Palerme, Sicily, 1964
Photo by Bruno Barbey
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October 28, 2020
Ben Harper is 51 years old today
Ben Harper is 51 years old today.
A singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Harper plays an eclectic mix of blues, folk, soul, reggae and rock music and is known for his guitar-playing skills, vocals, live performances and activism.
Harper's fan base spans several continents. His albums have been commercially successful in North America, Europe and Oceania.
Born in Pomona, California, Harper’s father, Leonard, was of African-American and Cherokee ancestry, and his mother, Ellen Chase-Verdries, is Jewish. His parents divorced when he was five, and he grew up with his mother's family. Harper has two brothers, Joel and Peter.
Harper began playing guitar as a child. His maternal grandparents' music store, The Folk Music Center and Museum, laid a foundation of folk and blues for the artist, complemented by regular patrons Leonard Cohen, Taj Mahal, John Darnielle and David Lindley. He was influenced by quotes of William Shakespeare and Robert Frost made often by his grandfather.
In 1978, at the age of nine, Harper attended reggae superstar Bob Marley's performance in Burbank, California (joined by former bandmate, Peter Tosh, in the encore, thus making it a sort of historical performance), which was, according to Harper, an important influence.
At the age of 12, Harper played his first gig. During the '80s, in his teen years, he began to play the slide guitar, mimicking the style of Robert Johnson. Next, he refined his style, taking up the Weissenborn slide guitar.
Harper broke out of the Inland Empire after being offered an invitation by Taj Mahal to tour with the artist. They recorded Taj Mahal's album, Follow the Drinking Gourd, released in November, 1990. Then they toured Hawaii.
In 1992, Harper recorded the LP, Pleasure and Pain, with folk multi-instrumentalist, Tom Freund.
After this limited edition record, Harper secured a lifetime record deal with Virgin Records, which released his debut album, Welcome to the Cruel World, in 1994. This allowed him to be invited at the Rencontres Trans Musicales of Rennes in France in December, 1993 where he appeared for the first time on a large stage.
The first album was followed by, Fight For Your Mind, in 1995, with Juan Nelson on bass. It became a college radio favorite and included several songs that Harper still plays live regularly.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is 65 years old today
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, is 65 years old today.
In this photo, from the late 1980s, Gates explains his concept of Microsoft’s “office.”
It was then to be a paperless office. That didn’t quite work out.
Photo by Frank Beacham
The second "Apache trial" began for Chuck Berry 59 years ago today
The second "Apache trial" began for Chuck Berry 59 years ago today.
Although his earlier conviction for transporting a minor across state lines for immoral purposes in violation of the Mann Act was thrown out on appeal, the aggressive prosecution decided to retry Berry.
Chuck Berry was one of the biggest pop stars of the late 1950s when he began to have legal problems. While charges in yet another Mann Act violation were pending (which were dismissed in 1960), Berry met Janice Escalante, a Native American with roots in the Apache tribe, in a bar near El Paso, Texas.
According to Berry, who took the young woman on the road with his traveling rock show, Escalante claimed to be 21-years-old. After there was a falling out between the two, Escalante complained about Berry to the authorities.
During his second trial, Berry was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. After a short stretch in Leavenworth Federal Prison, he was transferred to a Missouri jail, where he spent his time studying accounting and writing songs.
Among the songs he wrote before his release from prison in October, 1963 were "No Particular Place to Go" and "You Never Can Tell," later memorialized in the film, Pulp Fiction.
Photo by Frank Driggs
On this day in 1957 — after a show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles — local police told Elvis Presley that he was not allowed to wiggle his hips onstage
On this day in 1957 — after a show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles — local police told Elvis Presley that he was not allowed to wiggle his hips onstage.
The local press ran headlines saying Elvis would have to clean up his act.
The next night, the Los Angeles Vice Squad filmed Elvis entire concert to study his performance.
Here, Elvis performs live on the Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show at a CBS studio in New York a year earlier.
Frank Gehry: A Brief Moment of Honesty
A brief moment of honesty...
In 2014, architect Frank Gehry was in Oviedo, Spain at a press conference related to the country’s Prince of Asturias Awards for the arts.
Gehry, now 91, made news when a questioner asked him his response to charges he created architecture for show.
“In the world we live in, 98 percent of what gets built and designed today is pure shit. ... There’s no sense of design nor respect for humanity or anything. They’re bad buildings and that’s it.
“Every now and then, however, a small number of people do something special. They’re very few. But — my God! — leave us in peace! We dedicate ourselves to our work. I don’t beg for work. I don’t have publicists. I’m not waiting for people to call me. I work with clients who have respect for the art of architecture. At the very least, don’t ask stupid questions like this.”
Charlie Daniels was born 84 years ago today
Charlie Daniels was born 84 years ago today.
Daniels was a musician known for his contributions to country and southern rock music. He was best known for his #1 country hit, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," and many other songs he wrote and performed.
Daniels was a singer, guitarist and fiddler, who began writing and performing in the 1950s. He was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry on January 24, 2008 and the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2009.
In 1964, Daniels co-wrote, "It Hurts Me," a song which Elvis Presley recorded with Joy Byers. He worked as a Nashville session musician, often for producer Bob Johnston, including playing electric bass on three Bob Dylan albums during 1969 and 1970, and on recordings by Leonard Cohen.
Daniels recorded his first solo album, Charlie Daniels, in 1971. He produced the 1969 album by The Youngbloods, Elephant Mountain and played the violin on "Darkness, Darkness."
During the 1970s, Daniels played fiddle on many of The Marshall Tucker Band's early albums: "A New Life." "Where We All Belong," "Searchin' For a Rainbow," "Long Hard Ride" and "Carolina Dreams,"
In 1975, he had a Top 30 hit as leader of the Charlie Daniels Band with the Southern rock self-identification anthem, "The South's Gonna Do It Again." "Long Haired Country Boy" was a minor hit in that year.
Daniels played fiddle on Hank Williams, Jr.'s 1975 album, Hank Williams, Jr. and Friends.
Daniels performed in 1979 film, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," which reached #3 on the Hot 100 in September, 1979. The following year, "Devil" became a major crossover success on rock radio stations after its inclusion on the soundtrack for the hit movie, Urban Cowboy.
The song was by far Daniels' greatest success, still receiving regular airplay on U.S. classic rock and country stations, and is well-known even among audiences who eschew country music in general.
Daniels died on July 6, 2020, at the age of 83 of a hemorrhagic stroke at Summit Medical Center in Nashville.
October 27, 2020
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice released the album Jesus Christ Superstar 50 years ago today
Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar
From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, it was common for original cast recordings of successful Broadway musicals to find their way up near the top of the pop album charts.
Hit shows like West Side Story, The Sound of Music and Funny Girl, among several others, all spun off million-selling albums during this era. But by the late 1960s, the pop album charts had been decisively taken over by rock.
