Brown/Who do we think they are,1. Deep Purple’s Black Knight: The Virtuoso Identity of Ritchie Blackmore in defining the riff-driven Heavy metal of In Rock

As Kevin Ebert makes clear in Chapter 1, neither the popular riff composition status of ‘Smoke On The Water’ or the baroque-classical soloing to be found on Machine Head’s ‘Highway Star,’ as outlined by Robert Walser (1993/2014), fully do justice to the extent of Blackmore’s heavy metal legacy, not least because neither includes his seminal contribution to the definition and subsequent development of the genre, laid down in conjunction with the classic Purple band on the pivotal 1970 album, In Rock. Indeed, as Ebert notes, these claims to fame to be found in guitar features and surveys, such as Rolling Stone’s ‘100 Greatest Guitarists’ (2015) lead to Blackmore being ranked a middling 50th, while other metal guitarists are placed above him and rock guitarists above them. Some of this, as Ebert notes, is attributable to Blackmore’s ‘the man in black’ or Black Knight persona, reflected in his ‘difficult’ relationship with the rock press. But this persona itself appears to be a defensive response to a perceived lack of recognition of his contribution to heavy rock and metal song composition but also a lack of appreciation of the technical skill and sheer audacity of his ‘live’ performances. It is the combination of these two aspects that Ebert seeks to explore in his re-examining of the making of this classic.