Country singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell is 73 years old today
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Country singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell is 73 years old today
Rodney Crowell, B.B. Kings Club, 2005
Photo by Frank Beacham
Rodney Crowell is 73 years old today.
Crowell, a singer and songwriter in country music, has had five #1 singles — all from his 1988 album, Diamonds & Dirt. He has also written songs and produced for other artists, and was influenced by songwriters Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. He played guitar and sang for three years in Emmylou Harris' "Hot Band.”
Born in Crosby, Texas, Crowell had come from a musical family, with one grandfather being a church choir leader and the other a bluegrass banjo player. His grandmother played guitar and his father sang semi-professionally at bars and honky-tonks.
At age 11, he starting playing drums in his father's band. In his teen years, he played in various garage rock bands in Houston, performing hits of the day mixed with a few country numbers. In August, 1972, he moved to Nashville in search of a musical career and got a job as a songwriter after being discovered by Jerry Reed.
Crowell later met and befriended fellow songwriter, Guy Clark, who became a major influence on his songwriting and vice versa. "I got a real cold splash in the face of what real songwriting is about,” he said. “I started filling my mind with as many symbols and images as I could. I started reading. I got real hungry to have something to contribute."
Emmylou Harris had recorded one of Crowell's songs, "Till I Gain Control Again," on her Elite Hotel album and made a request to meet him. After he sat in with Emmylou at her gig at the Armadillo World Headquarters in early January, 1975, she asked him to play rhythm guitar in her backing band, The Hot Band. He accepted and left the following day to join Emmylou in Los Angeles.
In 1977, as a side project, he formed a musical group, The Cherry Bombs, together with Vince Gill, Tony Brown and others. One year later, he signed a solo deal with Warner Bros. Records and in late 1978, released his debut album, Ain't Living Long Like This.
His debut album, as well his following two albums, But What Will The Neighbors Think and Rodney Crowell, were not commercially successful despite garnering a huge cult following. Crowell himself criticized his debut album for not translating onto vinyl the same clarity and energy he felt in the studio. His single, "Ashes by Now," from But What Will The Neighbors Think reached #37 in 1981.
Though he had already several country hits by artists covering his songs (including "Ain't Living Long Like This" by Waylon Jennings, "Leaving Louisiana..." by the Oak Ridge Boys and several covers by Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash, Emmylou Harris, Jerry Reed and others), Crowell got his first big taste of pop songwriting success with "Shame on the Moon."
The album, Rodney Crowell, was released in 1981 by Warner Bros. Records and was his last album on that label before switching to Columbia. The first album Crowell produced by himself, it reached #47 on the Top Country Albums chart and #105 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
The songs "Stars on the Water" and "Victim or a Fool" were released as singles. "Stars on the Water" reached #30 on the country chart, Crowell's highest charting song up to that point. It peaked at #21 on the Canadian country charts. "Victim or a Fool" reached #34 in the U.S.
In 1981, Crowell left Warner Bros.' roster, putting his career on hold to produce several albums for his wife, Rosanne Cash. After producing Cash's Rhythm & Romance, Crowell signed to Columbia Records in 1986. His first album for that label, Street Language, was co-produced with Booker T. Jones and featured a blend of Soul and country music.
Although best known as a songwriter and alternative country artist, Crowell enjoyed mainstream popularity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. His critically acclaimed album 1988's Diamonds & Dirt produced five consecutive #1 singles during a 17-month span in 1988 and 1989.
The hits included "It's Such a Small World" (a duet with Cash), "I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried," "She's Crazy For Leavin'," "After All This Time" and "Above and Beyond" (a cover of Buck Owens' 1962 hit). His follow-up album, 1989's Keys to the Highway, produced two Top 5 hits in 1990, which were "Many a Long and Lonesome Highway" and "If Looks Could Kill."
Crowell was married to Rosanne Cash from 1979 to 1992 and they had an influence on each other's careers, with Rodney producing most of her albums during that period and her success influencing his songwriting. They collaborated on several duets, including 1988's "It's Such a Small World." Although Crowell and Cash are now divorced, they remain on friendly terms, performing together occasionally.
Crowell and Cash have three daughters, Caitlin, Chelsea and Carrie, and together raised Hannah, Rodney's daughter from a previous marriage. He married Claudia Church in 1998.
Here, Crowell and former wife, Rosanne Cash, perform “It’s Such a Small World.”
