going to happen and needed DJ's to spread the word eg Alan Freed.
 
I can remember my dad saying that before Elvis and Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock the music charts were awful. Bill Haley may have been the original starter of the new wave but Elvis grabbed the whole world. Its a shame that Blue Suede Shoes was wrote by Carl Perkins but he became ill or something and couldn't record it, so they gave it to Elvis. The music charts were forever changed.
 
Gilly said:
Its not fact. Elvis took black music and made it popular, the band/person I mentioned created an entire new genre. In fact, more than one.
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In doing that he had a massive impact though; Popularisation (is that a word?) is influence in the early stages of popular music. But I think the founders of Atlantic Records, ABC and were more important than Elvis in doing this, they were the first major white record label to make black music appeal to white people on a large scale in America leading to the creation of people like Elvis, and Bill Haley.

Not in a glamourous way but more a covert way.
 
badgermonkey said:
Music, not modern music.

In which case you have to go back through history, but the most notable are people such as Bach, Mozrt, Handel, Tchaikovski (Sp?) and anyone involved the the birth of new musical eras.

People like Hendrix may have influenced MODERN musicians, but music in general was developed long before he was born.
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Good point. Probably Bach then, because of his work on tempered music. although I think that Rachmaninoff was the peak of instrumental virtuosity and the evolution of complexity within music.
 
Considering he popularised equal temperament which was used and relied upon by pretty much all of Western music to come, Bach. I can't think of any other single point which was so significant, by one person, except possibly Guido of Arezzo's invention of musical notation :)

arty
 
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They showed the world that in the 1960s the western notation system (as devised by Bach as arty points out) still had life in it - in addition they took the blues and early rock and in a very short career changed popular music.

They have a perfectly preserved body of work that always sounds fresh and new. An awesome band and true pioneers.
 
The guy who hit a rock with a bone back in - oh, when was it, the Stone Age. But seriously folks, if we're doing "Pop" music of the 20th Century onwards, it can only be Robert Johnson. There really can be only one.
 
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