Who from North Carolina is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Here’s the list

With Link Wray’s November induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, North Carolina grows its array of individual musicians and bands celebrated by the Cleveland, Ohio, institution.

The Hall of Fame’s database of 365 inductees isn’t searchable by the state that helped give rise to the performers, so we apologize for any omissions. Also, we claim some people who aren’t North Carolina natives but spent enough time here to get their name on a marquee.

Here they are, listed in reverse order of the year of their induction:

▪ Link Wray: Born in Dunn, in Harnett County, of Shawnee heritage, Wray took to the guitar as a young boy and his interest and influence eventually spanned country, blues, gospel and folk rock. The Hall of Fame describes him as “the original punk, the inventor of the power chord, and the architect of a sound that laid the foundation for metal, punk and every genre that relies on raw, untamed noise to convey its message.” Created the song – and the sound – “Rumble” on the spot during a performance at a Virginia dance hall, The News & Observer has reported. To be inducted 2023.

▪ Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten: Born and raised in what’s now Carrboro in 1893, Cotten was a blues and folk musician best known for a song she wrote as a child. “Freight Train,” inspired by the trains that rumbled past her family’s home, and other tunes she composed such as “Shake Sugaree,” have been performed by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. Cotten herself finger-picked upside-down, playing a guitar strung for a right-handed player but with her left hand, a form that’s known as “Cotten-picking.” Working for much of her life as a domestic, she didn’t get acclaim for her music and start playing concerts until she was in her 60s. Inducted in 2022.

▪ Nina Simone: Born in Tryon in 1933, Simone began playing piano by ear at age 3, and was soon getting lessons in classical music, according to her website. She was denied admission to the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia after moving there with her family to attend. Simone began playing jazz, blues and classical music in Atlantic City to support herself, becoming known as a captivating musical storyteller, building a following all over the East Coast and launching a decades-long recording career.

Simone said she long resisted performing “protest songs” because the form of a three-minute song oversimplified the work of those seeking social equality and civil rights, but in 1963, after four girls were killed in the bombing of a Black church in Alabama, she wrote “Mississippi Goddam” and said there was no going back. The Hall of Fame says: “Simone’s unapologetic rage and accusatory voice named names and took no prisoners in the African-American struggle for equality in the early 1960s.” Inducted in 2018.

▪ Ed King: King joined the band Lynyrd Skynyrd in 1972 as a temporary replacement bassist, but stayed on as a guitarist. He played on the group’s first three albums and is credited as a writer on several of its hit songs. He left the band in 1975 because of discord between the members, and wasn’t with the group when its lead singer and a guitarist were killed along with four other people in a plane crash. He joined a reunion version of the band a decade later and stayed eight years, until heart trouble forced him to quit.

King was born in 1949 in Glendale, Calif., and played in a band called Strawberry Alarm Clock in the 1970s, The News & Observer has reported, co-writing their 1967 No. 1 hit, “Incense and Peppermints.” After the band broke up, he moved to Raleigh and played with a series of bands, including one called Smokehouse. The band relocated to Greenville, which is where King was living when Lynyrd Skynyrd recruited him. Inducted with Lynyrd Skynyrd, 2006.

▪ James Taylor: Taylor’s unmistakable sound incorporates blues, soul, pop, country and folk, all of which he would have had access to growing up in Carrboro while his father was a faculty member and then dean of the UNC School of Medicine. Taylor went back and forth between North Carolina, Massachusetts and then New York playing in various bands through high school, then moved to London, where he connected with Peter Asher of Apple Records. He recorded his debut album at the same time the Beatles were making “The White Album” at the same studio, and recorded “Sweet Baby James” in California in 1970, establishing himself and launching a career that has produced 20 studio albums so far. Taylor had a No. 1 hit in 1971 with Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Taylor is currently on tour, with dates through September. He played PNC Arena in Raleigh in June 2022.

In 2019, Taylor and his wife agreed to pay $1.7 million to victims of fraud committed over 12 years by Taylor’s brother-in-law, an Albany lawyer.

Inducted in 2000.

▪ George Clinton: Clinton grew up in Plainfield, N.J., but was born in Kannapolis in 1941. He was a hairdresser in New Jersey when he formed The Parliaments as a doo-wop band, accompanied by The Funkadelics, another Clinton creation. The group auditioned for Motown, according to the N.C. Music Hall of Fame, but didn’t get a contract, getting picked up instead by the smaller Revilot Records, where they scored one hit before the company folded and temporarily tied up The Parliaments’ name in a legal tangle.

Clinton reinvented the bands as Funkadelic and Parliament, which performed throughout the 1970s and each had several No. 1 R&B hits. Clinton simultaneously helped produce four other bands involving a loose crew of about 50 musicians with soul and early funk styles, biographies say.

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame describes Parliament and Funkadelic as “the mind-blowing, soul-expanding musical equivalent of an acid trip. They grabbed the funk movement from James Brown and took off running.” Inducted with Parliament-Funkadelic in 1997.

▪ Shirley Owens: Owens, also known as Shirley Alston Reeves, was born in Henderson. Owens and Doris Coley, later known as Doris Coley Kenner Jackson (born in Goldsboro), were two of the original members of the Shirelles. The group included two other girls and actually formed as the Poquellos in 1957 to perform at a talent show at their high school in Passaic, N..J., biographies say.

The N.C. Music Hall of Fame says the song the girls wrote for the show, “I Met Him on a Sunday,” became their first single. That was followed by “Dedicated to the One I Love,” “Tonight’s The Night,” “Mama Said,” “Baby It’s You,” and “Soldier Boy,” with Reeves serving as the main lead singer. Jackson also sometimes sang lead.

In 1960, they recorded “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, which in 1961 went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, the first record by an African-American girl group to do so. Reeves left the Shirelles in 1975 for a solo career. Coley left in 1968 but returned in 1975.

Inducted with the Shirelles, 1996.

▪ Clyde McPhatter: McPhatter was born in Durham in 1932 and as a young boy sang in the choir of the Baptist church his father pastored, according to Open Durham. He moved at age 12 with his family to New Jersey and then New York where he sang at a church in Harlem, according to the N.C. Music Hall of Fame.

Two years later he and friends started a band, then in 1950, McPhatter joined the Dominoes as their new lead singer. The Dominoes had success with “Sixty Minute Man,” but McPhatter left in 1953 looking for a more lucrative gig. He signed with Atlantic Records and with five others formed the Drifters, who had their first No. 1 record on the R&B charts that September. McPhatter left the Drifters in 1954 and had a successful solo career that included “Long Lonely Nights” and 1962’s “Little Bitty Pretty One.”

McPhatter’s high tenor voice and his use of gospel styling on R&B songs broadly influenced doo-wop and R&B music. His Rock & Roll Hall of Fame bio says, ”McPhatter was among the first singers to rhapsodize about romance in gospel’s emotionally charged style.”

Inducted individually in 1987 and with the Drifters in 1988.

Ben E. King: Born Ben Nelson in Henderson in 1938, King joined a later iteration of the Drifters in 1958. That year, while the band was on tour, King wrote “There Goes My Baby,” which the Drifters recorded in 1959 and which hit No. 2 on the pop charts. King also sang lead on the Drifters’ other big recordings of the era, including “Dance With Me,” “This Magic Moment,” and “Save The Last Dance For Me,” according to Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebook. He co-wrote the 1961 hit “Stand By Me.” Inducted with the Drifters in 1988.