Frank Beacham's Journal

Donald Byrd on the “A” Train, New York City, 1959

Photo by William Claxton

Lefty Frizzell was born 95 years ago today

Lefty Frizzell was born 95 years ago today.

Frizzell was country music singer and songwriter of the 1950s, and a proponent of honky tonk music.

His relaxed style of singing was an influence on later stars, including Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, George Jones and John Fogerty.

Born in Corsicana, Texas, Frizell moved with his family shortly after his birth to El Dorado in southern Arkansas, where the Frizzells remained until the early 1940s.

Frizzell began playing the guitar as a young boy. By age 12, he was appearing regularly on a children's show at local radio station KELD-AM.

The family returned to Texas when Frizzell was still a teenager, his music career receiving a significant boost when he won a talent contest in Dallas.

Called Sonny by his family, Frizzell got the nickname Lefty at age 14 after a schoolyard scrap, although his record company falsely suggested he had won a Golden Gloves boxing match.

In his late teens, Frizzell was performing at fairgrounds and other venues, developing a unique, soulful voice.

Like his father, he worked in the oilfields, but his growing popularity as a singer soon provided regular work on the honky tonk nightclub circuit.

At the age of 19, he had a half-hour show on a small Texas radio station, getting a major break when record producer Don Law heard him sing live at the Club Ace of Clubs in Big Spring, Texas.

Signed to Columbia Records, he immediately had a string of hits that broke into country music's top ten. Several of them reached #1.

In 1950, Frizzell was invited to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. The following year, he appeared on Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, Louisiana.

Then he and close friend, "Cowboy" Ralph Spicer, began touring with country music's biggest star of the era, Hank Williams. Handbills of the time referred to them as "Kings of the Honky Tonks."

A prolific songwriter, Frizzell had four songs in the country Top 10 at the same time in 1951 — a feat that would not be repeated on any chart until The Beatles had five songs on the pop chart in 1964.

In 1952, while speeding through Minden, Frizzell crashed his Cadillac into the Elm Street residence of R. Harmon Drew, Sr., the municipal judge and later a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives.

By the end of the 1950s, rock and roll was dominating the American music scene, and although no one would mistake Frizzell's music for anything but country, his 1959 hit, "Long Black Veil," gained wide acceptance with a variety of music fans.

In 1964, Frizzell recorded "Saginaw, Michigan,” which took the top spot on the country music charts and broke into the pop charts as well (#85 pop, Joel Whitburn's Top Country Singles).

In the early 1970s, Frizzell changed record labels and moved to Bakersfield, California, where he recorded several more country music hits and became the first country singer to perform at the Hollywood Bowl.

By this, his alcoholism was a problem. Mood swings and irrational anger became a trademark, and his constant failure to meet recording commitments strained his relationship with his record company.

In 1972, Frizzell was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. His song, "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," was a major hit.

Success and money only added to Frizzell's alcohol addiction, and on July 19, 1975, at age 47, he died after a massive stroke.

In October, 1982, Frizzell was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Here, Frizell performs “Saginaw, Michigan”

Johann Sebastian Bach was born 338 years ago today

Johann Sebastian Bach was born 338 years ago today.

Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist and violinist of the Baroque period.

He enriched many established German styles through his skill in counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organization, and the adaptation of rhythms, forms and textures from abroad — particularly from Italy and France.

Bach's compositions include the Brandenburg Concertos, the Mass in B minor, the The Well-Tempered Clavier, his cantatas, chorales, partitas, Passions and organ works. His music is revered for its intellectual depth, technical command and artistic beauty.

Bach was born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach, into a very musical family. His father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was the director of the town musicians, and all of his uncles were professional musicians.

His father taught him to play violin and harpsichord, and his brother, Johann Christoph Bach, taught him the clavichord and exposed him to much contemporary music.