Rodney Crowell and Guy Clark, 1970
Photo by Scott Newton
Photo by Alan Welner
On this day in 1974 — 49 years ago — Philippe Petit, a French stuntman, committed what came to be known as the “Artistic Crime of the Century” in New York City.
Petit sneaked into the World Trade Center and ran a 450-pound cable between the Twin Towers. As he balanced with a 26-foot pole 1,350 feet above the ground, hundreds gathered below to watch him walk from one building to the other.
According to The New York Times, they created a traffic jam “as they watched the black-clad figure outlined against the gray morning sky tiptoeing back and forth across the meticulously rigged 131-foot cable.”
After he descended, Petit explained his motivation: “If I see three oranges, I have to juggle. And if I see two towers, I have to walk.” Then he was arrested and booked for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass.
But who says crime doesn’t pay? All charges were dismissed in exchange for his doing a performance in Central Park for children.
Since then, Petit has lived in New York, where he has been artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also a location of other aerial performances.
He has done wire walking as part of official celebrations in New York, across the United States, and in France and other countries, as well as teaching workshops on the art.
In 2008, Man on Wire, a documentary directed by James Marsh about Petit's walk between the towers, won numerous awards. He was also the subject of a children's book and an animated adaptation of it, released in 2005.
Magic Slim, 2007
Photo by Jack Vartoogian
Magic Slim, blues singer and guitarist, was born 86 years ago today.
Born as Morris Holt at Torrance, near Grenada, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers, Holt followed blues greats such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf to Chicago, developing his own place in the Chicago blues scene.
Holt's stage name was taken from a childhood friend from Grenada, Magic Sam, a Blues Hall of Fame guitarist. He was forced to give up playing the piano when he lost his little finger in a cotton gin mishap. He moved first to nearby Grenada, and first came to Chicago in 1955 with his friend and mentor, Magic Sam.
The elder Magic (Sam), (by six months), let the younger Magic (Slim) play bass with his band and gave him his nickname. At first Slim was not rated very highly by his peers. He returned to Mississippi to work and got his younger brother, Nick, interested in playing bass.
By 1965, he was back in Chicago and in 1970 Nick joined him in his group, the Teardrops. They played in the dim, smoke-filled juke joints popular in Chicago in the 1970s on bandstands barely large enough to hold the band.
Slim's recording career began in 1966 with the song "Scufflin'," followed by a number of singles into the mid 1970s. He recorded his first album in 1977, Born Under A Bad Sign, for the French MCM label. During the 1980s, Slim released titles on Alligator, Rooster Blues and Wolf Records and won his first W.C. Handy Award. In 1980, he recorded his cover version of "Mustang Sally."
In 1982, the guitarist, John Primer, joined the Teardrops and stayed and played for him for 13 years. Releases include Spider in My Stew on Wolf Records and a 1996 Blind Pig release called Scufflin', which presented the post-Primer line-up with the new addition of the guitarist and singer, Jake Dawson.
In 1994, Slim moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where the Zoo Bar had been booking him for years. Slim was frequently accompanied by his son, Shawn Holt, an accomplished guitarist and singer.
In 2003, Magic Slim and the Teardrops won the W.C. Handy Award as Blues Band Of The Year for the sixth time. They released a live performance on CD and DVD in August, 2005 entitled, Anything Can Happen.
Slim died at a hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 21, 2013 at age 75.
He had health problems that had worsened while he was on tour several weeks earlier. His manager said bleeding ulcers had sent Slim to the hospital, but that he also suffered from heart, lung and kidney problems.
Magic Slim and the Teardrops perform “Going to Mississippi.”
Rehearsal of Keillor’s radio show at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles on June 9, 1989. It was the third annual farewell show.
Photo by Frank Beacham
Garrison Keillor, creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion, is 81 years old today.
An author, storyteller, humorist and radio personality, Keillor hosted of the Minnesota Public Radio show — A Prairie Home Companion — for 42 years.
Born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of a carpenter and postal worker, the family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, an Irish fundamentalist Christian denomination Keillor has since left.
Keillor is six feet, three inches tall and has Scots ancestry, and is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.
Keillor started his professional radio career in November, 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time slot of 6 to 9 a.m. on KSJR 90.1 FM at St. John's University in Collegeville, which the station called "A Prairie Home Entertainment."
The show's eclectic music was a major divergence from the station's usual classical fare. During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared on September 19, 1970.
Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February, 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became "A Prairie Home Companion" when he returned in October.
Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them.
In August, 1973, The Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians. The show debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects.
A Prairie Home Companion was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Auto Repair ("All tracks lead to Jack's where the bright shining lights show you the way to complete satisfaction") and Powdermilk Biscuits, which "give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done."
