Jon Corneal

Jon Corneal may not be the best drummer in rock music, or the best drummer in country music, but he does carry the distinction of being -- down to a virtual certainty -- the first drummer in country-rock, in addition to being a songwriter and occasional singer. He was part of the very first wave of the postwar baby boom, born in Auburndale, FL, in the summer of 1946, and was just old enough to get swept into the second wave of rock & roll fandom, hitting his teens just as the 1950s were drawing to a close. In 1960, at age 14, he was part of a rock & roll band that Carl Chambers and his cousin Gerald Chambers put together for a school show; out of that one-off linkup came the Dynamics, organized by Carl Chambers. Despite the band's members all being in their mid-teens, they were good enough to play across central Florida, and even made it onto local television in Tampa. Out of the Dynamics came a successor group, the Legends, made up of Corneal, the two Chambers cousins, Jim Stafford, and Gram Parsons, who was then a surf music and rock & roll enthusiast.

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