Bach also went to St Michael's School in Lüneburg because of his singing skills. After graduating, he held several musical posts across Germany: he served as Kapellmeister (director of music) to Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, Cantor of Thomasschule in Leipzig and Royal Court Composer to August III.

Bach's health and vision declined in 1749 and he died at age 65 on July 28, 1750.

Modern historians believe that his death was caused by a combination of stroke and pneumonia.

Bach's abilities as an organist were highly respected throughout Europe during his lifetime, although he was not widely recognized as a great composer until a revival of interest and performances of his music in the first half of the 19th century.

He is now generally regarded as one of the main composers of the Baroque period, and as one of the greatest composers of all time.

Etta Baker was born 110 years ago today

Photo by David Holt

Etta Baker was born 110 years ago today.

Baker was a Piedmont blues guitarist and singer. She was born Etta Lucille Reid in Caldwell County, North Carolina, of African American, Native American and European American heritage.

She played both 6-string and 12-string acoustic guitars, as well as the five-string banjo.

Baker played the Piedmont Blues for ninety years, starting at the age of three when she could not even hold the guitar properly.

She was taught by her father, Boone Reid, who was also a longtime player of the Piedmont Blues on several instruments.

Etta Baker was first recorded in the summer of 1956 when she and her father happened across the folk singer, Paul Clayton, while visiting Cone Mansion in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, near their home in Morganton, NC.

Baker's father asked Clayton to listen to his daughter playing her signature "One Dime Blues." Clayton was impressed and arrived at the Baker house with his tape recorder the next day, recording several songs.

Over the years, Baker has shared her knowledge with many well known musical artists including Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

Baker received the North Carolina Folk Heritage Award from the North Carolina Arts Council in 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship in 1991 and the North Carolina Award in 2003.

Along with her sister, Cora Phillips, Baker received the North Carolina Folklore Society's Brown-Hudson Folklore Award in 1982.

Baker had nine children, one of whom was killed in the Vietnam War in 1967, the same year her husband died.

Baker last lived in Morganton, North Carolina, and died at the age of 93 in Fairfax, Virginia, while visiting a daughter who had suffered a stroke.

Here is “The Fingerpicking Blues of Etta Baker”

Herb Alpert is 88 years old today

Herb Alpert is 88 years old today.

Alpert is most associated with the group variously known as Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, or TJB.

Alpert is also a recording industry executive — he is the "A" of A&M Records (a recording label he and business partner, Jerry Moss, founded and eventually sold to Polygram).

The multi-talented Alpert has also created abstract expressionist paintings and sculpture over two decades. His work is occasionally exhibited to the public.

He and his wife are substantial philanthropists through the operation of the Herb Alpert Foundation.

Alpert has sold more than 72 million albums worldwide. He is the only recording artist to hit #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 pop chart as both an instrumentalist ("Rise," 1979) and vocalist ("This Guy's in Love with You," 1968).

Here, is Alpert and the Tijuana Brass with “A Taste of Honey,” 1965

The play, Oklahoma!, opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943 — 79 years ago today

The financial risk of mounting a Broadway musical is so great that few productions ever make it to the Great White Way without a period of tryouts and revisions outside of New York City.

This was as true in the 1940s as it is today, and especially so during the war years, when the producers of an innovative little musical called Away We Go had real concerns about their show's commercial viability.

Even with lyrics and music by two of theater's leading lights, Away We Go was believed by many to be a flop in the making.

Indeed, an assistant to the famous gossip columnist Walter Winchell captured the prevailing wisdom in a telegram sent from New Haven, Connecticut, during the show's out-of-town tryout. His message read: "No girls. No legs. No chance."

This would prove to be one of the most off-base predictions in theater history when the slightly retooled show opened under the new name, Oklahoma!, on Broadway on March 31, 1943 —80 years ago today.

It went on to set a Broadway record of 2,212 performances before finally closing more than 15 years later.

What was it that made Oklahoma! seem so risky? For one, it was the first show undertaken by the already legendary composer Richard Rodgers without his longtime partner, Lorenz Hart.