It was in this environment that a young British composer and his lyricist partner managed to achieve a massive success by precisely reversing the old formula.
On this day in 1970 — 50 years ago — Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who would go on to become the most successful composer-lyricist team in modern theater history, released a double-LP "concept" album called Jesus Christ Superstar, which only later would become the smash-hit Broadway musical of the same name.
Jesus Christ Superstar was the third musical written by Lloyd Webber and Rice, following on The Likes of Us, which was staged for the first time in 2005, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which saw only limited performances in various English churches between 1968 and 1970.
Superstar grew out of Tim Rice's longtime fascination with Judas Iscariot, whom he conceived not as a craven betrayer of Jesus, but rather as a dear friend struggling with the implications of Jesus' growing celebrity.
Although the musical would later find broad support among leaders of liberal Christian churches, it was nevertheless too controversial to gain the financial backing necessary for a stage production. For that reason, Lloyd Webber and Rice therefore chose to package Superstar as an album first.
Working with a cast that included Murray Head — later of the pop hit "One Night In Bangkok" (1985) — in the role of Judas, and Yvonne Elliman — of the 1977 #1 hit "If I Can't Have You" — as Mary Magdalene, Lloyd Webber and Rice recorded the Jesus Christ Superstar album in the summer of 1970 and released it in Britain and the United States the following fall.
Then as now, Lloyd Webber and Rice had their detractors in the critical establishment. Writing for The New York Times, critic Don Heckman questioned whether this new "rock opera" deserved praise either as rock or as an opera.
"As rock, it leaves much to be desired," he wrote. And in relation to 20th century operas by the likes of Stravinsky and Gershwin, Heckman argued, "The comparison is pretty devastating."
Nevertheless the Jesus Christ Superstar album spawned a Top 40 single in versions of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" by both Yvonne Elliman and Helen Reddy, and it shot all the way to the top of the Billboard album charts in early 1971, paving the way for a smash Broadway opening later that year.
Here, Carl Anderson performs “Superstar” from the movie
Dylan Thomas was born 106 years ago today
Dylan Thomas at the bar of the White Horse Tavern, 1952
Dylan Thomas was born 106 years ago today.
A Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” "And Death Shall have No Dominion,” the "Play for Voices,” Under Milk Wood and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
Thomas became popular in his lifetime, and remained popular after his death — partly due to his larger than life character and his reputation for drinking to excess.
Born in Swansea, Wales in 1914, Thomas was undistinguished student. He left school at 16, becoming a journalist for a short time. Although many of his works appeared in print while a teenager, it was the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines,” published in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world.
While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937. Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive. In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth, settling in the Welsh fishing village of Laugharne.
Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult, which resulted in Thomas augmenting his income with readings and broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the latter half of the 1940s brought him a level of celebrity.
In the 1950s, Thomas travelled to America, where his readings brought him a level of fame, though his erratic behavior and drinking worsened. His time in America cemented Thomas' legend, where he recorded to vinyl works such as A Child's Christmas in Wales.
The Scottish poet, Ruthven Todd, introduced Thomas to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, and the great Welsh bard was soon quaffing oceans of ale in the Horse's back room. Thomas made the tavern his headquarters on his tumultuous stateside forays, and soon tourists were lining up eight deep at the bar to watch him carouse.
Today, a plaque on the wall commemorates the November night in 1953 when the poet — still only 39 — downed one last shot, staggered outside and collapsed. After falling into a coma at the nearby Chelsea Hotel, he was whisked to St. Vincent's Hospital where he died.
Throughout his life, Thomas was close to attorney William Kunstler, who discovered him while a French major at Yale. Kunstler published one of his books, represented Thomas and was called to join him at the hospital after he collapsed outside the White Horse Tavern.
Although writing exclusively in the English language, Thomas has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. Noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery, Thomas' position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, though this has not tarnished his popularity amongst the general public, who found his work accessible.
Barbed wire was patented 147 years ago today — illustrating man’s inhumanity to humans and animals
On this day in 1873 — 147 years ago — a De Kalb, Illinois, farmer named Joseph Glidden submitted an application to the U.S. Patent Office for his new design of a fencing wire with sharp barbs — an invention that would forever illustrate man’s inhumanity to other humans and animals.
Glidden’s was by no means the first barbed wire. He only came up with his design after seeing an exhibit of Henry Rose’s single-stranded barbed wire at the De Kalb county fair. Glidden’s design, however, significantly improved on Rose’s by using two strands of wire twisted together to hold the barbed spur wires firmly in place.
Glidden’s wire proved to be well suited to mass production techniques, and by 1880 more than 80 million pounds of inexpensive Glidden-style barbed wire was sold, making it the most popular wire in the nation.
Prairie and plains farmers quickly discovered that Glidden’s wire was the cheapest, strongest and most durable way to fence their property. As one fan wrote, “it takes no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds, makes no snowdrifts and is both durable and cheap.”
The effect of this simple invention on the life in the Great Plains was huge. Since the plains were largely treeless, a farmer who wanted to construct a fence had little choice but to buy expensive and bulky wooden rails shipped by train and wagon from distant forests.
Without the alternative offered by cheap and portable barbed wire, few farmers would have attempted to homestead on the Great Plains, since they could not have afforded to protect their farms from grazing herds of cattle and sheep. Barbed wire also brought a speedy end to the era of the open-range cattle industry.
Within the course of just a few years, many ranchers discovered that thousands of small homesteaders were fencing over the open range where their cattle had once freely roamed, and that the old technique of driving cattle over miles of unfenced land to railheads in Dodge City or Abilene was no longer possible.
The New York City subway opened on this day in 1904
New York City Mayor McClellan, in the middle, at the controls of the subway on opening day in 1904
At 2:35 p.m. on October 27, 1904 — 116 years ago — New York City Mayor George McClellan took the controls on the inaugural run of the city's innovative new rapid transit system: the subway.
While London boasts the world's oldest underground train network (opened in 1863) and Boston built the first subway in the United States in 1897, the New York City subway soon became the largest American system.
The first line, operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), traveled 9.1 miles through 28 stations.
Running from City Hall in lower Manhattan to Grand Central Terminal in midtown, and then heading west along 42nd Street to Times Square, the line finished by zipping north, all the way to 145th Street and Broadway in Harlem.
On opening day, Mayor McClellan so enjoyed his stint as engineer that he stayed at the controls all the way from City Hall to 103rd Street. At 7 p.m. that evening, the subway opened to the general public, and more than 100,000 people paid a nickel each to take their first ride under Manhattan.
IRT service expanded to the Bronx in 1905, to Brooklyn in 1908 and to Queens in 1915. Since 1968, the subway has been controlled by the Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA).
The system now has 469 stations in operation; the longest line, the 8th Avenue "A" Express train, stretches more than 32 miles, from the northern tip of Manhattan to the far southeast corner of Queens.
