Clapton was born on 30 March 1945 in Ripley, Surrey, England, to 16-year-old Patricia Molly Clapton (7 January 1929 – March 1999) and Edward Walter Fryer (21 March 1920 – 15 May 1985), a 25-year-old soldier from Montreal, Quebec.Fryer was drafted to war before Clapton's birth and then returned to Canada. Clapton grew up believing that his grandmother, Rose, and her second husband, Jack Clapp, Patricia's stepfather, were his parents, and that his mother was actually his older sister. The similarity in surnames gave rise to the erroneous belief that Clapton's real surname is Clapp (Reginald Cecil Clapton was the name of Rose's first husband, Eric Clapton's maternal grandfather). Years later, his mother married another Canadian soldier and moved to Germany,leaving Eric with his grandparents in Surrey.
Clapton received an acoustic Hoyer guitar, made in Germany, for his thirteenth birthday, but the inexpensive steel-stringed instrument was difficult to play and he briefly lost interest. Two years later he picked it up again and started playing consistently. Clapton was influenced by blues music from an early age, and practised long hours to learn the chords of blues music by playing along to the records He preserved his practice sessions using his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, listening to them over and over until satisfied.
In 1961, after leaving Hollyfield School in Surbiton, Clapton studied at the Kingston College of Art but was expelled at the end of the academic year because his focus had remained on music rather than art. His guitar playing was sufficiently advanced that, by the age of 16, he was getting noticed.Around this time, he began busking around Kingston, Richmond, and the West End. In 1962, Clapton started performing as a duo with fellow blues enthusiast Dave Brock in pubs around Surrey. When he was 17 years old, Clapton joined his first band, an early British R&B group, the Roosters, whose other guitarist was Tom McGuinness. He stayed with this band from January until August 1963.In October of that year, Clapton did a seven-gig stint with Casey Jones & the Engineers.
we have decided to give you some of the most beautiful songs by the British blues legend Eric Clapton, These songs have achieved many successes and prizes there are written by himself and there were other artists had written so I invite you to watch these songs and don't forget to share ur opinion with us and why not tell us whats ur favorite one at the comment section down.
Its contrasting movements were reportedly composed separately by Clapton and Gordon. The piano part has also been controversially credited to Rita Coolidge, Gordon's girlfriend at the time.
The song was Clapton's best-selling single in the United States and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. In his home country the United Kingdom it reached number five on the UK Singles Chart, and also charted in the top 10 in more than twenty nations around the world. It won three Grammy Awards for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance, Song of the Year, and Record of the Year. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked "Tears in Heaven" 362nd on its list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time".
Clapton performed this track for the first time in 1992 and again in 1996, in both electric and unplugged versions. These versions of the song were completely different from the official single release in 1998. He would later retire the song in 2004, along with "Tears in Heaven", until the 50 Years Further On Up The Road world tour in 2013.