Hart's drinking and other personal problems had rendered him unable to work by 1942, so Rodgers would undertake his next project with a new partner, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.

While Rodgers and Hammerstein almost instantly clicked as a songwriting duo, the creative chances they were taking with Oklahoma! were significant.

The show had no big-name stars involved in it, it was based on relatively obscure source material and it was an ambitious experiment in integrating music and dance in service of storytelling rather than spectacle.

At a time when Broadway musicals always opened with a "bang," Oklahoma! would open with a lone cowboy singing a gentle idyll about corn and meadows.

From the very first moment on opening night, however, Oklahoma! hit a nerve.

The show's choreographer, the legendary Agnes DeMille, later recalled the audience reaction to that opening number, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin':

"[It] produced a sigh from the entire house, that I don't think I've ever heard in the theater. It was just, 'aaaahh...' It was perfectly lovely, and deeply felt."

Of the reaction to the title song, "Oklahoma!," actress Joan Roberts, the original Laurey, said, "The applause was so deafening, and it continued and continued. We repeated two encores, and we stood there, until they stopped applauding! And I didn't think they ever would!"

That famous number had been changed from a solo to a full-cast showstopper only weeks earlier, during the show's final tune-ups in Boston before the beginning of its history-making Broadway run on this day in 1943.

Thanks History.com

Octavio Paz was born 109 years ago

Octavio Paz was born 109 years ago.

Paz was a Mexican writer, poet and diplomat and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paz was born to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. His father was an active supporter of the Revolution against the Díaz regime.

Paz was raised in the village of Mixcoac (now a part of Mexico City) by his mother, Josefina (daughter of Spanish immigrants), his aunt Amalia Paz and his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former supporter of President Porfirio Díaz.

Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature. During the 1920s, he discovered Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writings.

As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera." Two years later, at the age of 19, he published Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems.

In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. In 1937 at the age of 23, Paz abandoned his law studies and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida, set up for the sons of peasants and workers.

By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet.

In 1945, he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought.

In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time. In the same year he went to Tokyo, as chargé d'affaires, and then to Geneva, Switzerland.

He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957 and Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time.

In 1962, he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.

A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In India, he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35 month long trial.

Paz died of cancer in 1998 at age 84.

On this day in 1949 — 74 years ago — RCA Victor introduced the 45rpm single record, which had been in development since 1940

On this day in 1949 — 74 years ago — RCA Victor introduced the 45rpm single record, which had been in development since 1940.

The seven-inch disc was designed to compete with the Long Playing record introduced by Columbia a year earlier. Both formats offered better fidelity and longer playing time than the 78rpm record that was then currently in use.

Advertisements for new record players boasted that with 45rpm records, the listener could hear up to ten records with speedy, silent, hardly noticeable changes.

Wet Kiss

Photo by Marius Sperlich

Eric Clapton is 78 years old today

Eric Clapton performs at Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival at Madison Square Garden, New York City, April 14, 2013

Photo by Charles Sykes

Eric Clapton is 78 years old today.

Born in England, Clapton is one of the most important and influential guitarists of all time.

In the mid-1960s, Clapton departed from the Yardbirds to play blues with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. In his one-year stay with Mayall, Clapton gained the nickname "Slowhand."

Immediately after leaving Mayall, Clapton joined Cream, a power trio with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce in which Clapton played sustained blues improvisations and "arty, blues-based psychedelic pop."

For most of the 1970s, Clapton's output bore the influence of the mellow style of J.J. Cale and the reggae of Bob Marley. His version of Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" helped reggae reach a mass market.

Two of his most popular recordings were "Layla," recorded by Derek and the Dominos, another band he formed, and Robert Johnson's "Crossroads," recorded by Cream.

Following the death of his son, Conor, in 1991, Clapton's grief was expressed in the song, "Tears in Heaven," which is featured in his Unplugged album.