No matter how crowded or dirty, the subway is one New York City institution few New Yorkers — or tourists — could do without.
City Hall Subway, 1904, New York City
Roy Lichtenstein, the American pop artist, was born 97 years ago today
Roy Lichtenstein, the American pop artist, was born 97 years ago today.
During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist, Lichtenstein became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art through parody.
Favoring the comic strip as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described pop art as not American painting, but industrial painting.
Whaam! and Drowning Girl are generally regarded as Lichtenstein's most famous works, with Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But... arguably third. Drowning Girl, Whaam! and Look Mickey are regarded as his most influential works.
Woman with Flowered Hat has held the record for highest Lichtenstein auction price since May 15, 2013.
Lichtenstein died in 1997 at age 73.
On this day in 1955 — 65 years ago — Rebel Without a Cause opened in American movie theaters, a month after its 24-year-old star, James Dean, died in a car crash
On this day in 1955 — 65 years ago — Rebel Without a Cause opened in American movie theaters, a month after its 24-year-old star, James Dean, died in a car crash.
The film is now part of the National Film Registry for its cultural, historic and aesthetic significance.
The film is a 1955 Warner drama about emotionally confused suburban, middle-class teenagers filmed in CinemaScope. The film stars James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood.
Directed by Nicholas Ray, it offered both social commentary and an alternative to previous films depicting delinquents in urban slum environments.
Over the years, the film has achieved landmark status for the acting of cultural icon James Dean, fresh from his Oscar nominated role in East of Eden and who died before the film's release, in his most celebrated role. This was the only film during Dean's lifetime in which he received top billing.
The film was a groundbreaking attempt to portray the moral decay of American youth, critique parental style, and explore the differences and conflicts between generations.
The title was adopted from psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner's 1944 book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath.
The film itself, however, does not reference Lindner's book in any way.
Ruby Dee, the actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and activist, was born 98 years old today
Actress Ruby Dee gives a reading at Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963
Photo by Charles Del Vecchio
Ruby Dee, the actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and activist, was born 98 years old today.
Dee was best known for co-starring in the film, A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and the film, American Gangster (2007), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Dee won a Grammy, Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, among scores of others awards.
Ruby Wallace married blues singer Frankie Dee in the mid-1940s, but later divorced him. Three years later, she married actor Ossie Davis.
Dee and Davis were longtime civil rights activists who served as masters of ceremony at the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. They were principle financial backers of Dr. King.
Davis eulogized Malcolm X at his funeral. In 1995, the couple was awarded the Presidential Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. After Ossie Davis died at the age of 87 on February 4, 2005, Dee continued her career.
She appeared in the 2005 TV movie, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was executive produced by Oprah Winfrey. Dee received her first Oscar nomination for her performance as the mother of drug kingpin Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, in 2007’s American Gangster, also starring Russell Crowe.
The octogenarian actress, who was the second-oldest Oscar nominee in history (behind Gloria Stuart for Titanic), lost the Best Supporting actress award to Tilda Swinton for the film, Michael Clayton.
Together, Dee and Davis wrote an autobiography in which they discuss their political activism as well as insights on their open marriage. Together they had three children: a son, blues musician Guy Davis, and two daughters, Nora Day and Hasna Muhammad.
Dee survived breast cancer for more than 30 years. She died on June 11, 2014 at age 91.
Lee Krasner, the influential abstract expressionist painter, was born 112 years ago today
Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner, an an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century, was born 112 years ago today.
On October 25, 1945, Krasner married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the abstract expressionism movement.
She was born as Lena Krassner (outside the family she was known as Lenore Krasner) in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia.
Krasner studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction.
When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, "This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman."
In 1940, she started showing her works with the American Abstract Artists, a group of American painters. Krasner would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create collages and, at times, revised or discarded an entire series. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small.
Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists only 599 known pieces. She was rigorously self-critical. Her critical eye is believed to have been important to Pollock's work.
Krasner struggled with the public's reception of her identity, both as a woman and as the wife of Pollock. Therefore she often signed her works with the genderless initials "L.K." instead of her more recognizable full name.
Krasner and Pollock gave each other reassurance and support during a period when neither's work was well-appreciated. Like Picasso during the brief period of his interaction with Braque, the daily give-and-take of Pollock and Krasner stimulated both artists.
Pollock and Krasner fought a battle for legitimacy, impulsiveness and individual expression. They opposed an old-fashioned, conformist and repressed culture unreceptive to these values, which was put off by the intricacy of Modernism in general.
Lee Krasner died in 1984, at age 75, from natural causes. She had been suffering from arthritis. Six months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of her work.
A review of the exhibition in the New York Times noted that it "clearly defines Krasner's place in the New York School" and that she "is a major, independent artist of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation, whose stirring work ranks high among that produced here in the last half-century."
As of 2008, Krasner is one of only four women artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. The other three women artists are Louise Bourgeois (MoMA retrospective in 1982), Helen Frankenthaler (MoMA retrospective in 1989) and Elizabeth Murray (MoMA retrospective in 2004).
Her papers were donated to the Archives of American Art in 1985. They were digitized and posted on the web for researchers in 2009. After her death, her East Hampton property became the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, and is open to the public for tours. A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established in 1985.
The Foundation functions as the official Estate for both Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and also, under the terms of her will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need."
Krasner was portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Marcia Gay Harden in the 2000 film, Pollock, a drama about the life of her husband, Jackson Pollock, played and directed by Ed Harris.
In John Updike's novel, Seek My Face (2002), a significant portion of the main character's life is based on Krasner's.
Floyd Cramer, the Nashville pianist, was born 87 years ago today
Floyd Cramer (in foreground) with Jim Reeves and the Anita Kerr singers in a recording session at RCA studios, Nashville, Oct. 25, 1962
Photo by Joe Rudis
Floyd Cramer, the Nashville pianist, was born 87 years ago today.
Cramer was a Hall of Fame pianist who was one of the architects of the "Nashville sound.” He was known for his "slip note" piano style, where an out-of-key note slides into the correct note.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Cramer grew up in the small town of Huttig, Arkansas, teaching himself to play the piano. After finishing high school, he returned to Shreveport, where he worked as a pianist for the Louisiana Hayride radio show.
In 1953, he cut his first single, "Dancin' Diane,” backed with "Little Brown Jug,” for the local Abbott label. He then toured with an emerging talent who would later figure significantly in his career, Elvis Presley.
Cramer moved to Nashville in 1955 where the use of piano accompanists in country music was growing in popularity. By the next year he was, in his words, "in day and night doing sessions.”
Before long, he was one of the busiest studio musicians in the industry, playing piano for stars such as Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, Patsy Cline, The Browns, Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold, Roy Orbison, Don Gibson and the Everly Brothers.
