Ritchie Blackmore was born as Richard Hugh Blackmore on April 14th, 1945 in Weston-Super-Mare, UK. He started to play guitar when he was nine and his father forced him to take classical guitar lessons. Blackmore started his recording career when he was 18.
Ritchie Blackmore formed Rainbow with Elf in February 1975. Rainbow faced several line-up changes during the years. In November 1978 Rainbow's and Ronnie James Dio's ways separated, but Rainbow existed several years after that. In 1993 Ritchie Blackmore formed Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow again, with no-one from earlier Rainbow line-ups.
History after Ronnie James Dio left Rainbow:
These days Blackmore lives in Long Island, NY, USA.
Related WWW pages:
This page is maintained by Tapio Keihänen,
E-mail: dio@iki.fi.
The page has been updated on 13.05.1999
Biography URL: http://www.dio.net/biography/,
the front page http://www.dio.net/.