Billy Strange

Billy Strange was born on September 29, 1930 in Long Beach, California, USA as William Everett Strange. He was married to Jeanne Black, Betty Jo Conrad and Joan O'Brien.

Married briefly in the 1950s to singer/actress Joan O'Brien. His present wife, Jeanne Black, was also a singer. They first connected in the 1950s, but didn't reconnect until almost 40 years later. They married in 1999.

Generally credited with inventing the "fuzz" or "feedback" guitar sound, which occurred when rehearsing his guitar solo on the rock song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo Dah" by Bobb B. Sox and the Blue Jeans in the mid-1960s. Halfway through his solo the guitar's speaker malfunctioned. He liked the distorted, faraway sound that came out of the broken speaker, and "fine-tuned" it to magnify it when he recorded the actual solo. The song was a hit, and many guitarists began copying his "fuzz" sound on their records.

Heard on the soundtracks of many Disney features, Strange also built up durable associations with both Elvis Presley and Nancy Sinatra as a writer and scorer and played themes for such TV shows as The Munsters (1964), Batman (1966) and Have Gun - Will Travel (1957).

Son of George Strange and Billie Strange. He played the trumpet first and then the guitar. He moved to Texas at age 16 where he performed in honky-tonks and dance halls before being hired by West Coast country artists like Spade Cooley and Tennessee Ernie Ford. After two decades in Hollywood, he moved to Tennessee in the early 1970s to manage a branch of the music publishing firm of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra. He was inducted into the Nashville-based Musicians Hall of Fame.