It was Cramer's piano playing, for example, on Presley's first national hit, "Heartbreak Hotel.” However, Cramer remained strictly a session player, a virtual unknown to anyone outside the music industry.
Cramer had released records under his own name since the early 1950s, and became well known following the release of 1960’s "Last Date,” a 45 rpm single. The instrumental piece exhibited the "slip note" style.
The record went to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 pop music chart, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. Interestingly, the song was kept out of the #1 position by Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight.”
In 1961, Cramer had a hit with "On the Rebound," which went to #3, and #1 on the UK chart. That same year Cramer also hit with "San Antonio Rose" (#8).
By the mid-1960s, Cramer had become a respected performer, making numerous record albums and touring with guitar maestro, Chet Atkins, and saxophonist, Boots Randolph. He also performed with them as a member of the Million Dollar Band.
Over the years, Cramer continued to balance session work with his own albums. Many of these featured standards or popular hits of the era and from 1965 to 1974 he annually recorded a disc of the year's biggest hits prefaced "Class of . . ."
In 1977, Floyd Cramer and the Keyboard Kick Band was released, on which he played eight different keyboard instruments.
Floyd Cramer died of lung cancer in 1997 at the age of 64.
Sylvia Plath was born 88 years ago today
Sylvia Plath on the beach, June, 1954
Photo by Gordon Ames Lameyer
Sylvia Plath was born 88 years ago today.
A poet, novelist and short story writer, Plath was born in Boston and studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer.
She married fellow poet, Ted Hughes, in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England. They had two children together, Frieda and Nicholas.
After suffering from depression from the age of 20 and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel.
In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems.
She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
October 26, 2020
Beat poet Diane di Prima died on Sunday at the age of 86
Beat poet Diane di Prima died on Sunday at the age of 86. No cause of death was given.
di Prima was also an artist, prose writer, memoirist, playwright, social justice activist, fat acceptance activist and teacher. She authored nearly four dozen books, with her work translated into more than 20 languages.
Born in Brooklyn in 1934, she attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. She was "a second generation American of Italian descent" and her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman.
Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published in 1958 by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.
Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently. Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later hippies, as well as between East Coast and West Coast artists.
She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press.
On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear. In 1961 she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for publishing two poems in The Floating Bear.
According to di Prima, police persistently harassed her due to the nature of her poetry. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the first two editions of "Psychedelic Prayers" by Leary in Spring 1966.
In 1969, she wrote a fictionalized, erotic account detailing her experience in the Beat movement titled Memoirs of a Beatnik. From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught Poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg (co-founder of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others. In 2001, she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.
Mahalia Jackson, “The Queen of Gospel” music, was born 109 years ago today
Mahalia Jackson, “The Queen of Gospel” music, was born 109 years ago today.
Possessing a powerful contralto voice, Jackson was one of the most influential gospel singers in the world and was heralded internationally as a singer and civil rights activist.
She recorded about 30 albums (mostly for Columbia Records) during her career, and her 45 rpm single releases included a dozen million-selling gold records.
Born as Mahala Jackson and nicknamed "Halie,” Jackson grew up in the Black Pearl section of the Carrollton neighborhood of Uptown New Orleans, Louisiana. The three-room dwelling on Pitt Street housed thirteen people and a dog.
When she was born Halie suffered from genu varum, or "bowed legs.” The doctors wanted to perform surgery by breaking her legs, but one of the resident aunts opposed it.
Halie's mother would rub her legs down with greasy dishwater. The condition never stopped young Halie from performing her dance steps for the white woman for whom her mother and Aunt Bell cleaned house. Mahalia was five when her mother Charity died, leaving her family to decide who would raise Halie and her brother. Aunt Duke assumed this responsibility, and the children were forced to work from sunup to sundown.
In 1927, at the age of sixteen, Jackson moved from the south to Chicago in the midst of the Great Migration. After her first Sunday church service, where she had given an impromptu performance of her favorite song, "Hand Me Down My Silver Trumpet, Gabriel," she was invited to join the Greater Salem Baptist Church Choir.
She began touring the city's churches and surrounding areas with the Johnson Gospel Singers, one of the earliest professional gospel groups.
In 1929, Jackson met the composer, Thomas A. Dorsey, known as the Father of Gospel Music. He gave her musical advice, and in the mid-1930s they began a fourteen-year association of touring, with Jackson singing Dorsey's songs in church programs and at conventions. His "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" became her signature song.
In 1936, Jackson married Isaac Lanes Grey Hockenhull ("Ike"), a graduate of Fisk University and Tuskegee Institute, who was 10 years her senior. Though under constant pressure, Mahalia refused to sing secular music, a pledge she would keep throughout her professional life. She divorced Isaac over the issue in 1941.
Jackson played an important role during the civil rights movement. In August, 1956, she met Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the National Baptist Convention. A few months later, both King and Abernathy contacted her about coming to Montgomery, Alabama to sing at a rally to raise money for the bus boycott. They also hoped that she would inspire the people who were getting discouraged with the boycott.
Despite death threats, Jackson agreed to sing in Montgomery on December 6, 1956. By then, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder vs. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional. In Montgomery, the ruling was not yet put into effect, so the bus boycott continued.
After the concert, when she returned to the Abernathy's home, it was bombed. The boycott finally ended on December 21, 1956 when federal injunctions were served, forcing Montgomery to comply with the court ruling.
Although she was internationally known, she still encountered racial prejudice when trying to buy a home. Everywhere she went, the white owners and real estate agents would turn her away, claiming that houses she wanted to buy had already been sold. When she finally found a house, the neighbors were not happy.
Shots were fired at her windows and she had to contact the police for protection. White families started moving out and black families started moving in. Everything remained the same in her neighborhood except for the skin color of the residents.
From this point forward, she appeared often with Rev. King, singing before his speeches.
When King called on her, she never refused, traveling with him to the deepest parts of the segregated south. She performed “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned” before King gave his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She also sang "Precious Lord" at his funeral in 1968.
Jackson died in Chicago on January 27, 1972 of heart failure and diabetes complications.
On this day in 1970 — 50 years ago — a wake was held at the Lion's Share in San Anselmo, California to celebrate the life of Janis Joplin.
On this day in 1970 — 50 years ago — a wake was held at the Lion's Share in San Anselmo, California to celebrate the life of Janis Joplin.
The singer, who died of an accidental drugs overdose, had left $2,500 in her will to throw a wake party in the event of her demise. The party was attended by her sister, Laura, and Joplin's close friends.
Brownies laced with hashish were unknowingly passed around amongst the guests. Joplin was cremated in the Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Mortuary in Los Angeles.
Her ashes were scattered from a plane into the Pacific Ocean and along Stinson Beach.
Photo of Janis Joplin, 1970
Bootsy Collins is 69 years old today
Bootsy Collins, the funk bassist, singer and songwriter, is 69 years old today.
