Frank Beacham's Journal

Street performer, Sicily

Photo by Richard Avedon

Mimi Baez Fariña was born 76 years ago today

Mimi and Richard Farina

Mimi Baez Fariña was born 76 years ago today.

Fariña was a singer-songwriter and activist, the youngest of three daughters to a Scottish mother and a Mexican-American physicist, Albert Baez. She was the younger sister of the singer and activist, Joan Baez.

Fariña's father, a physicist affiliated with Stanford University and MIT, moved his family frequently, due to his job assignments, working in places not just in the United States, but internationally. She benefited from dance and music lessons, and took up the guitar, joining the 1960s American folk music revival.

Fariña met novelist, musician and composer Richard Fariña in 1963 when she was 17 years old and married him at 18. The two collaborated on a number of influential folk albums, most notably, Celebrations for a Grey Day (1965) and Reflections in a Crystal Wind (1966), both on Vanguard Records.

After Richard Fariña's 1966 death (on Mimi's 21st birthday) in a motorcycle accident, Mimi married Milan Melvin and continued to perform, sometimes recording and touring with either her sister Joan or the folksinger, Tom Jans, with whom she recorded Take Heart, an album in 1971.

Among the songs she has written is "In the Quiet Morning (For Janis Joplin)," which her sister recorded. The song is included on Joan Baez's Greatest Hits album.

In 1967, Fariña joined a satiric comedy troupe called The Committee. That same year, she and her sister, Joan Baez, were arrested at a peaceful demonstration, where the two were temporarily housed in Santa Rita Jail — personalizing the experience of captivity for her. By 1973, she was asked to accompany her sister, Joan, and B.B. King when they performed for the prisoners in Sing Sing Prison.

Those two experiences led her to a desire to do more for those who are held in institutions. In 1974, Fariña founded Bread and Roses, a nonprofit co-operative organization, designed to bring free music and entertainment to institutions, including jails, hospitals, juvenile facilities and nursing homes. Initially it was active in the San Francisco Bay area, but later, nationally.

It still remains in operation, producing 500 shows each year. The organization's name came from a 1911 poem by James Oppenheim, "Bread and Roses," which is commonly associated with a 1912 garment workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Though she continued to sing in her later years, releasing an album in 1985 and performing sporadically, Fariña devoted most of her time to running Bread and Roses.

In the late 1980s, she teamed up with Pete Sears to play a variety of benefit and protest concerts. Many concerts were concerned with human rights issues in Central America, especially the U.S.-backed civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador. They once set up to play on the abandoned railroad tracks outside Concord Naval Base in California.

Surrounded by military police, Farina and Sears played a show for people protesting U.S. weapons being shipped to government troops in El Salvador.

In 1986, she took the time to record her own album, Mimi Fariña Solo.

Fariña used her connections with the folksinging community to elicit help in her focus with Bread and Roses, including Pete Seeger, Paul Winter, Odetta, Judy Collins, Taj Mahal, Lily Tomlin, Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt.

In 2000 alone, Bread and Roses brought performers to play at more than 500 concerts in 82 institutions.

Fariña died of neuroendocrine cancer, at her home in California, on July 18, 2001, at age 56.

She was also the subject of her sister Joan Baez's 1969 song, "Sweet Sir Galahad."

Here, Fariña joins her sister Joan to perform at Sing Sing Prison in 1973

Johnny Horton was born 96 years ago today

Johnny Horton was born 96 years ago today.

Horton was country and rockabilly singer most famous for his semi-folk, so-called "saga songs," which began the "historical ballad" craze of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

With them, he had several major successes, most notably in 1959 with the song "The Battle of New Orleans," written by Jimmy Driftwood.

During 1960, Horton had two other successes with "North to Alaska" for John Wayne's movie, North to Alaska, and "Sink the Bismarck."

That same year, near Milano, Texas, Horton was crossing a bridge when a truck came at him. It hit both sides of the bridge before plunging into Horton's Cadillac. He had in the past avoided head-on collisions by driving into ditches, but on the narrow bridge he had no such opportunity.

He was still breathing when he was pulled from the car, but died en route to the hospital. Horton was 35 years old when he died.

Here, Horton performs “North to Alaska” in 1959 on live television

Bobby Vee was born 78 years old today

Bobby Vee was born 78 years old today.

Vee was a teen idol in the early 1960s and had 38 Hot 100 chart hits, 10 of which hit the Top 20.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota to Sydney Ronald Velline and Saima Cecilia Tapanila, he had his first single with "Suzie Baby,” an original song penned by Vee that nodded towards Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" for the Minneapolis-based Soma Records in 1959. It drew enough attention and chart action to be purchased by Liberty Records, which signed him to their label later that year.

