ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard dies aged 77

Mark KennedyUpdated August 19, 2026 — 8:54am,first published 8:50amFrank Beard, the drummer for the Texas boogie-rock trio ZZ Top who kept the tempo for the band’s biggest hits like Sharp Dressed Man, Legs and Gimme All Your Lovin’, has died. He was 77.Beard was in hospice care when he died on Tuesday at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with family members at his side, according to publicist Bob Merlis. Band co-founder and guitarist Billy Gibbons, on tour with bassist Elwood Francis, hailed Beard in a statement.ZZ Top, with Frank Beard on drums, performing at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2025.Getty Images for Crossroads Guitar Festival“Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas. His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished,” Gibbons said.ZZ Top sold more than 50 million records and had six singles that reached No.1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart. Seven of their albums have been in the Billboard 200’s Top 10, and they earned three Grammy Award nominations.“I’ve found the people I was meant to play with,” Beard says in the 2019 documentary, ZZ Top: That Little Ol’ Band from Texas. “I never wanted to quit, and never wanted to get fired.”How the band came togetherBeard, from Frankston, Texas, met Gibbons in a band called The Moving Sidewalks and later introduced bassist and vocalist Dusty Hill, who had been in several bands with Beard.ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard (centre) has died at age 77, with the band confirming the news in a statement. GettyThe trio formed ZZ Top in 1969, naming themselves in part after blues singer Z.Z. Hill and influenced by the British power trio Cream and Jimmy Reed. They maintained their original line-up for more than five decades. Their signature look – long, bushy beards on Gibbons and Hill, and dark sunglasses for all – didn’t change much, either.When Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards helped induct the trio into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, he joked: “These cats know their blues, and they know how to dress it up. When I first saw them, I thought, ‘I hope these guys are not on the run, because that disguise is not going to work’.”ZZ Top songs – with their sly and humorous lyrics – were popular in Hollywood, which used Gimme All Your Lovin’ in Happy Feet, Sharp Dressed Man in Evan Almighty, Legs in Air, Sleeping Bag in I, Tonya, Tush in Dazed and Confused, Mexican Blackbird in From Dusk Till Dawn and La Grange in Armageddon.Their debut release, ZZ Top’s First Album, came out in 1970. Their sound was described as a hybrid mixing elements of rock, blues and funk into a steaming-hot Houston stew.Breaking throughThree years later, they broke through commercially with La Grange, a funky blues song on the album Tres Hombres that paid tribute to the Chicken Ranch, a brothel outside of the Texas town of La Grange that operated from 1905 until 1973 and was immortalised in the Broadway show and the film, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.In an April interview with this masthead last year, Gibbons said the band’s next hit, Tush, was a good-humoured but bruising guitar workout that turned a nonce word into a bawdy crowd-pleaser.“That has a rather interesting backstory,” Gibbons said. “We were warming up for a show, way down in Alabama in a rodeo arena with a dirt floor. It was hot, and I started cranking out a warm-up guitar riff. The lighting director came running up and said, ‘Keep at it, whatever you’re doing is resonating!’“We returned to the dressing room and grabbed a piece of paper. At the time down in Texas, the word ‘tush’ was kind of a slang word meaning fine or ‘the ultimate’ or ‘rico’ [Spanish for rich.] I said, ‘Well, let’s use this word – it means ‘the best!’”The band went on to have another hit with Cheap Sunglasses. But it was their 1983 song Eliminator – named after one of Gibbons’ custom cars – that added more production elements, synthesizers and drum machines to their stripped-down sound and yielded the hits Gimme All Your Lovin’, Legs and Sharp-Dressed Man. The band toured with a Texas-shaped stage, live rattlesnakes and a longhorn steer.Long beards weren’t always part of the band’s look. Gibbons said it happened by accident: in 1976, the trio took a long break and went abroad separately. “Although we were speaking by phone … Dusty and I did not know that we had gotten so lazy that we had decided to forget to shave,” Gibbons told The Tribune in San Luis Obispo in 2010.“So after three years we returned and showed up, and lo and behold here was this sort of wacky-looking image. And it just kind of stuck with us.”A boost from MTVThe band’s rock-chic cool played well on the nascent MTV crowd and their videos, featuring models in short skirts emerging from one of Gibbons’ custom roadsters, became a mainstay.They kept the beards, hats and cheap sunglasses in the video trilogy of Gimme All Your Lovin’, Sharp Dressed Man, and Legs, made with director Tim Newman.“ZZ Top revelled in the humour and ridiculousness of it all, busting their synchronised dance moves and spinning their white-fur guitars. These guys always got the joke, at a time when other bands were still just nervously lip-syncing in front of brick walls,” Rolling Stone magazine said in 2021.In 2021, vocalist Hill died. Later, in March 2025, the band announced via Instagram that Beard would temporarily step away from the band’s tour to tend to foot and ankle problems.Beard died weeks after ZZ Top called off its August 5 concert at the Hollywood Bowl due to his health issues. He is survived by his wife, Debbie Meredith, and three children.APFind out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.From our partners