Rising to prominence with James Brown in the late 1960s, and with Parliament-Funkadelic in the '70s, Collins's driving bass guitar and humorous vocals established him as one of the leading names in funk.
With his elder brother, Phelps "Catfish" Collins, Frankie "Kash" Waddy and Philippé Wynne, Collins formed a funk band called The Pacemakers in 1968.
In March, 1970, after most of the members of James Brown's band quit over a pay dispute, The Pacemakers were hired as Brown's backing band and they became known as The J.B.'s. They are often referred to as the "original" J.B.'s to distinguish them from later line-ups that went by the same name.
Although they worked for Brown for only 11 months, the original J.B.'s played on some of Brown's most intense funk recordings, including "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” "Bewildered (1970),” "Super Bad,” "Soul Power,” "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing,” and two instrumental singles, the much-sampled, "The Grunt" and "These Are the J.B.’s.”
After parting ways with Brown, Collins returned to Cincinnati and formed House Guests with his brother, Phelps Collins, as well as Rufus Allen, Clayton "Chicken" Gunnels, Frankie Waddy, Ronnie Greenaway and Robert McCullough.
The House Guests released "What So Never the Dance" and another single on the House Guests label, as well as a third, “The Sound of Vision.”
Next Collins moved to Detroit, after Philippé Wynne suggested joining The Spinners, for whom Wynne had been singing. However, following the advice of singer and future Parliament member Mallia Franklin, Collins had another choice.
Franklin introduced both Collins brothers to George Clinton. In 1972, both of the Collins brothers, along with Waddy, joined Funkadelic. Collins played bass on most of Funkadelic and all of Parliament's albums (with the exception of Osmium) through the early 1980s, garnering several songwriting credits as well.
In 1976, Collins, Catfish, Waddy, Joel Johnson, Gary "Mudbone" Cooper, Robert Johnson and The Horny Horns formed Collin’s Rubber Band, a separate touring unit of Clinton's P-Funk collective. The group recorded five albums together, the first three of which are often considered to be among the quintessential P-Funk recordings.
The group's 1978 album, Bootsy? Player of the Year, reached the top of the R&B album chart and spawned the #1 R&B single, "Bootzilla.” Like Clinton, Collins took on several alter egos, from Casper the Funky Ghost to Bootzilla, "the world's only rhinestone rockstar monster of a doll,” all as parts of the evolving character of an alien rock star who grew gradually more bizarre as time went on (see P-Funk mythology). He also adopted his trademark "space bass" around this time.
In the 90s, Collins collaborated with bluegrass legends Del McCoury, Doc Watson and Mac Wiseman to form the GrooveGrass Boyz. They produced a fusion of bluegrass and funk.
In October, 2010, Collins was awarded a Bass Player Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award at the Key Club in Los Angeles.
In July, 2010, Collins, in partnership with former child actor, Cory Danziger, launched Funk University ("Funk U"), an online-only bass guitar school in which he also serves as curator and lead professor. Funk University offers an intense curriculum tailored for intermediate to advanced bass players as well as anyone interested in a deeper understanding of funk.
Maggie Roche, a member of the Roches, was born 69 years old today
Maggie Roche, 1979
Photo by Irene Young
Maggie Roche, a member of the Roches folksinging group, was born 69 years old today.
For Christmas, 1964, 13-year-old Maggie was given a guitar, and the family (also including a third sister, Suzzy, and a brother, David) learned to play folk songs by watching Laura Weber on public television.
As teenagers in the late '60s, Maggie and Terre formed a duo and got their first break when they were signed to Marilyn Lipsius' Coffee House Circuit, an agency that booked acts at colleges.
In 1971, Maggie boldly introduced herself to her songwriting idol, Paul Simon, which led to the duo becoming his protégés and singing backup vocals on "Was a Sunny Day" on his second solo album, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973).
They spent two years performing on the college circuit, ending up in San Francisco and falling in with the remnants of the counter culture movement, people whose interests would later be dubbed new age. The duo eventually hitchhiked to Louisiana with a friend involved with the martial arts, staying at what they have described as a "Kung Fu temple" in Hammond.
Returning to the East Coast, they were signed to a production company by Simon, which in turn led to a contract with Simon's label, Columbia Records.
Their debut album, Seductive Reasoning (1975), contained one track produced by Simon, "If You Empty Out All Your Pockets You Could Not Make the Change," and the rest produced by either David Hood and Jimmy Johnson of the Muscle Shoals Sound Rhythm Section (which played on the album) or by Paul Samwell-Smith, a former member of the Yardbirds.
The album's songs, written by Maggie, chronicled the sisters' recent cross-country adventures. The album was positively reviewed, but it did not sell. The sisters abandoned music and went back to Louisiana for a time, working as waitresses while they, as Terre later put it, "sought to discover the key to a harmonious existence."
They returned to New York City in 1976 and, during the holiday season, sang Christmas carols for fun on street corners along with their younger sister, Suzzy. They had enough fun that they began to rehearse seriously as a trio. By this time, Maggie and Terre were working as bartenders at the famed Greenwich Village club, Folk City, and soon the trio, calling themselves the Roches, were on-stage there.
With the addition of the more outgoing and overtly comical, Suzzy, and with all three sisters writing songs, the Roches were a distinctly different act from Maggie and Terre Roche. They caught on in 1979, releasing the first of what would be ten albums that tended to follow the pattern of Seductive Reasoning, earning critical kudos but negligible sales.
On January 21, 2017, Maggie Roche died of cancer at the age of 65.
The legendary shootout at the OK Corral occurred 139 years ago today
On this day in 1881 — 139 years ago — the Earp brothers faced off against the Clanton-McLaury gang in the legendary shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
After silver was discovered nearby in 1877, Tombstone quickly grew into one of the richest mining towns in the Southwest. Wyatt Earp, a former Kansas police officer working as a bank security guard, and his brothers, Morgan and Virgil, the town marshal, represented "law and order" in Tombstone, though they also had reputations as being power-hungry and ruthless.
The Clantons and McLaurys were cowboys who lived on a ranch outside of town and sidelined as cattle rustlers, thieves and murderers.
In October, 1881, the struggle between these two groups for control of Tombstone and Cochise County ended in a blaze of gunfire at the OK Corral.
On the morning of October 25, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury came into Tombstone for supplies. Over the next 24 hours, the two men had several violent run-ins with the Earps and their friend, Doc Holliday. Around 1:30 p.m. on October 26, Ike's brother, Billy, rode into town to join them, along with Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne.
The first person they met in the local saloon was Holliday, who was delighted to inform them that their brothers had both been pistol-whipped by the Earps. Frank and Billy immediately left the saloon, vowing revenge.
Around 3 p.m., the Earps and Holliday spotted the five members of the Clanton-McLaury gang in a vacant lot behind the OK Corral, at the end of Fremont Street.