In 1998, Clapton, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for recovering substance abusers.

Clapton was born in Ripley, Surrey, England, the son of 16-year-old Patricia Molly Clapton and Edward Walter Fryer, a 25-year-old soldier from Montreal, Quebec.

Fryer shipped off to war prior to Clapton's birth and then returned to Canada.

Clapton grew up with his grandmother, Rose, and her second husband, Jack Clapp, who was stepfather to Patricia Clapton and her brother, Adrian, believing they were his parents and that his mother was actually his older sister.

The similarity in surnames gave rise to the erroneous belief that Clapton's real surname is Clapp (Reginald Cecil Clapton was the name of Rose's first husband, Eric Clapton's maternal grandfather).

Years later, his mother married another Canadian soldier and moved to Germany, leaving young Eric with his grandparents in Surrey.

Clapton received an acoustic Hoyer guitar, made in Germany, for his thirteenth birthday, but the inexpensive steel-stringed instrument was difficult to play and he briefly lost interest.

Two years later, Clapton picked it up again and started playing consistently.

Clapton was influenced by the blues from an early age, and practiced long hours to learn the chords of blues music by playing along to the records.

He preserved his practice sessions using his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, listening to them over and over until he felt he'd got it right.

After leaving Hollyfield School, in Surbiton, in 1961, Clapton studied at the Kingston College of Art, but was dismissed at the end of the academic year because his focus remained on music rather than art.

His guitar playing was so advanced that by the age of 16 he was getting noticed.
Around this time, Clapton began busking in Kingston, Richmond, and the West End.

In 1962, Clapton started performing as a duo with fellow blues enthusiast, David Brock, in pubs around Surrey.

When he was seventeen years old, Clapton joined his first band, an early British R&B group, "The Roosters," whose other guitarist was Tom McGuinness. He stayed with this band from January through August, 1963.

In October 1963, Clapton joined The Yardbirds, a blues-influenced rock and roll band, and stayed with them until March, 1965.

Synthesizing influences from Chicago blues and leading blues guitarists such as Buddy Guy, Freddie King and B. B. King, Clapton forged a distinctive style and rapidly became one of the most talked-about guitarists in the British music scene.

The band initially played Chess/Checker/Vee-Jay blues numbers and began to attract a large cult following when they took over the Rolling Stones' residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond.

They toured England with American bluesman, Sonny Boy Williamson II.

Clapton cites Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin as guitar playing influences. Blues musician Robert Johnson was his single most important influence, he said.

In 2004, Clapton released CDs and DVDs entitled Sessions for Robert Johnson, featuring Clapton covering Robert Johnson songs using electric and acoustic guitars.

Clapton co-authored with others the book, Discovering Robert Johnson.

Clapton wrote that Johnson was "...the most important blues musician who ever lived. He was true, absolutely, to his own vision, and as deep as I have gotten into the music over the last 30 years, I have never found anything more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice, really. ... it seemed to echo something I had always felt."

Guitarists influenced by Clapton include Slash, Allen Collins, Richie Sambora, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Moore, Duane Allman, Derek Trucks, Eddie Van Halen, Brian May, Tony Iommi, Lenny Kravitz, Ted Nugent, Orianthi, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Jonny Buckland, Joe Don Rooney, Alex Lifeson, Jonny Lang, John Mayer, Joe Satriani, Joe Bonamassa, Davy Knowles, Lindsay Ell, Neal Schon and Mark Knopfler.

In June, 2014, Clapton announced his retirement plans, saying life on the road had become "unbearable" and "odd ailments" may force him to retire from guitar playing permanently.

In a 2016 interview with Classic Rock magazine, Clapton revealed that he had been diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy in 2013, a condition which refers to damage in one's peripheral nerves and often results in stabbing, burning or tingling pain in the arms and legs.

However, Clapton has continued to perform.

Here, Clapton performs his “Crossroads,” his tribute to Robert Johnson