Later imaginary sponsors included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it"), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Ketchup Advisory Board (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the American Duct Tape Council and Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations").
The show also contained parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. In the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcased a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled The News from Lake Wobegon, which Keillor did totally from memory.
The town of Lake Wobegon was based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, and in part on Freeport and other towns in Stearns County, where he lived in the early 1970s. Lake Wobegon was a quintessential but fictional Minnesotan small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."
A Prairie Home Companion ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, "The American Radio Company of the Air" — which had almost the same format as A Prairie Home Companion's — for several years. In 1993, he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, in a format nearly identical to the original's, and has done so since.
On July 1, 2016, Keillor recorded the final episode of the show at the Hollywood Bowl in California for an audience of 18,000 fans. It was broadcast the next day. "I have a lot of other things that I want to do. I mean, nobody retires anymore. Writers never retire,” he said of ending the show.
On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor received no billing or credit (except "written by Sarah Bellum," a joking reference to his own brain); his name was not mentioned unless a guest addressed him by his first name or the initials "G. K.," though some sketches feature Keillor as his alter ego, Carson Wyler.
B.J. Thomas
Photo by Angela Talley
B. J. Thomas was born 81 years ago today.
Born in Hugo, Oklahoma, Thomas was a popular singer in the 1960s and 70s in pop, country and gospel music. In 1966, Thomas and The Triumphs released the album, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry. The album featured a hit cover of the Hank Williams song. It sold over one million copies.
Thomas achieved mainstream success again in 1968, with the single, "Hooked on a Feeling,” which featured the sound of an electric sitar, first released on the album On My Way (Scepter Records). It became Thomas's second million-selling record.
The 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, featured Thomas performing the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head,” which won the Academy Award for best original song that year. It became the #1 song in January, 1970. Sales of this disc also exceeded one million copies, with Thomas being awarded his third gold record.
Other hits of the 1970s were "Everybody's Out of Town,” "I Just Can't Help Believing" (#9 in 1970, covered by Elvis Presley), "No Love At All,” "Mighty Clouds of Joy" and "Rock and Roll Lullaby".
In 1976, Thomas released Home Where I Belong on Myrrh Records, the first of several gospel albums he recorded. The album went platinum, and Thomas became the biggest contemporary gospel artist of the period.
During the 1980s, his success on the pop charts began to wane, but many of his singles reached the upper regions on the country singles charts, including two 1983 chart toppers, "Whatever Happened to Old-Fashioned Love" and "New Looks from an Old Lover,” as well as "Two Car Garage," which reached #3 on the country singles chart.
In 1981, on his 39th birthday, Thomas became the 60th member of the Grand Ole Opry.
On March 23, 2021, Thomas announced that he had stage IV lung cancer and was being treated in Texas. He died approximately nine weeks later on May 29 at his home in Arlington, Texas, at the age of 78.
Here, Thomas performs “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.”
Nicholas Ray with James Dean during the filming of “Rebel Without a Cause”
Nicholas Ray, film director, was born 112 years ago today.
Ray directed the movie, Rebel Without a Cause, with James Dean in 1955. He is also appreciated by a smaller audience of cinephiles for a large number of narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963.
They included Bigger Than Life, Johnny Guitar, They Live by Night and In a Lonely Place, as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s, We Can't Go Home Again.
That film was unfinished at the time of Ray's death from lung cancer in 1979 at age 67.
Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded. He was an important influence on the French New Wave.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote in a review of Bitter Victory: "cinema is Nicholas Ray."
On this night in 1955 — 68 years ago — what’s thought to be the first performance of a rock ’n’ roll song on national television helped kick off the rock era.
“Rock Around the Clock,” originally recorded by the band Bill Haley and His Comets, swept the U.S. in the summer of 1955. It was the theme song of the film, “Blackboard Jungle,” also in 1955.
The band’s Aug. 7 TV performance, at Ed Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” concert in Stratford, Conn., helped clinch its members’ fame in the U.S. and Europe. The song also became the first rock single to hit #1 on the pop charts. (“Rock Around the Clock” became a hit again when it was included on the 1973 soundtrack of “American Graffiti.”)
“Blackboard Jungle” was notable, too, for being Hollywood’s first serious treatment of urban schools, and for having the first rock soundtrack.
The song was an important influence on the Beatles and other rock performers in the 1960s and ’70s.
Thanks New York Times!
Audrey Hepburn
Photo by Barbara Hearn