Most Influential Musician

Interesting question.

All time influential? Jacopo Peri, and his contemporaries.  They ushered in the baroque period which gave us our modernized diatonic scales and keys. 

Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Elvis, Buddy Holley, Ray Charles, The Beatles, Cream, Dylan, Hendrix.....

It may not be anyone on a list. Actually, it would be the first being that pounded on a tree with a stick or a rock. That in itself would constitute music, and therefore during evolution it would continue to change and be what music is today. As far as the "modern era" any of the classical masters would have to be on a very short list. The Bob Dylan's, Beatles, etc. are nothing more than the continuing evolution of music, but I do enjoy Mr. B.B. King.

I have been thinking (Saints, 4-1 over the Carolina Panthers) that influential music sources have to be divided into two groups:
General - influences like Peri, Mozart, Dylan etc...           and
Personal - people in our own lives who tripped our musical triggers in a most stimulating way.

Pythagoras, who brought us the 12 tone chromatic scale.

I think the most influential musician to me was Richard Burton only because when I heard him backup Ricky Nelson I was really impressed with his fills and that was when I started getting serious about playing leads and music I was around 20 at the time and this Thursday it will be 50 years ago time flies. on a unrelated note I was watching a special on Steve Jobs he was giving a speech at a college graduation class he quipped "everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there"brilliant to the end

music is the global language................ everyone needs to speak and hear.

Now yer talkin'!

I would agree with this for the most part.   Both were reputed to be monsters on the keys, but it's their compositions that live on.  Franz Liszt suffers the same ignominious fate.  Lack of recording technology really ruined a lot of old world rock star's reputations. 

I would argue Rachmaninoff is the most influential composer and musician in that regard.  We have recordings of him, and he is a master with both the pen and the key.

So if I understand, the minor third in blues as originally sung in the fields was really sort of "flatted and a half" and we only play it minor due to the diatonic nature of modern music?

I suppose that makes sense. The music stemming from the African origins of slaves would lend itself to whatever modes African music is built on.  I don't know much about the theory behind African music, but  I would imagine that carnatic like scales with more than 12 tones would be in play.

Learn something new every day!

@Jerome: It was more like 1/2 way between flatted and natural. The quote in this wiki article is a decent summary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_note

Rachmaninoff was a frickin' stud.

Quick tangent on non-western theory:
I studied folk music of Lao river people for a college music thesis. During the course of study I learned that their scale was very very close to our major scale, with a few differences. They don't think in terms of scales and their instruments are always tuned by ear. So the instrument (called a khaen or caen) has a scale that is close to our major scale in terms of intervals but there was no common tuning, i.e. a440.

Because the instruments are hand tuned by their maker and made from pretty cheap materials (long pieces of river grass and old melted down Thai coins), the intervals were tuned inconsistency relative to how we hear music...so some notes would be off by a few cents in either direction.

At any rate, the tuning was close enough that I was able to transcribe a portion of the Lomax Anthology of American Folk Music for playing on this instrument, using a system of notation that I developed for the instrument.

What is really fascinating is that these river people developed this music and this modality with no influence from the west.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe2O_KaDkrk