Jose Feliciano Behind This Guitar (Deluxe) LP

The title track on José Feliciano's 2019 album Behind This Guitar sums up, with uncanny accuracy, the still-unfolding career of this remarkable and singular figure in American musical culture of the last half-century. Puerto Rican by birth, a New Yorker (Spanish Harlem) from his childhood, José Feliciano has been a fact of American musical life since his breakthrough at the height of the Sixties - the golden age of American pop and rock music.

Behind This Guitar brings the singer/guitarist full circle with producer and old friend Rick Jarrard, whom RCA Victor assigned to produce the very young Feliciano in the late 1960s. It was Jarrard who convinced Feliciano to record The Doors' "Light My Fire" for their album Feliciano! - the record that made him a household name in 1968. Two years later, in the midst of recording a Christmas album, it was Jarrard who told Feliciano they needed a new song and encouraged Feliciano as he virtually improvised the enduring classic "Feliz Navidad".

Feliciano already had a distinctive international career when "Light My Fire" catapulted him to real pop superstardom. It was a song no one much wanted him to record except Jarrard. It was even the "B" side of the single from Feliciano! ("California Dreamin'" was the "A" side). The rest is history. The recording won Feliciano a 1968 Grammy Award® for his performance, the same year he won the Grammy for Best New Artist of the Year.

Together again for Behind This Guitar, artist and producer have rediscovered their rhythm, in collaborating on the first album Feliciano has ever recorded in Nashville. The Deluxe LP features two bonus tracks: "Eagle When She Flies", his first-ever duet with Dolly Parton, and "Feliz Navidad 50th Anniversary (FN50)", a reimagined rerecording of his bilingual holiday classic.

To date, José Feliciano has won nine Grammy Awards including Lifetime Achievement honors, plus multiple other nominations. He has released more than 60 albums in both English and Spanish, on a variety of labels, collaborating with an extraordinary array of artists. He toured the world (and continues to), maintaining a vibrant presence in the Latin music world, and even became a fixture in American television with the theme song he recorded in 1974 for the hit series Chico And The Man. In 2000, Feliciano was named a Grammy Legend and, a decade later, "Feliz Navidad" entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.