This webpage has interesting short biographies of many famous flamenco guitarist.

http://www.ctv.es/USERS/norman/bios.htm

Sam, thanks for posting the link to the bios of flamenco guitarists. Many of the names of the earlier guitarists are familiar to me from reading Paco Sevilla's "enhanced biography" (Paco calls it a historical novel) of Don Antonio Chacon, Seeking Silverio: the Birth of Flamenco. I recommended this book on the old Foro, and I repeat that recommendation here. Paco Sevilla brings the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century in Andalucia to life--sights, sounds, smells, and most of all the personalities of the flamencos, including just about all of those guitarists who were alive then, and played for or were heard by Chacon, as he began to establish himself as a cantaor to be reckoned with.

I'm a big fan of Paco Sevilla's writings--he is, in my opinion, the pre-eminent popular historian of flamenco who is writing in English today. Much of what is posted in our Informacion Historica section is Paco's work. His biography of Carmen Amaya, Queen of the Gypsies, is a gold mine of information on flamenco, including many of the guitarists, from the opening of the Twentieth Century until Amaya's death in 1963. Paco is himself a flamenco guitarist, and was the publisher for years of the flamenco journal Jaleo. Check out his website at http://www.flamencobooks.com

Carlos

Thanks for Paco Sevilla's webpage. I think I will order the compas and palmas CD. This is the way I first learned and this sound like a good refresher course.