The famous gunfight that ensued lasted all of 30 seconds, and around 30 shots were fired. Though it's still debated who fired the first shot, most reports say that the shootout began when Virgil Earp pulled out his revolver and shot Billy Clanton point-blank in the chest, while Doc Holliday fired a shotgun blast at Tom McLaury's chest.
Though Wyatt Earp wounded Frank McLaury with a shot in the stomach, Frank managed to get off a few shots before collapsing, as did Billy Clanton.
When the dust cleared, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded. Ike Clanton and Claiborne had run for the hills.
Sheriff John Behan of Cochise County, who witnessed the shootout, charged the Earps and Holliday with murder. A month later, however, a Tombstone judge found the men not guilty, ruling that they were "fully justified in committing these homicides."
The famous shootout has been immortalized in many movies, including Frontier Marshal (1939), Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994).
Pat Conroy, the writer, was born 75 years ago today
Pat Conroy, the writer, was born 75 years ago today.
Conroy wrote several acclaimed novels and memoirs. Two of his novels, The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, were made into Oscar-nominated films. He is recognized as a leading figure of late-20th century Southern literature.
Born in Atlanta, he was the eldest of seven children (five boys and two girls) born to Marine Colonel Donald Conroy, of Chicago, Illinois and the former Frances "Peggy" Peek of Alabama. His father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot, and Conroy moved often in his youth, attending eleven schools by the time he was 15.
He never had a hometown until his family settled in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he finished high school. His alma mater was The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina. His experiences at the military school provided the basis for two of his best-known works, the novel, The Lords of Discipline, and the memoir, My Losing Season.
Conroy has said his stories were heavily influenced by his military brat upbringing, and in particular, difficulties experienced with his own father, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, who was physically and emotionally abusive toward his children. The pain of a youth growing up in such a harsh environment is evident in Conroy's novels, particularly The Great Santini.
On February 15, 2016, Conroy said he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He died on March 4, 2016 at the age of 70.
Photo by David G. Spielman
October 25, 2020
Pablo Picasso was born 139 years ago today
Pablo Picasso at his studio / 7 rue des Grands Augustins, Paris, France, 1948
The large painting behind him is called LA CUISINE (II), painted in November, 1948
Photo by Herbert List
Pablo Picasso was born 139 years ago today.
Picasso was Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France.
As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.
Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, each responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence.
During the first decade of the century, his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in art.
Here Picasso’s draws in a short video
Picasso's Two women sitting at a bar, 1902
From the artist’s blue period. The painting hangs in the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Helen Reddy was born 79 years ago today today
Helen Reddy was born 79 years ago today today.
An Australian American singer, actress and activist, Reddy was often referred to as the "Queen of 70s Pop."
In the 1970s, she enjoyed international success, especially in the United States, where she placed 15 singles in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Six made the Top 10 and three reached #1, including her signature hit, "I Am Woman."
She placed 25 songs on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. Fifteen made the Top 10 and eight reached #1, six consecutively.
In television, she was the first Australian to host her own one-hour weekly primetime variety show on an American network, along with several specials that were seen in over forty countries.
Reddy retired from live performance in 2002 and practiced as a clinical hypnotherapist and motivational speaker. She lived in Australia.
Her song, "I Am Woman," played a large role in popular culture and became an anthem for second-wave feminism. She came to be known as a "feminist poster girl" or a "feminist icon."
Reddy died on September 29, 2020 in Los Angeles at age 78. She suffered from Addison’s disease and dementia in her later years.
Eddie Lang, the father of the jazz guitar, was born 118 years ago
Eddie Lang, the father of the jazz guitar, was born 118 years ago.
Lang played a Gibson L-4 and L-5 guitar, providing great influence for many guitarists, including Django Reinhardt.
Born as Salvatore Massaro, he was the son of an Italian-American instrument maker in Philadelphia. He took violin lessons for 11 years. In school, he became friends with Joe Venuti, with whom he would work for much of his career.
Lang was playing professionally by 1918, playing violin, banjo and guitar. He worked with various bands in the northeast of the U.S., worked in London (late 1924 to early 1925) and then settled in New York City.
Lang was considered the first important jazz guitarist. He was effectively able to integrate the guitar into 1920s jazz recordings. He played with the bands of Joe Venuti, Adrian Rollini, Roger Wolfe Kahn and Jean Goldkette, in addition to doing a large amount of freelance radio and recording work.
On February 4, 1927, Lang featured in the recording of "Singin' the Blues" by Frankie Trumbauer and his Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet. Lang traded guitar licks while Beiderbecke soloed on cornet, in a landmark jazz recording of the 1920s.
In 1929, he joined Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, and can be seen and heard in the movie, The King of Jazz. In 1930, Lang played guitar on the original recording of the jazz and pop standard "Georgia On My Mind,” recorded with Hoagy Carmichael and his Orchestra. Joe Venuti and Bix Beiderbecke also played on this recording.
When Bing Crosby left Whiteman, Lang went with Crosby as his accompanist, and can be seen with him in the 1932 movie, Big Broadcast. Lang also played under the pseudonym, Blind Willie Dunn, on a number of blues records with Lonnie Johnson.
Lang died following a tonsillectomy in New York City in 1933 at the age of thirty.
He had been urged by Crosby to have the tonsillectomy so that he might have speaking parts in Crosby's films. Lang's voice was chronically hoarse, and it was hoped that the operation would remedy this.
On this day in 1991 — 29 years ago — Bill Graham, the rock music promoter, died in a helicopter crash
On this day in 1991 — 29 years ago — Bill Graham, the rock music promoter, died in a helicopter crash.
In the early 1960s, Graham moved to San Francisco, and, in 1965, began to manage the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He had teamed up with local Haight Ashbury promoter, Chet Helms, and Family Dog, and their network of contacts, to organize a benefit concert, then promoted several free concerts.
This eventually turned into a profitable full-time career and he assembled a talented staff. Graham had a profound influence around the world, sponsoring the musical renaissance of the '60s from the epicenter, San Francisco.
Graham and Helms made famous the Fillmore and Winterland Arena; these turned out to be a proving grounds for rock bands and acts of the San Francisco Bay area including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin.
Graham was killed in the crash west of Vallejo, California on October 25, 1991, while returning home from a Huey Lewis and the News concert at the Concord Pavilion.
Flying in severe weather, with rain and gusty winds, the aircraft flew off course and too low over the tidal marshland north of San Pablo Bay. The Bell Jet Ranger flew directly into a 223-foot high-voltage tower near where Highway 37, which runs between Vallejo, California and Marin County, California, crosses Sonoma Creek.
The helicopter burst into flames on impact, killing Graham, pilot and advance man Steve "Killer" Kahn, and Graham's girlfriend, Melissa Gold, ex-wife of author Herbert Gold. The charred remains of the helicopter hung eerily in the tower for more than a day.
