Katherine Charlton is a classically trained musician who has always loved rock music. She holds degrees in classical guitar performance and music history. As a music historian teaching at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, she proposed and developed a course in the history of rock music in the early 1980s. Not happy with books available as texts at that time, she decided to write Rock Music Styles: A History, the first edition of which was published in 1990. During a sabbatical in 1990, she taught music history and history of rock music at the American Institute for Foreign Study at the University of London. During that teaching experience, she researched many places in London that were important in rock music and took her students on various different tours to see places bands formed, recorded, and other parts of the city of interest to rock music lovers. Katherine Charlton also wrote a book on general music appreciation, Experience Music, published by McGraw-Hill Education and currently in its third edition.

Art has always been Katherine’s second great love, and she has recently been studying drawing and painting with a wonderful artist, Phil Journeay, in Lake Forest, California. As an avid art student, she could not resist the opportunity to paint a tribute to such an important rock artist as Chuck Berry, and that painting has been reproduced on the cover of this book.