His fourth release, a revival of the Clovers' doo-wop ballad, "Devil or Angel,” brought him into the big time with U.S. buyers. His next single, "Rubber Ball,” was the record that made him an international star.

Vee's career began amid tragedy. On "The Day the Music Died" (February 3, 1959), three of the four headline acts in the lineup of the traveling Winter Dance Party —Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper — were killed, along with 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson, in the crash of a V-tailed 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza airplane.

Dion, the second headliner, opted not to be on the plane, which crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa while enroute to the next show on the tour itinerary in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Velline, then aged 15, and a hastily assembled band of Fargo, North Dakota, schoolboys calling themselves, The Shadows, volunteered for and were given the unenviable job of filling in for Holly and his band at the Moorhead engagement. Their performance there was a success, setting in motion a chain of events that led to Vee's career as a popular singer.

Early in Vee's career, a musician named Elston Gunnn briefly toured with the band. "Gunnn,” whose birth name was Robert Allen Zimmerman, later went on to fame as Bob Dylan. In Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, Volume One, he makes special mention of Vee and shares significant and complimentary details about their friendship, both professional and personal.

In a concert at Midway Stadium in St. Paul, Minnesota, on July 10, 2013, Dylan said he had been on the stage with many stars but that none of them were as meaningful as Bobby Vee. He said Bobby Vee was in the audience and then Dylan played Bobby Vee's hit, "Suzie Baby," with emotion.

On April 29, 2012, Vee announced on his website that, a year previously, he had been diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer's disease and, as a consequence, would withdraw from the music business. Prior to his death, he received hospice care in a long-term facility in Rogers, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis.

On October 24, 2016, Vee died from complications of the disease at the age of 73.

Here’s a segment from a live Bobby Vee show

Bobby Vee meets Bob Dylan after a show at Midway Stadium, St. Paul, 2013

Dylan paid tribute to Vee, who was in the audience, by performing his hit, "Suzie Baby."

Vee hired Dylan in the late 1950s to play piano in his band. After a few small gigs in North Dakota, the idea of lugging around a piano on tour didn't appeal to Vee, so he gave Dylan $30 and sent him on his way.

Alice B. Toklas was born 144 years ago today

Alice B. Toklas was born 144 years ago today,

Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century. She was born Alice Babette Toklas in San Francisco into a middle-class Jewish family (her father had been a Polish army officer) and attended schools in both San Francisco and Seattle. For a short time she also studied music at the University of Washington.

Toklas met Gertrude Stein in Paris on September 8, 1907, the day she arrived. Together they hosted a salon that attracted expatriate American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder and Sherwood Anderson. Joining that group were avant-garde painters, including Picasso, Matisse and Braque.

Acting as Stein's confidante, lover, cook, secretary, muse, editor, critic and general organizer, Toklas remained a background figure. She lived in the shadow of Stein, until Stein published her memoirs in 1933 under the teasing title The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It became Stein's bestselling book.

"She was a little stooped, somewhat retiring and self-effacing. She doesn't sit in a chair, she hides in it; she doesn't look at you, but up at you; she is always standing just half a step outside the circle. She gives the appearance, in short, not of a drudge, but of a poor relation, someone invited to the wedding but not to the wedding feast," wrote W. G. Rogers in his 1946 memoir of the couple.

Poet James Merrill wrote that before meeting her "one knew about the tiny stature, the sandals, the mustache, the eyes," but that he had not anticipated "the enchantment of her speaking voice — like a viola at dusk."

Toklas and Stein were a couple until the latter's death in 1946. Although Gertrude Stein had willed much of her estate to Toklas, including their shared art collection (some of them Picassos) housed in their apartment at 5, rue Christine, the couple's relationship had no legal recognition.

As the paintings appreciated in value, Stein's relatives took action to claim them, eventually removing them from Toklas's residence while she was away on vacation and placing them in a bank vault. Toklas then relied on contributions from friends as well as writing to make a living.

Toklas published her own literary memoir, a 1954 book that mixed reminiscences and recipes under the title The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. The most famous recipe therein (actually contributed by her friend, Brion Gysin) was called "Haschich Fudge," a mixture of fruit, nuts, spices and "canibus sativa" (marijuana).

The 1968 Peter Sellers movie, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, was named for Toklas's cannabis brownies, which play a significant role in the plot.

Toklas died in 1967 at the age of 89 in Paris.

Above, Stein and Toklas walking their dog, circa 1930s

Photo by Carl Mydans

Sheldon Harnick is 97 years old today

Photo by Chad Batka

Sheldon Harnick is 97 years old today.