October 24, 2020
The Big Bopper was born 90 years ago today
Jiles Perry "J. P." Richardson, Jr., commonly known as The Big Bopper, was born 90 years ago today.
A disc jockey, singer and songwriter whose big voice and exuberant personality made him an early rock and roll star, Richardson is best known for his recording of "Chantilly Lace.”
On February 3, 1959, a day that has become known as The Day the Music Died (from Don McLean's song, "American Pie"), Richardson was killed in a plane crash in Iowa, along with Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the pilot, Roger Peterson.
J. P. Richardson was born in Sabine Pass, Texas, the oldest son of oil-field worker, Jiles Perry Richardson, Sr. and his wife Elise. He graduated from Beaumont High School in 1947 and played on the "Royal Purple" football team as a defensive lineman, wearing #85. He later studied pre-law at Lamar College, and was a member of the band and chorus.
Richardson worked part-time at Beaumont, Texas radio station, KTRM (now KZZB). He was hired by the station full-time in 1949 and quit college.
Richardson married Adrianne Joy Fryou on April 18, 1952. Their daughter, Debra Joy, was born in December, 1953. Soon after, he was promoted to supervisor of announcers at KTRM.
Richardson had seen the college students doing a dance called The Bop, and he decided to call himself, "The Big Bopper." His new radio show ran from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Richardson soon became the station's program director.
Richardson is credited for creating the first music video in 1958, and recorded an early example himself.
Richardson, who played guitar, began his musical career as a songwriter. George Jones later recorded Richardson's "White Lightning," which became Jones' first #1 country hit in 1959 (#73 on the pop charts).
Richardson also wrote "Running Bear" for Johnny Preston, his friend from Port Arthur, Texas. The inspiration for the song came from Richardson's childhood memory of the Sabine River, where he heard stories about Indian tribes.
Richardson sang background on "Running Bear," but the recording wasn't released until September, 1959, after his death. Within several months it became #1.
The man who launched Richardson as a recording artist was Harold "Pappy" Daily from Houston. Daily was promotion director for Mercury and Starday Records and signed Richardson to Mercury.
Richardson's first single, "Beggar To A King," had a country flavor, but failed to gain any chart action. He soon cut "Chantilly Lace" as "The Big Bopper" for Pappy Daily's D label.
Mercury bought the recording and released it in the summer of 1958. It reached #6 on the pop charts and spent 22 weeks in the national Top 40. It also inspired an answer record by Jayne Mansfield, "That Makes It."
In "Chantilly Lace," Richardson pretends to have a flirting phone conversation with his girlfriend. The Mansfield record suggests what his girlfriend might have been saying at the other end of the line.
With the success of "Chantilly Lace," Richardson took time off from KTRM radio and joined Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Dion and the Belmonts for a "Winter Dance Party" tour. On the eleventh night of the tour, Holly chartered an airplane to fly them to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota.
The musicians had been traveling by bus for over a week, and it had already broken down once. They were tired, they had not been paid yet and all of their clothes were dirty. With the airplane, Holly could arrive early, do everyone's laundry and get some rest.
Roger Peterson, the 21-year old pilot, had agreed to take the singers to Fargo, North Dakota, where the airport serves the cities of Moorhead and Fargo. A snowstorm was inbound, and the pilot was fatigued from a 17-hour workday, but agreed to fly the trip.
The musicians packed up their instruments and finalized the flight arrangements. Buddy Holly's bass player, Waylon Jennings, was scheduled to fly on the plane, but gave his seat up to the Big Bopper, who was suffering from influenza.
Holly's guitarist, Tommy Allsup, agreed to flip a coin with Ritchie Valens for the remaining seat. Valens won. The three musicians boarded the red and white single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza at the Mason City Airport around 12:30 AM on February 3. Snow blew across the runway, but the sky was clear.
Peterson received clearance from the control tower, taxied down the runway and took off. He was never told of two weather advisories that warned of an oncoming blizzard ahead.
The plane remained airborne only a few minutes. No one is sure what went wrong. The best guess is Peterson flew directly into the blizzard, lost visual reference and accidentally flew down instead of up. The four-passenger plane plowed into a cornfield at over 220 mph, flipping over on itself and tossing the passengers into the air.
The bodies of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were jettisoned from the plane, landed yards from the wreckage and lay there for ten hours as snowdrifts formed around them. Roger Peterson's body was not jettisoned from the plane. Because of the weather, no one reached the crash site until later in the morning.
Here’s “The Big Bopper” performing “Chantilly Lace” in 1958
Bill Wyman is 84 years old today
Bill Wyman is 84 years old today.
Wyman is an English musician who was the bass guitarist for the Rolling Stones from 1962 until 1993.
Since 1997, he has recorded and toured with his own band, Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings. He has worked producing both records and film, and has scored music for film in movies and television.
Wyman has kept a journal since he was a child after World War II. It has been useful to him as an author who has written seven books, selling two million copies.
His love of art has additionally led to his proficiency in photography and his photographs have hung in galleries around the world.
Wyman's lack of funds in his early years led him to create and build his own fretless bass guitar. He became an amateur archaeologist and enjoys relic hunting.
He designed and markets a patented Bill Wyman signature metal detector, which he has used to find relics in the English countryside dating back to the era of the Roman Empire.
As a businessman, he owns several establishments including the famous Sticky Fingers Café, a rock & roll-themed bistro serving American cuisine first opened in 1989 in the Kensington area of London and later, two additional locations in Cambridge and Manchester, England.
In March, 2016, Wyman said he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had made a full recovery.
On this day in 1963 — 57 years ago — Bob Dylan recorded “The Times They Are A-Changin” at Columbia Recording Studios in New York City
On this day in 1963 — 57 years ago — Bob Dylan recorded “The Times They Are A-Changin” at Columbia Recording Studios in New York City
On this day in 1962 — 58 years ago — James Brown recorded his breakthrough album, Live at the Apollo
On this day in 1962 — 58 years ago — James Brown recorded his breakthrough album, Live at the Apollo.
Brown began his professional career at a time when rock and roll was opening new opportunities for black artists to connect with white audiences. But the path he took to fame did not pass through Top 40 radio or through The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand.
Brown would make his appearance in all of those places eventually, but only after a decade spent performing almost exclusively before black audiences and earning his reputation as the “Hardest Working Man in Show Business.”
On this day in 1962, he took a major step toward his eventual crossover and conquest of the mainstream with an electrifying performance on black America's most famous stage — a performance recorded and later released as Live at the Apollo (1963), the first breakthrough album of James Brown's career.
By the time 1962 rolled around, Brown was one of the most popular figures on the R&B scene, not so much on the strength of his recordings, but on the strength of his live act.
As he would throughout his long career, Brown ran his band, the Famous Flames, like a military unit, demanding of his instrumentalists and backing vocalists the same perfection he demanded of himself.
Even in the middle of a performance, Brown would turn around and dish out fines for missed or flubbed notes, all without missing or flubbing a dance step himself.