Harnick is a lyricist best known for his collaborations with composer Jerry Bock on hit musicals, including Fiddler on the Roof. He began his career writing words and music to comic songs in musical revues. One of these, "The Merry Minuet,” was popularized by the Kingston Trio.

Harnick was born to American Jewish parents and grew up in the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park. Yiddish was rarely spoken in the home, mostly as a way of telling secrets between parents. He began writing music while still in Carl Schurz High School in Chicago. After his Army service, he graduated from the Northwestern University School of Music (1946-1949) with a Bachelor of Music Degree, and worked with various orchestras in the Chicago area.

He then moved to New York City and wrote for many musicals and revues. He was friends with Charlotte Rae from college, and he went to see her one night at the Village Vanguard where she was singing a revue.

Yip Harburg, who was one of Harnick's idols, heard she was singing a song of his and decided to come. He told Harnick that he enjoyed his writing, and urged him to continue. He advised Harnick to work with a large number of composers.

He also counseled him to write character and comic songs, not ballads, for Broadway. Harnick followed both tips. Harburg gave him that advice because his old partner, Jay Gorney, had told them ballads were the key to success on Broadway.

Around 1956, Harnick met Jerry Bock, forming "what is arguably the most important musical partnership of the '60s." Their first musical was The Body Beautiful, running for only 60 performances in 1958, but Fiorello! (1959) ran for 795 performances and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Fiddler on the Roof (1964) "became one of the most cherished of all Broadway musicals."

Here’s “If I Were A Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof

Reverend Gary Davis was born 125 years ago today

Rev. Gary Davis, St. Albans, New York, 1961

Photo by Don Schlitten

Reverend Gary Davis was born 125 years ago today.

Davis was blues and gospel singer and guitarist, who was also proficient on the banjo and harmonica. His finger-picking guitar style influenced many other artists. His guitar students included Stefan Grossman, David Bromberg, Roy Book Binder, Barry Kornfeld, Larry Johnson, Woody Mann, Nick Katzman, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Winslow, Rory Block and Ernie Hawkins.

Davis has influenced Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Jackson Browne, Townes van Zandt, Dave Van Ronk, Wizz Jones, Jorma Kaukonen, Danny Kalb, Keb' Mo', Ollabelle, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Resurrection Band and John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful.

Davis was born in Laurens, South Carolina, and was the only one of eight children his mother bore who survived to adulthood. He became blind as an infant.

Davis reported that his father was killed in Birmingham, Alabama, when Davis was ten, and Davis later said that he had been told that his father had been shot by the Birmingham sheriff. He recalled being poorly treated by his mother and that before his death his father had placed him under the care of his paternal grandmother.

Davis told Stephan Grossman he was born on a farm. “Way down in the sticks, too. Way down in the country, so far you couldn't hear a train whistle blow unless it was on a cloudy day.” He took to the guitar and assumed a unique multi-voice style produced solely with his thumb and index finger, playing not only ragtime and blues tunes, but also traditional and original tunes in four-part harmony.

Davis was a street musician who played parties for both blacks and whites from an area that stretched from Laurens to Greenville, South Carolina. He went to a school for the blind in Spartanburg, S.C., near Greenville.

In the mid-1920s, Davis migrated to Durham, North Carolina, a major center for black culture at the time. There he collaborated with a number of other artists in the Piedmont blues scene including Blind Boy Fuller and Bull City Red.

In 1935, J. B. Long, a store manager with a reputation for supporting local artists, introduced Davis, Fuller and Red to the American Record Company. The subsequent recording sessions marked the real beginning of Davis' career.

During his time in Durham, Davis converted to Christianity. In 1937, he was ordained as a Baptist minister. Following his conversion and especially his ordination, Davis began to express a preference for inspirational gospel music. In the 1940s, the blues scene in Durham began to decline and Davis migrated to New York.

In 1951, well before his “rediscovery,” Davis's oral history was recorded by Elizabeth Lyttleton Harold (the wife of Alan Lomax) who transcribed their conversations into a 300-plus page typescript.

The folk revival of the 1960s re-invigorated Davis' career, culminating in a performance at the Newport Folk Festival and the recording by Peter, Paul and Mary of "Samson and Delilah," also known as "If I Had My Way," originally a Blind Willie Johnson recording that Davis had popularized.

Blues Hall of Fame singer and harmonica player Darrell Mansfield has also recorded several of Rev. Davis song's. Bob Dylan covered Rev. Gary Davis, Dave Von Ronk and Eric Von Schmidt's song, "Baby Let me Follow You Down."

Davis died in May, 1972, from a heart attack in Hammonton, New Jersey. He is buried in plot 68 of Rockville Cemetery in Lynbrook, Long Island, New York.

Here, Davis performs “If I Had My Way”

Rev. Gary Davis plays as Meegan Ochs dances

(Meegan is the daughter of Alice and Phil Ochs)

Photo by Alice Ochs

Suze Rotolo and Sylvia Tyson on the Rev. Gary Davis...

As I talked with Izzy Young about the Rev. Gary Davis in Washington Square Park in 2007, two women stood nearby listening.

When I finished, Suze Rotolo — perhaps best known as Bob Dylan’s 1960’s girlfriend from the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” — said she also had a story about Rev. Gary Davis. I quickly turned on my audio recorder.

The follow-up voice is Sylvia Tyson, half of the popular folk duo, Ian and Sylvia, who also had something to say about Rev. Davis. 

Sylvia Tyson and Susie Rotolo remember Rev. Gary Davis

Photo by Frank Beacham

Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, as seen from the rear of the stage

Photographed during a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann

Duke Ellington was born 122 years ago today

Duke Ellington was born 122 years ago today.

A composer, pianist and big-band leader, Ellington wrote over 1,000 compositions. As a major figure in jazz, he stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, film scores, popular and classical.

His career spanned more than 50 years and included leading his orchestra, composing an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies, composing stage musicals and world tours. Several of his instrumental works were adapted into songs that became standards.

Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and thanks to his eloquence and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an art form on a par with other traditional genres of music. His reputation increased after his death and the Pulitzer Prize Board bestowed on him a special posthumous honor in 1999.

Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category." These included many of the musicians who were members of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the best-known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz.

He often composed specifically for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Johnny Hodges, "Concerto for Cootie" for Cootie Williams, which later became "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics and "The Mooche" for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley.

He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido," which brought the "Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained there for several decades.

After 1941, he frequently collaborated with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his "writing and arranging companion." Ellington recorded for many American record companies, and appeared in several films. Ellington led his band from 1923 until his death in 1974.

His son, Mercer Ellington, who had already been handling all administrative aspects of his father's business for several decades, led the band until his own death in 1996. At that point, the original band dissolved.

Paul Ellington, Mercer's youngest son and executor of the Duke Ellington estate, kept the Duke Ellington Orchestra going from Mercer's death onwards. Today, it is managed and represented by A. C. Lichtenstein of Ideal Entertainment.

Here, Ellington performs “Take the ‘A’ Train” in the film, Reveille, 1943

Big Jay McNeely, rhythm and blues saxophonist, was born 94 years ago today

Big Jay McNeely, Los Angeles, 1951

Photo by Bob Willoughby

Big Jay McNeely, rhythm and blues saxophonist, was born 94 years ago today.

Inspired by Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young, he teamed with his older brother, Robert McNeely, who played baritone saxophone, and made his first recordings with drummer Johnny Otis, who ran the Barrelhouse Club that stood only a few blocks from McNeely's home.

Shortly after he performed on Otis's "Barrel House Stomp,” Ralph Bass, A&R man for Savoy Records, promptly signed him to a recording contract. Bass's boss, Herman Lubinsky, suggested the stage name Big Jay McNeely because his real name, Cecil McNeely, did not sound commercial.

McNeely's first hit was "The Deacon's Hop," an instrumental which topped the Billboard R&B chart in early 1949. The single was his most successful of his three chart entries.

Thanks to his flamboyant playing, called "honking," McNeely remained popular through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, recording for the Exclusive, Aladdin, Imperial, Federal, Vee-Jay, and Swingin' labels.

But despite a hit R&B ballad, "There Is Something on Your Mind," (1959) featuring Little Sonny Warner on vocals, and a 1963 album for Warner Bros. Records, McNeely's music career began to cool off.

He quit the music industry in 1971 to become a postman. However, thanks to an R&B revival in the early 1980s, McNeely left the post office and returned to touring and recording full-time, usually overseas.

His original tenor sax is enshrined in the Experience Music Project in Seattle, and he was inducted into The Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame.

In 1989, Big Jay McNeely was performing at the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down, "and Cold War legend has it that Big Jay McNeely blew down the Berlin Wall in 1989 with his earth-shaking sonic sax torrents outside the Quasimodo Club in West Germany"

McNeely wore bright banana- and lime-colored suits, played under blacklights that made his horn glow in the dark, used strobe lights as early as 1952 to create an "old-time-movie" effect, and sometimes walked off the stage and out the door, usually with the club patrons following along behind.

At one point, in San Diego, police arrested him on the sidewalk and hauled him off to jail, while his band kept playing on the bandstand, waiting for him to return.

McNeely died in Moreno Valley, California on September 16, 2018 of prostate cancer, at the age of 91.

Here, McNeely and Detroit Garry Wiggins perform “High Rate of Speed”