At the midnight show at the Apollo on October 24, 1962, however, every member of Brown's band knew that the fines they faced would be far greater than normal. "You made a mistake that night," band member Bobby Byrd told Rolling Stone magazine, "the fine would move from five or ten dollars to fifty or a hundred dollars."
The reason was simple. Having failed to convince the head of his label, King Records, to record and release the performance as a live album, James Brown, a man who was famously wise to the value of a dollar, was financing the Apollo recording himself.
In the end, the show went off not only without a hitch, but with such success that the famously tough Apollo crowd was in a state of rapture.
Released in May, 1963, Live at the Apollo ended up spending an astonishing 66 weeks on the Billboard album chart and selling upwards of a million copies, giving James Brown his first smash hit album and setting him on a course for his incredible crossover success in the mid-1960s and beyond.
Thanks History.com
May Pang is 70 years old today
May Pang is 70 years old today.
Pang is a Chinese-American, best known as the former girlfriend of John Lennon. She had previously worked as a personal assistant and production coordinator for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono.
In 1973, when Lennon and Ono separated, Pang and Lennon had a relationship lasting over 18 months — during a time which Lennon later referred to as his "Lost Weekend."
Pang subsequently produced two books about their relationship: a memoir, Loving John (Warner, 1983), and a book of photographs, Instamatic Karma (St. Martin's Press, 2008).
Pang was married to producer Tony Visconti from 1989 to 2000 and had two children, Sebastian and Lara.
Pang is shown with Frank Beacham, October 23, 2013, New York City
Moss Hart, the playwright and theatre director, was born 116 years ago today
Moss Hart with Arlene Francis on the game show, Answer Yes or No, in 1950
Moss Hart, the playwright and theatre director, was born 116 years ago today.
Hart was born in New York City and grew up in relative poverty with his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in The Bronx and in Sea Gate, Brooklyn.
Early on he had a strong relationship with his Aunt Kate, with whom he later lost contact due to a falling out between her and his parents, and Kate's weakening mental state. She piqued his interest in the theater and took him to see performances often. Hart even went so far as to create an "alternate ending" to her life in his book, Act One.
He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for The Beloved Bandit. Later, Kate became eccentric and then disturbed, vandalizing Hart's home, writing threatening letters and setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee.
But his relationship with her was formative. He learned that the theater made possible "the art of being somebody else… not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name… and a mother who was a distant drudge."
After working several years as a director of amateur theatrical groups and an entertainment director at summer resorts, he scored his first Broadway hit with Once in a Lifetime (1930), a farce about the arrival of the sound era in Hollywood. The play was written in collaboration with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman, who regularly wrote with others, notably Marc Connelly and Edna Ferber.
During the next decade, Kaufman and Hart teamed on a string of successes, including You Can't Take It With You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). Though Kaufman had hits with others, Hart is generally conceded to be his most important collaborator.
You Can't Take It With You, the story of an eccentric family and how they live during the Depression, won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama. It is Hart's most-revived play.
When director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin adapted it for the screen in 1938, the film won the Best Picture Oscar and Capra won for Best Director.
The Man Who Came To Dinner is about the caustic Sheridan Whiteside who, after injuring himself slipping on ice, must stay in a Midwestern family's house. The character was based on Kaufman and Hart's friend, critic Alexander Woollcott. Other characters in the play are based on Noël Coward, Harpo Marx and Gertrude Lawrence.
After George Washington Slept Here (1940), Kaufman and Hart called it quits, although throughout the 1930s, Hart worked both with and without Kaufman on several musicals and revues.
Those included Face the Music (1932); As Thousands Cheer (1933), with songs by Irving Berlin; Jubilee (musical) (1935), with songs by Cole Porter; and I'd Rather Be Right (1937), with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. (Lorenz Hart and Moss Hart were not related.)
Hart continued to write plays after parting with Kaufman, such as Christopher Blake (1946) and Light Up the Sky (1948), as well as the book for the musical Lady In The Dark (1941), with songs by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin.
However, he became best known during this period as a director. Among the Broadway hits he staged were Junior Miss (1941), Dear Ruth (1944) and Anniversary Waltz (1954). By far his biggest hit was the musical My Fair Lady (1956), adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.
The show ran over seven years and won a Tony Award for Best Musical. Hart won the Tony for Best Director. Hart also wrote some screenplays, including Gentleman's Agreement (1947) – for which he received an Oscar nomination – Hans Christian Andersen (1952) and A Star Is Born (1954).
He wrote a memoir, Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart, which was released in 1959. It was adapted to film in 1963, with George Hamilton portraying Hart.
The last show Hart directed was the Lerner and Loewe musical, Camelot (1960). During a troubled out-of-town tryout, Hart had a heart attack. The show opened before he fully recovered, but he and Lerner reworked it after the opening. That, along with huge pre-sales and a cast performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, helped ensure the expensive production was a hit.
Hart died of a heart attack at the age of 57 on December 20, 1961, at his winter home in Palm Springs, California.
Sonny Terry was born 109 years ago today
Sonny Terry was born 109 years ago today.
Terry was a blind American Piedmont blues musician. He was widely known for his energetic blues harmonica style, which frequently included vocal whoops and hollers, and imitations of trains and fox hunts.
Terry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. His father, a farmer, taught him to play basic blues harp as a youth. He sustained injuries to his eyes and lost his sight by the time he was 16, which prevented him from doing farm work himself.
In order to earn a living, Terry was forced to play music. He began playing in Shelby, North Carolina. After his father died, he began playing in the trio of Piedmont blues-style guitarist Blind Boy Fuller.
When Fuller died in 1941, he established a long-standing musical relationship with Brownie McGhee, and the pair recorded numerous songs together. The duo became well-known among white audiences, as they joined the growing folk movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
This included collaborations with Styve Homnick, Woody Guthrie and Moses Asch, producing Folkways Records (now Smithsonian/Folkways) classic recordings. In 1938, Terry was invited to play at Carnegie Hall for the first From Spirituals to Swing concert, and later that year he recorded for the Library of Congress.
In 1940, Terry recorded his first commercial sides. Some of his most famous works include "Old Jabo,” a song about a man bitten by a snake, and "Lost John,” in which he demonstrates his amazing breath control.
Despite their fame as "pure" folk artists, in the 1940s, Terry and McGhee fronted a jump blues combo with honking saxophone and rolling piano that was variously called Brownie McGhee and his Jook House Rockers or Sonny Terry and his Buckshot Five.
Terry was also in the 1947 original cast of the Broadway musical comedy, Finian's Rainbow.
Terry died from natural causes at Mineola, New York, in March, 1986, the year he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. He died three days before the film, Crossroads, was released in theaters.
Here, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee perform “Hooray, Hooray, These Women Is Killin’ Me” in 1966
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